Metal man, metal man, metal man hates the people he thinks did this to him. They have a fight, everyone dies, and I may have fallen asleep during this episode it was so pointless.
You know how a lot of the time when something horrible is happening to an innocent victim progressively throughout an episode, they manage to find the cure just in time to save the person? Yeah. Not so much.
Let's see if anything can be, er, salvaged from this episode, shall we?
Again, moderately interesting premise, and some pretty good special effects, especially on the car crash in the beginning. But the story is ridiculous. No, I'm not even going to get into the absurd science of it. I'm talking about the plot itself. Rather than seeking a cure, Ray just goes on a killing spree.
OK, some science, I guess. How the hell does he even walk? Or stand up? He must weigh ten tons, right? How can he walk in multi-story buildings without destroying them? Is his strength voluntary? Oh, forget it, this is just ridiculous.
It's certainly more of an X-File, though not exactly paranormal so much as entirely scientific. OK, in the show's universe, it's scientific. I don't believe modern scientific research will ever be able to create a scenario where a person turns to metal (also, what kind of metal?) or that allows any kind of metal to grow or regenerate itself. In fact, that pretty much defies the laws of physics and chemistry.
There are disorders of the human body that cause rapid bone growth and replace much of the rest of the body's tissue with bone, and maybe something like that even inspired this episode. But that's about where the similarity ends. Usually I can get behind the science-fiction in the show, but it's hard to suspend disbelief for something so outrageous.
Also, was he magnetic? Because it seems that might have been a way to at least try to hold him at bay. Even if he wasn't, he was certainly conductive. Why not set up a magnetic rig that would hold him - like say, the room they managed to trap him in for at least a few minutes - and then find a way to run a high current through him. If it didn't kill him, it would at least prevent him from escaping.
No, I'm still asking for too much logic. This episode is beyond logic, beyond reason.
And like so many episodes this season, Scully and Doggett's presence is entirely superfluous. Their investigation didn't really turn up anything someone didn't already suspect, and it's not like they actually stopped the bad guy. In this case, the bad guy just had a change of heart and went off to die as his body turned itself entirely into metal.
I feel like the show has, to some extent, lost a bit of what made it The X-Files. It used to be that Scully's scientific inquiry was actually used to help Mulder solve a case that seemed too ridiculous to be real. Now they've left out most of the science, and they've pretty much ignored the part about solving the case, too.
This one more or less solved itself after a few highly unpleasant and revolting murders.
Also, no mythology episodes since the beginning of the season. This may be the longest stretch of standalone episodes so far, which I'm not explicitly complaining about - I usually like the standalones, but they've got to at least be good. I think a bad mythology episode can at least advance the main storyline, even if the execution is somewhat off. A bad standalone episode is just pointless.
'Salvage' didn't even really develop the characters very much.
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