Oh, season nine, you were off to a pretty good start, Mulder's absence notwithstanding, but this? What did we do to deserve this?
Seriously, 'Daemonicus' was pointless. Doggett hasn't grown at all as a character, and I'm beginning to think he's just supposed to be boring and not very good at figuring things out. Even in her most skeptical moments in the show, Scully was never so obstinate about her disbelief in paranormal activity.
I don't want to watch the Doggett and Reyes show, though. I kind of like Reyes, because she's certainly more open minded than Doggett, but she was introduced for maybe three episodes in season eight and now she's not just a regular character, but has basically taken over the lead, along with Doggett, from Scully.
Because what does Scully do in this episode? Get abducted and threatened. AGAIN. Well, and give a lecture in which one of her students apparently thinks she's a Vampire Slayer. I do like this notion of Scully going back to teaching, because she seems to be good at it, though it's clear her teaching methods now are very much informed by her work for the past eight years on the X-Files. I like that, too, because when you think about science, that's kind of how it should be taught. We don't know certain things, and we examine evidence to try to prove or disprove our hypotheses. And there are going to be some things we still don't know at the end.
Scully is great, and I like this concept, but I hope she's more directly involved in the cases as the season progresses, because again, this is not The X-Files, but merely a show called The X-Files that has all the same characters, just in slightly different roles.
I think this was done better when it was 'Die Hand Die Verletzt'. Like most of the show's recycled ideas, it wasn't entirely obvious or entirely a direct ripoff of the previous episode, but here, instead of the devil itself showing up and wreaking havoc on a town, it's just one man with demonic abilities who can somehow control others. And he's just playing a game. Or maybe he was the demon himself - it's hard to tell here what was real and what were just people's visions of him and of each other and of themselves.
The reveal at the end about the letters in the names of the victims kind of spelling out Daemonicus might have been interesting, but maybe it would have been even more interesting if the writers had remembered that MONIca Reyes would have fit the middle of that word as well as some random character we'd never seen before. Not that I'm saying she should have been killed by him, but it might have made for a more interesting story if she'd been the one in danger.
Otherwise, this was a pretty ordinary investigation, and again, one that had no apparent point, except maybe to show us that Doggett's intense denial is, as has been discussed on many occasions before, not an unwillingness to believe, but more of a desire to maintain the illusion that he understands the world. I can get that - most people don't want their worldviews particularly shattered like that. The fact that Reyes understood that Doggett could feel the evil presence but was unwilling to admit it tells me that maybe Doggett can come around at some point, except he won't - we know he won't because he's has so many opportunities to before. It's just not who he is.
Also, there was some extreme grossness in this episode. I've never actually seen The Exorcist, but I know enough to know about that one scene and I'm assuming that the scene in this episode in which, well, Kobold produces about forty gallons of vomit, is inspired by that. Demonic possession, extreme vomiting, it's a Thing apparently.
Also also, little known fact: knowing what letters your opponent has in Scrabble doesn't tend to help you very much, especially if you can play all seven of your own letters. Because the fifty points are pretty much always worth it, even if you let your opponent score a triple word on their next turn. But that's not really the point of this episode, is it?
No comments:
Post a Comment