X-Files S5E4: There is an 'I' in team building

Sestra Amateur: 

This episode begins in Vancouver’s version of North Florida woods, near the Tallahassee area, according to Google Maps. Surveyors are mapping the area until one worker, Sloan, awakens something in the ground. The thing opens its red eyes and attacks him. Sloan’s partner runs and hides, but he suffers the same fate. Next, father and son, Louis and Michael Asekoff, are bonding while hunting in the same woods. They happen upon the surveyor equipment – finders’ keepers – and their dog finds what’s left of the surveyors. Then something attacks the father. Maybe you guys should have just had a nice catch outside your house.

Sculder are driving to a team-building seminar with Agents Stonecypher and Kinsley (who we never met before so don’t feel bad if you have no clue who they are) when they are stopped by a Florida Highway Patrol roadblock. Actually I must clarify, the cars are Sheriff’s Office patrol vehicles, but the officers are dressed like FHP troopers. Nice job, research team. Mulder bails and gets ambushed by the hunter’s wife, who apparently isn’t important enough to be given a first name. Mrs. Asekoff is waiting for information on her husband. Don’t worry, the boy and his dog are perfectly fine. Fox talks to Michele Fazekas of Florida Search and Rescue and joins her investigation while sending Scully and the other agents to the seminar. Hope Dana doesn’t get jealous of the other redhead working with Mulder.

Back in the motel, Fox does some online research and can't find previous examples of the predator’s psychology. He leaves Dana – and her tray of wine and cheese – to chase a lead. Meanwhile, some red-eyed thing has managed to enter the Asekoff’s house and chase Michael outside, straight into Mulder’s arms. The next morning, Fox reviews the physical evidence inside the house and thinks the creature is running on the balls of its feet, unlike humans. Michele arrives and comes to the same conclusion. Tech guy Jeff Glaser – played by Anthony Rapp of Rent and Adventures in Babysitting fame -- is brought in to help. Hope there’s a karaoke scene later in the episode so he can break out into song. 

The crew walks through the woods trying to find the creature, but it seems to be tracking them instead. Jeff locates one, but since it’s like Predator – able to camouflage itself – they’re unable to see it with the naked eye, just with infrared equipment. Jeff spots a second one and the group splits up -- ladies one way and gents the other. Scully realizes its (their?) plan is to divide and conquer, so they head back to Fox and Jeff, unknowingly passing one creature embedded in a tree. Michele then disappears and Dana is all alone. So much for the competition…

Glaser is torn between getting out of dodge and staying to find Fazekas. Mulder again points out how Michele was taken because she was presumably the strongest. Is that why he tells Jeff to “lead the way?” That’s cold, Fox. Mulder compares this creature to Point Pleasant’s Moth Men from the 1960’s. Yes, that’s real folklore from West Virginia. I read The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel years ago. Whether or not you believe in the Mothman, it makes for an intriguing read. If you’re interested, the next Mothman festival begins Sept. 20, 2019, but the Mothman Museum is open year round. But I digress. 

Jeff experiences a Blair Witch Project lost-in-the-woods moment and starts to panic. Clearly, he’ll be the last man standing if the creatures keep going after the strong ones first. Glaser sees one creature on the infrared and directs Fox to its location. Mulder and Scully shoot but miss. Jeff runs away, but doesn’t get far. Fox gets dragged down, but Dana saves him from the creature. Did I mention she’s looking a lot healthier after that whole deathbed cancer scare?

So Sculder spend the night together – in the woods, in the dark, huddling together for warmth. Scully is able to start a fire with gunpowder from one of their bullets. I was half right about the karaoke prediction, too bad it’s tone-deaf Dana singing to Mulder to prove she’s staying awake. The red-eyed creature remains at bay, but looks bored. The next morning Scully goes grocery shopping in the woods for their breakfast. On the way back she falls into a hole … and finds several of the missing victims. Michele and Louis are still alive. Dana also spots one of the red-eyed creatures in the cave with her. 

Fox gives Scully his weapon, then gets chased into the hole by another predator. Dana shoots the one coming toward them and takes it down. Of course she hopes there’s a scientific explanation. Mulder’s leaning toward evolution over hundreds of years. Agents Stonecypher and Kinsley find and rescue their ride partners. Fox becomes worried for Scully's safety after realizing how one of the creatures still went after the boy in his own home. He drives to the motel thinking he has to save Dana from a creature hiding in the room. He was right, but neither he nor Scully get to know that little factoid. At least Sculder can write off their expenses now.


Sestra Professional:

There aren't a lot of times in which a fan changes their opinion on an episode, but I know I've come around a bit on "Detour." On original run, I found it a bit of a bore, starting with the clunky team-building discussion in the car with the rubes who obviously sat behind a desk all day at the FBI. The rest of the episode played like a different take on Season 1's dynamic "Darkness Falls" with shades of The Conversation on the Rock from "Quagmire." I've changed my tune to some extent. It's not perfect, but it's certainly an enjoyable enough offering.

Love the interplay between the surveyors in the opening scene in which one dude chastises the other by declaring that's where the new Blockbuster will open up. Well, the woods might still be there years later, but it's the Blockbusters that have fallen by the wayside. If he could, Sloan would smile at that irony.

Kill me now: Still not a whopping big fan of the machinations that landed Mulder and Scully in the car with their fellow agents. Huge flash-forward to Season 10, Kincypher make Einstein and Miller seem interesting. Oh well, it's a way to get our dynamic duo on the scene. The concept seems much more interesting when the one-dimensional FBI reps are off the canvas, even Dana's joke about needing the communication seminar about Fox going rogue works better without them around.

Nature is populated by creatures either killing something they need to survive or trying to avoid being killed by something that needs them to survive: So Frank Spotnitz wrote this one and it's got some interesting ideas, such as the idea that encroaching development has caused the somethings in the woods to "push back." And he's able to drive that point across while drawing strange and wonderful parallells between Walt Whitman and dialogue from another Fox network show, When Animals Attack. Speaking of such similarities, not only do we get a large dose of Predator, doesn't there seem to be a substantive correlation to Jurassic Park? We've got raptor-like behavior in which the prey gets distracted by one creature only to be attacked by another. And even something like Scully saying she'll stay awake, just like Sam Neill protecting the kids. Glad he didn't sing in that movie, it might not have been a blockbuster.

Everything in this episode is quite beautiful -- driving home another point made by the team's weak link, Jeff Glaser -- about how if we're mesmerized by the sights and sounds in the forest we might overlook its deadly nature. It's not only the makeshift Apalachicola National Forest that is striking, though, our heroes look fabulous in blue. 

The most unique aspect of the unknown threat is the idea that it attacks the strongest first. (By the way, the strongest didn't seem to "initiate oral contact" when she was taken out.) And, of the course, the part in which they follow the victims home is different from your garden-variety attack. That doesn't happen too often with predators in the woods outside the Friday the 13th franchise. 

Despite the fact that I didn't like them, I'm a big fan of the boring agents ultimately coming to Sculder's rescue. Maybe Kincypher have two dimensions instead of one. So, if they hadn't had success at the previous team-building success they took part in, maybe Mulder and Scully wouldn't have been rescued? Not that it opened these plebes' minds at all about thinking outside of the box. 

Meta morsels: Spotnitz expressed appreciation for open-ended conclusions like this one in The Complete X-Files. "Nothing pleased me more than when I would talk to a viewer who said they really couldn't go to sleep that night, or they kept double-checking their windows and doors. It's scarier if you think he could still be out there," he said. ... Due to rain in the region, this episode took 19 days to shoot, according to the fifth-season episode guide. ... The writer drew from another movie before penning this one -- Deliverance -- and the idea of the agents in a hostile environment, the guide said. ... Spotnitz originally scripted that Scully sing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" by Hank Williams, but cottoned to creator Chris Carter's suggestion to switch to Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World." Gillian Anderson jumped to her own defense in the episode guide -- "In that scene, I sang intentionally badly. In real life, I can do a lot better than that," she said.

Guest star of the week: Well, he may have been the Thumper on the search team, but Anthony Rapp stands head and shoulders above the trees in this tale. For a change of pace, the weakest link gives us something to think about when it comes to evolution. So glad he took 10 days off from Rent, which was a big hit on Broadway at the time, to be in the episode.