Sestra Pro promised a good episode was coming up and she was right. In the woods of Chaney, Texas, Mulder is chasing a suspect who apparently won’t take responsibility for whatever wrong he committed. (OK, allegedly committed.) Luckily, just like in horror movies, the runner trips, so Mulder catches up to him. There’s a struggle, but Fox manages to stake him. (Wait, what?) Scully catches up and Mulder proudly shows her the suspect’s pointy teeth. He’s a vampire! Scully shows they were fake. Ooh Mulder, you’re in truh-ble…
Back in their D.C. office, Fox takes out his anger and frustration on an innocent garbage can. Dana says Assistant Director Skinner wants their report in one hour. So does that make this a real-time episode? With commercials, there would be approximately 57 minutes left. Funny how alternate media options just mess up a good in-joke without even trying. So let’s just pretend Skinner wants their report in 44 minutes. Also, they’re being sued by the family of Ronnie Strickland (the fake vampire boy) for a blatantly punitive amount of money. Mulder wants to get their stories straight. He is sounding more and more like someone who did wrong and desperately wants to cover his tracks. Scully tells him her version of the events. Yes, it’s a Rashomon-ian bottle episode. It’s actually a great tool to articulate how Scully thinks Mulder “sees” her, with condescension and superiority.The previous day, an overly excited Mulder brings a new case to Scully -- dead cows in Chaney whose carcasses were drained of blood. “Classic vampirism!” Fox exclaims, then buries the lead about a dead tourist being one of the victims. They meet with the local sheriff Lucius Hartwell, played by Richie Tenenbaum himself, Luke Wilson. (Someday I’ll watch The Royal Tenenbaums, Sestra Pro. Honest.) Dana gets all swoony, but I blame Mark Snow’s dreamy score for that. Scully begins her preliminary exam of the dead tourist. The sheriff is on board with all of her not-a-real-vampire analyses. Real-time Mulder takes umbrage with “Dana’s” embellishing.
Back in the morgue, Fox makes the discovery of a lifetime, the victim’s shoes are untied! To quote Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “This means something.” Mulder and Hartwell head to the local creepy cemetery while Scully is on autopsy duty. After the world’s most boring autopsy, Dana checks into either the Davey Crockett Motor Court or the Sam Houston Motor Lodge, and Fox eventually appears covered in mud. Scully tells Mulder the victim has an abundance of knockout drops in his system. Fox sends Dana to autopsy the latest human victim while he steals her Magic Fingers bed time and laughs maniacally. She also lets Mulder have her pizza. By the way, the delivery boy is Ronnie Strickland.I was wrong, the second autopsy might be the world’s most boring one, except for the intestine thing. Doesn’t Fox realize the importance of sleep and nourishment for accuracy? If Scully made any mistakes it could have tanked Mulder’s whole investigation. Dana then gets interrupted by a heavy breather on the phone. Good to know she takes obscene calls in stride. Once she gets back to the examination, she realizes this victim had the same last meal as the previous victim. The chloral hydrates (knockout drops) were in the pizza! The pizza guy did it!
Scully breaks into the motel room (even though she has a key) and sees Fox unconscious on the floor. She sees the pizza guy – yes, with fangs – and shoots! She misses him but disables his car so Ronnie escapes on foot. After Mulder regains consciousness and starts to sing "Shaft," Dana pursues Strickland. Somehow, Fox gets to Ronnie first and “overreacts.” Scully admits they caught a killer, just not a supernatural one. Now it’s time for Mulder’s version (and his perception that Dana is impatient and whiny). They do agree on two things: Fox brought this case to Scully’s attention and he already had their plane tickets. He’s not nearly as enthusiastic with his sales pitch and clearly doesn’t have confidence in his supernatural beliefs, at least not around Dana. This version of Mulder is practically worn down, probably from years of dealing with Scully’s skepticism. At the funeral home, Fox is clearly jealous of the attractive sheriff as well as Scully’s reaction to him. Or maybe Lucius really does have buck teeth and a lack of intelligence. Mulder is rattling off a laundry list of vampire facts when he notices the victim’s untied shoes.
Mulwell head to the cemetery, where they run into Ronnie and his pizza delivery car. There’s your suspect, Fox. But it’s daylight and he looks like a normal guy, so no alarm bells yet. Later that night, Mulwell are waiting patiently for their vampire when the sheriff gets called to an unusual scene -- a runaway RV is driving backwards in a circle while a crowd (including Ronnie) watches. After they fail to shoot out the tires, Mulder tries to board it, but just gets dragged and flung into a mud puddle. It runs out of gas and stops on its own, then Mulwell find the latest victim inside. Fox gets to the motor lodge and asks Dana to handle the autopsy. This Scully says everything to Mulder that Rashomon Scully did not. After she storms out, Ronnie delivers the drugged pizza to Fox, who generously tips Ronnie two cents. Yep, you read that right. To add insult to injury, he clearly still has quarters for the Magic Fingers. Shoeless Mulder sees his shoelaces have been untied and tries to call Scully, but he’s been drugged. Yes, Fox is Dana's obscene caller. Didn’t we have Caller ID on most cell phones in 1998? Maybe not the name, but at least the number. Since Mulder called her cell on his, she should have known it was him. I stand by my theory that the biggest and lamest plot contrivances on this TV show relate to the cell phones.
So anyway, Fox is losing consciousness when Ronnie returns, all fangs and glowing eyes. Mulder flicks a bag of sunflower seeds at him which distracts Strickland, who compulsively has to pick them up. Fox loses consciousness but wakes with fangy/glowing green-eyed Ronnie attempting to bite him. Scully shoots Ronnie but – from Fox's perspective – the bullets hit him in the chest twice and don’t stop him. Then Strickland flies toward Dana and gets away with her in hot pursuit. Mulder breaks up some furniture to make a wooden stake and goes after them. He finds Strickland first and stakes him. Fox is convinced Ronnie’s autopsy will vindicate him. Strickland's autopsy is being performed in Dallas. The coroner has a legitimate theory as to the cause of death, because the stake is still protruding from Ronnie's chest. After the doctor removes it, a glowing-eyed Strickland rises off the table. He’s clearly disturbed by his lack of fangs, but bites the coroner anyway. Sculder are more than relieved when Skinner sends them back to Texas to locate Ronnie’s now-missing body. Luckily the coroner lived, just probably has an embarrassing hickey.
The dynamic duo returns to the local cemetery, where Sheriff Hartwell chats with Scully while Mulder tracks Ronnie’s greedy, lawsuit-happy family in a local RV park. Unfortunately, Lucius is part of the problem; he drugs Dana and reveals his glowing green eyes. Fox finds Ronnie in one of the RVs, but the “family” starts to come after Mulder. He uses two garlic sticks as a makeshift cross, but that doesn’t do squat and they overpower him. Sculder wake up the next morning groggy, disoriented and puncture-free. The RV park is empty because the would-be vampires pulled up stakes. (Get it?) Back in D.C., Walter has trouble believing our intrepid heroes, but clearly the “I was drugged” defense works to a degree for both of them, which might be the most unbelievable part of this entire tale. Nah, the cell-phone plot contrivance still wins.Sestra Professional:
This might be Vince Gilligan's finest hour on The X-Files. With irrepressible writer Darin Morgan's departure, a glaring hole opened up in terms of comedy episodes that still felt true to the show. The supervising producer had somewhat toiled in Morgan's shadow on this front. He delivered some of the best episodes of the entire run -- "Pusher" (Season 3, Episode 17) and "Paper Hearts" (S4E10) -- that seamlessly worked in humorous moments, but "Small Potatoes" (S4E20) didn't quite hit the middle of the comedy target. With "Bad Blood," Gilligan showed he could not only match, but in some respects surpass the gold standard set by Morgan. It was certainly a blueprint for Gilligan's later supremacy as the creative force behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
How could he do that for The X-Files? Well, some fans consider the Morgan episodes a little too deep. They find his material dense and don't particularly want to work out the deeper meanings in his stories. (Please don't include me in this grouping.) But Gilligan's work -- and here particularly so -- is instantly accessible. He can get laughs without sacrificing the rest of the story.
In "Bad Blood," he uses what's become the time-honored entertainment trope of differing versions of the same tale. It's masterful. It utilizes everything we know of Sculder to this point, including a couple quick digs at "El Chupacabra." It's a veritable throwaway line, but every fan who's seen every episode will instantly pick up on the fact that Gilligan's touching upon the Mexican goat sucker from the widely reviled S4E11 episode "El Mundo Gira."You really know your stuff, Dana: "Bad Blood" requires a lot of the actors too. There are three Scullys in this episode, there are three Mulders as well -- the way each looks at himself/herself, the way each looks at the other and the way their boss looks at both of them. Like they say about the truth -- there's one person's version, another's person's version and what actually happened. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny hit the perfect notes with all of them. Gilligan gives them the opportunity to be short with each other, basically to react to a co-worker the way an actual human being would react as opposed to the way a television character might in similar circumstances. Andovny (just following Sestra Am's lead) respond with great relish, it must have given them some license to work out some issues about each other's idiosyncrasies.
Props to episode director Cliff Bole for giving all the brilliant little moments the necessary time and space, starting with Fox exclaiming "oh, sh--" and the timely cut to the opening credits to avoid completion of the swear word. We'll never look at a Dana autopsy the same way again after watching intestines slide off the scale the way they did in this show. Even the Dallas coroner gets a laugh when looking at the stake running through Strickland's body.That is essentially exactly the way it happened: Scenes for both versions were shot one after the other, which made it a little difficult on the actors. "You never know whether the way you have to shoot something is actually going to end up inhibiting important performances," Anderson said in The Complete X-Files of her all-time favorite episode. "It's hard to know whether that, in and of itself, will work and benefit the show. So the fact that it did work was very satisfying."
There's even room for growth in this comedic bottle episode. We get a finer look at Scully, she continues to be the character who shows more colors as the series moves onward. Her interest in the sheriff seems a lot more organic and tangible than with fellow FBI agent and ex-boyfriend Jack Willis in "Lazarus" (S1E15). And we even learn more about her in the small moments -- Dana can be doing an autopsy on a guy who ate pizza, and that makes her hungry enough to order her own pizza. She does go off on her half of a light cream cheese bagel tirade and calls her "obscene caller" a creep in Mulder's version of events, but hey, low blood sugar can do that to a girl. Trust me.
Hoo, boy: Is it my imagination or does Fox come off as kind of ridiculous in all the variations? The muddy Mulder jumps on the bed to not waste Scully's quarters in the Magic Fingers and downs her pizza. In his own, six dead cows are still more important than one dead human. He's never been this subservient to her -- "that's one opinion and I respect that." During his story, he's so bothered by the competition that he describes Hartwell as having big buck teeth, gets dragged around by the RV when he's unable to shoot out the tires and gives the aforementioned two-cent tip. In short, he condemns himself with his own words.I'm not bothered by the cell-phone thing at all, Sestra Am. I wasn't close to having a flip phone yet when this originally aired on Feb. 22, 1998. If I even had a cordless at this point, it didn't have caller identification. So none of that diminishes the impact of the story for me, and Fox turning out to be Dana's obscene caller was priceless because it was so unexpected. But what do I know, I bought the "I was drugged" defense. Couldn't they do a blood test to confirm such a thing?
So we had a pair of famous guest-star writers (Stephen King for "Chinga" and William Gibson with "Kill Switch") in the previous two episodes and now Gilligan's dazzling comedy effort. We definitely need to get back to the mythology, so we can try to figure out what the black oil's all about and why those shape shifters always seem to be ahead of the curve and what the heck Alex Krycek has been up to. Sculder will be searching for the truth, the Sestras will just be trying to figure out what the heck is going on and how/if the pieces fit together.
Guest star of the week: Whether or not you think Lucius Hartwell has big buck teeth, Luke Wilson deserves some kudos. Earlier I was talking about how tough it was for our regulars to dish out variations on their character. Well, Wilson was only on the show for one episode and had to deliver two widely different accounts of the sheriff. He was picture perfect for both of them.
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