X-Files S3E3: Zero tolerance for lightning strikes

Sestra Amateur: 

Greetings Virtua Fighter. You have been recruited by the FBI to defend The Frontier against Darin Peter Oswald and his moronic friend, Zero. In Connorville, Oklahoma, a pizza delivery boy is playing Virtua Fighter 2 at the local arcade. That was my go-to fighting game in the '90s, preferred over Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Giovanni Ribisi’s Darin and Jack Black’s Zero want to play too, but clearly haven’t learned to wait their turn. Considering Zero works there, he should have just invoked the “we have the right to refuse service to anyone” rule. Darin takes a different tack, because he has X-File-worthy abilities. After Pizza Boy refuses, the lights go out and the jukebox starts by itself. Pizza Boy tries to drive away, but his car is clearly not under his control. He convulses and dies while Darin looks on.

Sculder arrive in the Sooner State – sooner rather than later – and Scully performs the autopsy on Jack Hammond, the pizza boy. Scully determines it was death by electrocution, but cannot find a point of contact on Jack’s body. Turns out, Sculder are involved because Pizza Boy is the sixth known victim of lightning strikes in the area, which is unusual, to say the least. Local Sheriff John Teller interrupts and tries to school Scully regarding the reasons behind the lightning frequency in their small hamlet. Dana holds her own, but it’s not enough. At least Mulder concedes it’s not UFOs fairly easily. Turns out the victims are all 17- to 21-year-old males. Guess serial lightning has a preferred type. 

The agents meet with Zero at the arcade. Because of the front counter’s location, he should have had a clear view of Jack’s last moments in the parking lot. However, Zero plays stupid. Now that I think about it, he’s probably not playing. Mulder focuses on the Virtua Fighter 2 machine out of all of the games in the arcade. Sonic the Hedgehog is making the most noise, so I’m surprised that didn’t draw his attention. I can’t get its sound effects out of my head now. 

Mulder sees the top 10 and notices all of the scores belong to D.P.O. (Reggie from Night of the Comet needs to work at that arcade so she can knock D.P.O. off his pedestal. “That’s the end of you, D.P.O.”) It’s very convenient that the top 10 lists the dates and times of the wins, and of course, they place D.P.O. there just before Jack’s death. Zero claims it was too noisy to notice anything, but we know the three of them were alone in the arcade. Mulder learns D.P.O. is Darin Peter Oswald, one of the previous lightning-strike victims. Clearly he survived.

At work at a garage, Darin awkwardly tries to hit on his boss’s wife, Sharon Kiveat. Her husband, Frank, returns and warns Darin the feds are looking for him. While Sculder talk to Darin, Mulder’s phone melts. Guess he won’t get much use out of it in this episode either. We then get a glimpse into Darin’s home life. His mother isn’t much of a prize, and Darin tortures her by screwing up the cable television while she’s watching her reality show. He’s pure evil incarnate. D.P.O. later gets struck by lightning in a cow pasture and it essentially recharges his abilities. 

The next morning, Sculder find the dead cows but no Darin. Mulder spots a footprint and they preserve it. In the meantime, D.P.O. is using is powers to try and cause car accidents at a local intersection. Zero joins him and has to listen to his buddy moon over Sharon. Darin finally causes a crash, but Zero doesn’t seem impressed anymore. Funny how he was cool with it when D.P.O. killed someone over a video game. Frank arrives at the crash scene with his tow truck to clear the road, but Darin uses his powers to cause his boss to have a heart attack. The on-scene paramedics can’t get their defibrillator to work, so D.P.O. uses his hands and shocks Frank back to life. When you’re the one who stops a person’s heart, you don’t get credit for saving his life.

Sculder go to Darin’s house and Mulder finds a yearbook photo of Sharon hidden in a men’s magazine. Dana figures out D.P.O.'s shoes are the same size as the footprint Fox found in the cow pasture. The agents go to the hospital and ask Sharon about their suspect. She shows them Frank’s EKG and verifies his jump-started heart wasn’t caused by a defibrillator. Scully learns Darin suffered from a severe chemical imbalance when he was struck by lightning, he had high sodium and low potassium levels. So if he cut out the salt and ate a banana or two he wouldn’t have become Lightning Boy? 

Our heroes catch up to D.P.O. and take him to the local jail. Sharon admits she knows about Darin’s crush on her and his special powers. She’s understandably scared of him. Sculder say they’ll protect her and her husband, but the sheriff lets D.P.O. out of jail. Darin thinks Zero ratted him out and stalks his buddy while music by Filter blasts in the background. Zero takes a lightning bolt to the back. “Hey man, nice shot” indeed.

Everyone converges on the hospital, which is more deserted than the one in Halloween II. I think they only showed three staff members in that movie. Wouldn’t an ER be busy on Halloween night, even in a small town like Haddonfield? Anyway, Dana tries to keep Darin from Sharon, but the frightened woman agrees to leave with him. (If they became a couple their shipper name could be ... Daron? Sharin?) They walk outside, but she bolts when Sheriff Teller confronts D.P.O. Guess how the sheriff dies. I guess he shouldn’t have been so condescending to Scully. Darin then gets knocked out by a lightning bolt and ends up incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Well, that was a pretty undramatic resolution, considering the last lightning bolt empowered him. Presumably, the Kiveats live happily ever after. I’m off to play a little Sonic the Hedgehog so I can get rid of the earworm.


Sestra Professional:

After the glut of information we took in over a two-parter to start the third season, it's kind of nice to slow down the pace a bit for a stand-alone episode. And this one proves to be very simple. It doesn't even take our heroes that long to figure out what's going on with the human lightning rod.

Darin Peter Oswald is a different type of character for the show at this point. Not really a monster, he's just a jerk using his powers for his own purposes. He doesn't come off as a victim, so we don't feel a lot of sympathy for him and we don't need Sculder to save him. Anyone else find it peculiar that his first name is Darin and it's spelled the exact same way as one of the writers on the show? Even the character's couch-potato mom gets to talk down at him.

Feel free to jump in any time: As penned by series stalwart Howard Gordon, that confrontation between Dana and the sheriff is certainly off-putting. Teller isn't completely off the mark about them at least needing to know lightning strikes are frequent in his area. But it's more than a little strange that Fox lets him get in quite a lot of shots with no reaction when that powder keg is known to go off for the slightest of irritations. But at least he's not considering conspiracy or aliens this time around.

Now when Sculder do get their research in -- the lightning shows a preference for males aged 17-21 and there was one survival in five strikes -- maybe the sheriff should have agreed there's cause for concern a lot sooner. Then he wouldn't have had to become Teller Fricassee. 

Manners don't cost, they're free: The more we get to know about D.P.O., the less we like him. And it goes way beyond his pronunciation of nuclear as "nucular." We might worry about him being somewhere on the autism spectrum if he doesn't come off as such a pus bucket. Killing Mulder's innocent mobile phone, sheesh. In a rare maternal moment, his mom says he wouldn't hurt a soul. That's really not the vibe we've been getting.

Darin does keep his crush's husband busy. Frank picked up a lot of business because of D.P.O.'s electrical impulses. But he's just so scuzzy. One example: he originally got interested in Karen just because he could see through her dress when his former teacher stood in front of a window.

With Sculder onto this creep early on, what plays out is a rather pedestrian set of sequences in which Mrs. Kiveat goes with Darin to avoid him charbroiling her hubby. The sheriff gets it, as Sestra Am points out, he really shouldn't have taken that tone with Scully. But the final image of D.P.O.'s overcooked brain zipping through TV channels before the final credit appears in his reflection proves to be the most interesting thing in the episode. Maybe that kind of imagination spliced throughout the show could have made this one more compelling and resonant.

Another nod to Sestra Am for earlier monikering Darin as "Lightning Boy," because the meta from the third-season episode guide on this show was that those were the precise words used on a concept card tacked to the board in executive producer Chris Carter's office since the first season. Some more little tidbits: Photos of "D.P.O." director Kim Manners and X-Files prop master Ken Hawryliw are among those on the same yearbook page as Mrs. Kiveat, Darin's homestead has been seen in such films as Jumanji and Jennifer 8, and in The Complete X-Files, Gordon said he spent an off day playing video games with Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black. Oh, and for those noting the sheriff's name Teller, the episode guide confirms comic magicians Penn and Teller wanted to be on the show. Although that didn't happen, the moniker was meant a nod to them. And Filter? Their lead singer, Richard Patrick, is the younger brother of actor Robert -- a future lead on the show. 

Guest star of the week: Ribisi ... Black ... Ribisi ... Black ... It should be Ribisi's showcase 'cause he does the heavy lifting, but Jack just stole every scene he was in with him. It is pretty cool seeing this episode again after both -- particularly Black -- have been known for other things on the big screen and in pop culture. They were just a geek and a freak when this one originally aired.