X-Files S1E5: Worst Devil loss ever?

Editors' Note: On the rewatch of The X-Files, Lorrie plays the part of Sestra Amateur and Paige  serves as the resident "expert," aka Sestra Professional.

Sestra Amateur:

There’s a family driving toward Atlantic City that experiences car trouble. Based on the car and clothing, it looks like I’m watching a first-season episode of Mad Men. Dad checks on it and promptly gets attacked by an unknown creature. Since we didn’t see any bright lights from above or some type of flying object that’s unidentifiable, it’s safe to assume this is not an alien episode.  It must be a creature of the week ep!

Cops find Dad and see that something – someone? – ate one of his legs. The cops find the attacker in a cave and shoot at it. A lot. We don’t find out if they killed it because it cuts to the opening credits. When we return, Scully is telling Mulder about a body found in Atlantic City. She also mentions that a human possibly ate the victim’s right arm and shoulder. Not sure why Scully is keeping the victim info gender neutral, but there’s probably a reason. Mulder immediately thinks it’s the Jersey Devil, but I don’t think Ken Daneyko is capable of something like this. Bobby Holik maybe, since he already has that Frankensteiny, unibrow look. Mulder tells Scully about a previous case from 1947. OK, so my estimate was off by a decade. Scully claims JD is a myth, but I think Salinger was just reclusive. Oops, wrong JD again.

So Sculder head to AC where Sestra Pro and I once saw Lindsey Buckingham in concert. The man puts on a great show. Sculder offer their services to local police who ... politely decline their offer.  Detective Thompson, in particular, really does not want Sculder to get involved. Mulder decides to stay and sends Scully on her way.  Mulder locates Peter Brullet, the park ranger who found the most recent body. Ranger Pete tells Mulder about related ominous things he’s found during his 32-year career, but he’s afraid to say more because he doesn’t want to lose his pension. Jeez, how long do you have to work for the Parks Department in New Jersey before you can get your pension?

Meanwhile, Scully is at her godson’s birthday party and has the obligatory talk with her friend about Scully’s personal life. She apparently won’t date Mulder because he is “obsessed with his work.” That’s one way of putting it.

Mulder pays a homeless guy $20 for information. For some reason, that reminded me of the scene in The Naked Gun in which the informant ends up paying Leslie Nielsen for information. Homeless Guy gives Mulder a crude drawing of JD that looks like a naked Marilyn Manson. Mulder lets Homeless Guy take his hotel room for the night. Free HBO, woohoo! Mulder waits for MM – I mean JD – and his patience pays off.  Mulder sees JD – who now looks more like Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon – but JD gets away.  The local police arrive, think Mulder is a homeless bum and take him into custody.  Mulder confronts Detective Thompson and accuses him of covering the truth about the JD because it would affect Atlantic City’s tourism. After all, most people don’t want to travel to a place where you can get killed and dismembered during while on vacation. The Mayor of Shark City – I mean Detective Thompson – denies it.

Scully retrieves Mulder.  She takes him to the University of Maryland to talk to one of her former professors. He provides anthropological exposition about JD, but I had to watch the scene twice because his delivery caused me to lose interest in what he was saying. Professor Snooze should have sung the exposition like Giles did in the Buffy episode "Restless."

Later that night, while Mulder is looking at Sasquatch erotica, Scully is on a date with a divorced dad, you know, a nice normal guy. Too bad he makes Professor Snooze seem exciting. Ranger Pete tells Mulder he found another dead body, possibly the male JD. Mulder tells Scully, essentially giving her an out for her date. Sculder, Ranger Pete and Professor Snooze go hunting for Brooke Shields, but ACPD arrive and complicate matters. Brooke tackles Mulder and we see her – she kind of looks more like me on a bad hair day. She gouges Mulder and the police chase her into the woods. The Four Musketeers follow. Ranger Pete shoots her with a tranquilizer dart, but she keeps going. The cops use more lethal ammo and kill her.

One week later, Sculder are discussing the case and the possibility of JD offspring living in the woods. Turns out it’s true, because we see a little girl (I think) with my frizzy, tangled hair hiding in the woods on her own. Mulder tells Scully he’s going to meet with an ethnobiologist, which, according to Dictionary.com, is a synonym for anthropologist.  See? Even the lesser XF eps can be informative.

Sestra Professional:

"Lesser" is very kind verbiage for this ep. In Dictionary.com's sestra site, Thesaurus.com, I found these words to use for it -- bush-league, small-time, a notch under, dinky and ... er ... minor-league.

And by the way, this don't look like no hockey game. As earlier alluded to, Sestra Am and I are dyed-in-the-wool New Jersey Devils fans. We ride the teams ups and downs. On this blog, we're riding The X-Files ups and downs. This one's definitely a speed bump in the road. Or maybe I should call this one "a dog." Well, not exactly a dog even thought JD kinda acts like one sometimes.

The teaser has some kick to it, I'll give 'em that much. Well, not the first part where the guy disappears, but the police cornering whatever it is before the opening credits. This is the first of like 14 searches during this ep, so it's a dinky victory indeed.

There's not a lot to like about this episode. It's like a Devils game in which the Devils don't score. The humor is bush-league -- from Scully commenting on Mulder looking at a centerfold (in the office?!?) by stating "Anti-gravity is right" to the homeless man who wants to watch HBO to the oh-so-clunky comparison to 6-year-olds running around as "primitive behavior."

"Not an uncommon place to lose a body part": To summarize, this thing terrorizing Atlantic City's neighboring woods is a veritable East Coast Bigfoot that comes out of the woods and attacks cars. Of course, Scully thinks it's a folk tale told to kids. And of course, Mulder believed it way back then too. But bodies are being cannibalized, so Scully wants in -- until she has a kids' birthday party or a date.

Scully on a date? Now that would be an X-File. And the ep loses even more traction here. If you're telling a fantastical tale in which you want people to believe in something unbelievable, don't ground it by interspersing the hunt with Scully attending to a kid who's bumped his head or having dinner with divorced, self-professed "SuperDad" whose day job is in the spine-tingling field of estate planning and taxation. Kinda wanted him to be gnawed upon, and not in a good way.

Meanwhile, Mulder's out on the street under a blanket. Of course, he's going to run into the creature. And of course, his is a shapely woman and not the big uggo of a man others have seen. And of course, he'll be mistaken for a vagrant. Even though he looks just slightly disheveled in his G-man suit and probably could have shown his ID.

Still, Mulder kinda got more action from his blind date then Scully wanted to have with hers. He offers up motive and alibi for the cannibalistic tendencies. In fact, he completely wins over Scully's professor, so much that he joins the second half of the episodes hunts. Scully rolls her eyes, I do likewise.

There's lots of running around -- guys with big guns and some strange drop-and-rolls actually done by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, which seemed to serve no purpose other than to look cool and liven up a dullsville sequence. Mulder gets bowled over. by Brooke. She sits on him and sniffs. He probably likes it, I don't.

And then one final wide, sweeping search for the unarmed naked woman who leaped from a second-story window. Parks Department guy pegged her at quite a distance with one dart. He probably should go to Atlantic City and rack up some big stuffed animals with that kind of accuracy. Then everyone uses her for target practice. Why? Same reason as why you kill a rabid animal, Thompson explained.

And again the ep's in trouble, because you really don't want stereotypical lawman to make the most sense. We're supposed to side with at least one of the heroes. So more than just one notch under.

But still not the worse Devil loss ever. Hated losing our hated hockey rivals in 1994, although taking the Stanley Cup from them the next year made up for it. In 2001, I had to produce the front page of the sports section saying that Colorado had beaten New Jersey for the Cup. This is just an episode that can be easily let go and not watched ever, ever again. (But they should have won back-to-back Cups to start off the millennium.)