I feel like my snarky side has taken a vacation as well, so I hope this is an episode in which I can let my snark flag fly once again. In Jasper County, Mississippi, a correctional farm facility prepares for an oncoming tornado. (“It’s a twister, Auntie Em!”) One inmate annoys prisoner Pinker Rawls and takes a nail through his hand for it. Superintendent Raybert Fellowes sends Rawls to the box as punishment. The “box” looks like a decrepit outhouse made of wood so, of course, it doesn’t stand up to the twister. Forty minutes later, one guard goes to tell Raybert (I wonder if his parents debated his name. Should we call him Ray? Nah, we should call him Bert. How about Raybert?) Pinker and the box are gone. The superintendent’s only half there. Literally. The fellow has been cut -- torn? burned? -- in half.
This is a job for … Doctor Scully! She’s thinking industrial acid, but Mulder nips that theory in the bud. Dana fulfills Fox's dreams by suggesting spontaneous human combustion. The guard says Pinker did it, but can’t account for how he entered a locked office, or for that matter, how he did it while dying during the storm. Mulder shows the wall isn’t so thick after all, he pushes his hand right through the plaster.Sculder are curious about Rawls' former girlfriend, June Gurwitch, played by Catherine Dent. At this time, she was only three years away from reaching some long-running job security as Danni Sofer on The Shield. June is currently engaged to Robert Werther, who is played by David Bowe, an actor with a name you won’t recognize but a face you will. Meanwhile, Pinker – played by character actor John Diehl (hey, he’ll also be on The Shield too!) – is alive and shopping for new clothes when a security guard apprehends him for burglary and theft. Rawls manages to get out of the cuffs and disappear, but the subsequent physical contact caused the cuffs to dissolve in Mulder’s hands.
Pinker goes to see his former partner in crime, Bo, trashes his home and demands June’s current address. Bo shoots Rawls eight times, but that doesn’t slow down Pinker one bit. You should’ve saved one for yourself, Bo. And where is this Trevor from the episode title? Sculder arrive, find the security guard’s car and what’s left of Bo. Let’s just say no one will be identifying Bo by his face. Fox sees seven of Bo’s bullets in the wall (What happened to the eighth one? Bo had such a tight grouping.) but they’ve also dissolved after passing through Rawls. Mulder tries to convince Scully that Pinker can move through solid objects and have solid objects move through him. June’s sister, Jackie (Tuesday Knight from Nightmare on Elm Street 4), is visited by Rawls. Let’s see her “dream warrior” her way out of this one. Our heroes show up while Jackie has Pinker at knifepoint, but Rawls walks through the wall and leaves Jackie and her son unharmed. Pinker hides in the agents' trunk as they unintentionally drive him directly to June and Robert’s house. Robert is pissed to hear about June’s criminal past and bails on her.
Fox and Dana take June into protective custody, but Mulder realizes Rawls was in their trunk the whole time. (Lariat must have one hell of a car rental contract with the FBI. The X-files division alone seems to cause lots of damage to their fleet.) Sculder search the house for him, but only find his message “burned” into the wall. Fox realizes Pinker can’t pass through rubber or glass. However, he can pass through ceilings because Rawls gets into the hotel room, kills the cop and kidnaps June.June thinks Pinker is mad about the 90 grand she stole, but he’s focused on the baby she gave up for adoption, the one named Trevor Andrew. (Those prison grapevines are more accurate than Johnny Dangerously let on.) Turns out Jackie adopted Trevor as her son. Mulder gets some rubber-bullet ammunition to take down Pinker. He and Scully realize who and where Trevor is and try to warn Jackie on the phone. Too bad June and Rawls show up at Jackie’s house for the family reunion and Pinker tries to bond with the wide-eyed Trevor. (“Call me Pinky.” Ewww. OK. Pinky it is.)
Jackie does her best by throwing hot soup on Pinky, but it goes through him. She does get to clock him with the pot, though. Too bad he catches her. Trevor makes a run for it and Rawls chases after him. Fox arrives and shoots Pinky several times with the rubber bullets while Dana gets Trevor to the car. Rawls catches up to them, so Scully secures Trevor and herself in a phone booth. (I know some of you might not know what one of those is. We'll wait here while you look it up.) Pinky punches a hole through the glass with a rock, but can’t bring himself to hurt Trevor. He steps into the road and June tries to run him down. The car passes through him … but the windshield doesn’t. Ewwwww ... glad I wasn’t eating lunch during this episode. At least Trevor is safe, but he and the Gurwitch sisters have some Ricki Lake drama to work out. Sestra Professional:
With any show of longevity, there are probably episodes you skip if you're not doing a complete rewatch. This is the perfect example of one of them for me. It's just so blah. It's almost not worth picking on because that would require some effort. Almost.
Acknowledgement (or blame) for the story depicted in "Trevor" went to Jim Guttridge (the only IMDb writing credit for the television composer) and Ken Hawryliw (The X-Files' prop master for 105 episodes). So I have to think they were trying to bring some musicality and an artistic bent to this one. I think my biggest issue is that Mulder and Scully don't get much out of it. OK, they can recognize there's some kind of supernatural aspect to the case. So it's an X-file. It's the kind of X-file I wish Jeffrey Spender has been assigned to when he still had a face. You know, the folder that he glanced at and then put in the circular file. I would have respected him for doing that with this one.
Dear diary, Today my heart leapt when Agent Scully suggested spontaneous human combustion: Having Dana pull a Fox-ian theory out of thin air reminds me of the Stephen King episode "Chinga." The show super fan penned Episode 10 in the fifth season, and concepts that seem like they might work on paper were just awkward when committed to celluloid. There's an art to the Sculder relationship and if one of the most renowned writers of our time can't capture their voices, we can posit that it's not all that easy to do. It has to be more than Scully brings the science and Mulder's willing to believe. Even reported polishing by co-executive producer Vince Gilligan and producer John Shiban didn't help. Say what you want about the less-convincing episodes penned by the regular writing team, but they know the characters inside and out. And the composition of them doesn't -- and shouldn't -- change and/or lessen.It might make a difference if the other characters in "Trevor" weren't so woefully uninteresting. We've probably been spoiled by the likes of Brad Dourif (S1E13's "Beyond the Sea") and Tom Noonan (S4E10's "Paper Hearts"), who delivered chilling performances -- partly because due to better scripts and partly because they were able to delve into the rich characters and make them hold up better than brittle walls easily punched through.
That leaves us wondering why this dude can vanish from a box in a tornado and withstand a multitude of bullets fired at close range. To tell the truth, I didn't really care after about 15 minutes. But I wanted to give it every opportunity for this rewatch, as there's a good chance I'll never watch it again.So should we arrest David Copperfield? --Yes we should, but not for this: So Sculder continue to swap theories from their usual side of the fences as they get closer and closer to this mystery man. They determine the oddball fugitive isn't just after the money, he's after a child -- the name of the episode not actually uttered until 34 minutes into the proceedings, Trevor. That's certainly a different tactic taken by the storytellers.
There's a long scene before the denouement with no Fox and/or Dana at all. That doesn't really help its cause. And then Mulder comes in, shotgun ablazing with the dumb-dumb bullets, thinking that's going to subdue a guy he's just spent the previous half hour investigating for the ability to withstand worse punishment. A portion of a speeding car eventually does the trick. Nevertheless, that was a beautiful shot through the broken phone booth at a tremulous Scully. Very artistic.
Guest star of the week: The Sestras recollect Diehl from his recurring role on The John Larroquette Show, among other things. And while he doesn't have a lot to work with here, Diehl made a career out of flourishing under those kinds of conditions. Playing the escaped convict must have been a lot like being third banana for three seasons on Miami Vice. At the very least, we see through to Pinky's human side.
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