In Muncie, Indiana, Roy Neary is about to go on the adventure of a lifetime. Whoops, wrong Muncie story. This isn't Close Encounters of the Third Kind, our tale is about Ray Pearce, a man who served his country, got sick and mysteriously died. His widow, Nora Pearce, is angry and grieving. (I wonder if Ronnie Neary felt the same way after Roy left.) His friend, Curt, doesn’t know what to say so he leaves. (Did Roy Neary even have guy friends?) Curt drives while distracted and hits a man standing in the road, but the man is Ray, who flawlessly wins the battle of car vs. human. The “friend?” Not so lucky.
When the local traffic homicide investigators get stumped, they call in Team Sculett. Curt is missing, but his permanently damaged car tells quite a story. Scully finds shoeprints in the asphalt, but Doggett tries to “Scully” his way out of the possible scenario that a man physically stopped the vehicle. Dana easily finds Curt’s dead body while canvassing the crime scene. (Nice work, local popo. This is why no one respects you.) Scully performs the autopsy and learns someone treated the victim's head like a bowling ball, pulling him through the windshield of his car. Scully rules out ordinary men as suspects. Doggett identifies Ray Pearce from the fingerprint and blood left on the windshield. Meanwhile, Ray, played by Wade Williams, is hiding out in a depressing room, clipping metal “hairs” from his face.
John meets with Nora Pearce and Harry Odell, the owner of the salvage yard where Ray and Curt worked together. Nora (Jennifer Pearce) claims her husband died from Gulf War Syndrome and was cremated. Doggett says Ray is still alive and responsible for Curt’s death. Nora and Harry strongly object, but it’s not like they have proof to show John. Meanwhile, Ray is in a halfway house where volunteer Larina (Tamara Clatterbuck) tries to help him. Harry the boss knows more than he’s letting on, because he starts a shred party in the salvage yard office. A clearly ticked-off Ray interrupts, but Harry shoots him with a shotgun. I’m not sure how a gun managed to cause more damage than a vehicle traveling 40 mph, but we’ll just put that in the “taking liberties for storyline purposes” column. Of course, Pearce still gets his man. Ray: 2, His Enemies: 0.
Doggett is at the salvage yard crime scene while Scully is at the morgue. They compare notes and John easily determines what Harry was trying to shred. Back in the halfway house, Ray is cleaning up when nosy Larina enters his room and asks about the blood on his clothes. She still can’t get through to him and panics when she sees the metallic changes to his face.
Looking for Dr. David Clifton at Chamber Technologies, Doggett learns about smart metals from Dr. Tom Puvogel, who has one of those awkwardly rare last names that probably means something to someone but even the internet can’t tell me what it is. We should ask the writer, Jeffrey Bell. (This ended up being his last X-Files episode, probably because the TV show Angel would keep him busy for the next couple of years.)
Dr. Puvogel, played by Arye Gross, claims Dr. Clifton is no longer affiliated with the company. John gets in touch with Dana, who learned Ray’s “Gulf War Syndrome” was actually exposure to a “non-identifiable contaminant metal.” No wonder his wife couldn’t get military benefits. Meanwhile, Larina reads Ray’s obituary while simultaneously watching the news update about the salvage yard incident. She decides to call Ray’s house.
When Doggett picks up Scully, she updates him on Ray’s medical condition. John manages to make his second Superman reference in two weeks. Maybe next week he’ll go for the turkey. For some reason, Scully and Doggett are tossing around the “Agent” titles more than usual, and it’s bordering on condescension. It seems like their relationship regressed back to when they first started working together. Maybe this episode was filmed earlier and aired out of order. Back inside Chamber Technologies, Ray has fallen into a trap set by Team Sculett and Dr. Puvogel, but punches his way outside and escapes. He leaves behind traces of blood that turn to metal before their eyes. (How come the blood he left on the car windshield didn’t do that?) Doggett arranges for Puvogel to be taken into “protective custody,” but clearly he’d rather arrest the lying doctor.
Nora waits for Ray at the halfway house, but she still doesn’t quite understand what’s happening. John finds a dead metal man at the salvage yard and links him back to Chambers Technologies. Team Sculett identify him as Dr. David Clifton and demand answers from Dr. Puvogel. He claims Clifton was already dying when he became infected. Somehow, the hazardous waste barrel containing his body ended up at the Salvage Yard and infected Ray. So maybe Pearce is turning into a Terminator, Doggett? Seems legit.
When Doggett picks up Scully, she updates him on Ray’s medical condition. John manages to make his second Superman reference in two weeks. Maybe next week he’ll go for the turkey. For some reason, Scully and Doggett are tossing around the “Agent” titles more than usual, and it’s bordering on condescension. It seems like their relationship regressed back to when they first started working together. Maybe this episode was filmed earlier and aired out of order. Back inside Chamber Technologies, Ray has fallen into a trap set by Team Sculett and Dr. Puvogel, but punches his way outside and escapes. He leaves behind traces of blood that turn to metal before their eyes. (How come the blood he left on the car windshield didn’t do that?) Doggett arranges for Puvogel to be taken into “protective custody,” but clearly he’d rather arrest the lying doctor.
Nora waits for Ray at the halfway house, but she still doesn’t quite understand what’s happening. John finds a dead metal man at the salvage yard and links him back to Chambers Technologies. Team Sculett identify him as Dr. David Clifton and demand answers from Dr. Puvogel. He claims Clifton was already dying when he became infected. Somehow, the hazardous waste barrel containing his body ended up at the Salvage Yard and infected Ray. So maybe Pearce is turning into a Terminator, Doggett? Seems legit.
Meanwhile, John sees Nora infiltrating the office to read a file. She calls Ray with an update, so Doggett sends the SWAT team to the halfway house. Ray tries to keep Larina silent but his metallic hand accidentally(?) smothers her. Nora learns of Larina’s death and leads the SWAT team to his current location. Ray’s last target is Owen Harris, the accountant who authorized the transport of the barrel from the Chambers lab to the salvage yard. Ray easily tracks down and starts to kill Owen in front of the man's son. Somehow, the panicked boy gets through to the old Ray, who lets Harris go. Turns out, Ray the Terminator is more Arnold in T2 than T-1000 after all. Ray even chooses a similar fate: he “commits suicide” by hiding in a car being crushed at the salvage yard. Roy Neary’s fate was way more optimistic.
Sestra Professional:
This one is just a hot molten mess. There's just no other way to put it. The first and most egregious issue is attempting to go all Terminator during Robert Patrick's first season on the show. There's just no way it can compare with his T-1000 image. If we needed proof of that, check out the awesomeness of this tweet I ran across yesterday. I'd rather look at that 1,100 more times (length of the gif times the 44-minute run time of "Salvage") than watch this episode again.
Sestra Professional:
This one is just a hot molten mess. There's just no other way to put it. The first and most egregious issue is attempting to go all Terminator during Robert Patrick's first season on the show. There's just no way it can compare with his T-1000 image. If we needed proof of that, check out the awesomeness of this tweet I ran across yesterday. I'd rather look at that 1,100 more times (length of the gif times the 44-minute run time of "Salvage") than watch this episode again.
There's an attempt here by Angel/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. writer/executive producer Jeffrey Bell to show some relevance to the times we were living in when the episode aired in January 2001. Of course, the fact they didn't even spell his first name right in the credits might indicate there wasn't an immense amount of care put into this one. At any rate, this wound up being the final of Bell's five scripts for the series after Season 6's "The Rain King" and "Alpha" and Season 7's "The Goldberg Variation" and "Signs & Wonders."
Bell tries to play on our inherent sympathy for veterans of the Gulf War coming back and not being able to resume their regular lives. But the story gets pulled in so many directions that it's really hard to get invested, and by the end, they just couldn't salvage a feasible story from it.
The set pieces are certainly striking. We first see Scully standing halfway through where a car engine would be under normal circumstances. (This is probably a good time to point out how amazing Gillian Anderson looks in Season 8. I think the series change wears very well on her.) As with "Surekill" last week, "Salvage" is kind of interesting when it starts off with the agents' initial investigation. But, also as with "Surekill" last week, the story kind of peters out after that.
Part of the problem is we again follow the guest stars of the story for copious amounts of time. We get to see Dana and John whenever the body count goes up, but the story revolves around people we don't know nor care about. The continual T-1000 winks are undeniable -- including two "Get out" occurrences -- but as they happen, so do the realizations that this is most definitely not like a Terminator movie.
Sestra Am pointed out some surface similarities to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and there are elements that keep reminding me of my favorite movie too. At the halfway house, Larina tells Ray "you're not alone." That's pretty similar to CE3K's tag line "We are not alone." Actress Tamara Clatterbuck, playing Larina, reminds me of Jillian Guiler too, the one person seemingly able to talk to Roy Neary as his obsession gets worse and worse.
That only happens in the movies: But that's also the problem. I'm thinking of Close Encounters ... I'm thinking of Terminator ... I'm thinking of The Shawshank Redemption ... and I'm even thinking of the new Amazon Prime series Truth Seekers, an eight-episode riff on ghost hunting that paid homage to Shawshank Redemption a lot more fluidly than the powers-that-be do here. I'm just looking for anything that will help me get into the story.
Ultimately that's not possible because Ray's reign of terror is rather aimless. His best friend gets killed, but the CEO of the company apparently has nothing to fear. For some reason, Larina's felled even though she didn't really stand in his way and he targets an accountant -- really, the paper pusher? -- but stops in his tracks when the man's son yells out for his daddy.
This time, you stay dead: There are points to be made, for instance, Doggett points out soldiers are often able to keep going even when they're riddled with bullets and holding their insides in the hands. So there's insight into John the veteran that we didn't have previously, even though when Doggett later calls him Ray we should root for, it doesn't really sway us to his side.
Scully seems to be standing by as John tries to suss out Pearce's motivations. Doggett thinks Ray will act and think like a man even if he is more powerful than a locomotive. Even with enough metal alloy in his body to poison an elephant, John doesn't think Pearce would kill his friends. So any character development in "Salvage" belongs to Doggett, with Dana on hand as our resident autopsier/sounding board. Kind of sounds like the old days a little bit, doesn't it? (By the way, I don't think they're tossing around "Agent" more than usual, and they'll continue doing this for a while, so it's going to continue to irk us both, I'm sure.)
A machine doesn't know blame ... nor mercy: I'm torn in regards to giving props to director Rod Hardy -- who also helmed two of the more memorable episodes of the season, fourth episode "Roadrunners" and the upcoming "Vienen" -- for the exciting moments, because I can't get past the ones where the story falls dead in its tracks. Definitely deserving of credit is the makeup department as Pearce transforms more and more into the metal man.
Guest star of the week: I'll go with TV and movie veteran Arye Gross as the uniquely monikered Tom Puvogel. The doctor's a company man, he withholds details, he whines and simpers, but I'll admit he does all of that really well.
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