According to another site the song Agent Miller was listening to was “Secret Heart” by Ron Sexsmith.
I was going to try to Shazam the dubstep song but my wife deleted the episode after we watched it.
Aye, I thought of that but it’s not up on Fox’s website yet. Another day or two and I’m sure it will be.
While I didn’t think it was a bad episode all in all, I thought it was another waste of 1/6 of a limited supply.
First I hated the reverse fakeout. I figured, this being X-Files, thast the whole “sure looks like a radical Muslim” was just a fake out, and the guy would be a victim of some right-wing nutcase. But nope, garden variety suicide bomber. Well, it IS Fox network after all. My conspiracy theory is that the radicalized American Muslim character is a plot by Fox to sew fear into Americans about Muslims, so that a Republican President will be elected. Hey, I’m just asking questions!
And secondly, so the whole of the X-filesness of this episode is that Mulder solves the case with magic mushrooms? That’s it? (I think they really were MM, and that Agent Einstein was just covering her ass to Skinner. Otherwise, what - Mulder tripped on his own and can read minds all the time? That’s even worse!) There really doesn’t seem to be a lot of meat on the bones of these episodes. So what if it had good music? So does my iTunes directory.
We got yet another episode that was nothing more than a MOR original series episode. I put this one somewhere near Postmodern Prometheus in the spectrum, a high concept but ultimately useless episode.
Too late for the edit.
I also wanted to comment on the murderous nurse. At first, I thought she was one of the “cell” Muslims, and she was going to kill Shiraz rather than risk him giving up the plot. But nope, just a “true American Patriot”, a nurse who murders patients just because she thinks they deserve it. Just the kind of nurse every hospital should have, in Foxland - people who will do what needs to be done. And she’ll get away with it. No repercussions for her.
I thought this episode was pretty bad.
Look, let’s introduce baby Mulder and Sculley! That will sure pump the viewers! Uh, no, I’m watching this show to see actual Mulder and Sculley, not their millennial counterparts. Not to mention having Agent Einstein (seriously, that’s the name they picked?) go along with one of Mulder’s less well thought out plans.
The MM trip was amusing, but in a bizarre manner that made me wonder if David Lynch was guest directing. Plus I really have no desire to see shirtless Mulder.
And then his wacky trip just happens to bring the clue to stop the rest of the bombings? (With the idiot terrorists that didn’t have all their bombers go at once so the FBI wouldn’t be there to stop them?)
Please, the last two episodes were good, why bring out this trash.
You have a point! But, their cunning plan would have worked, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids (and their mushrooms. Seriously, if it wasn’t for supernatural efforts, no one would have had a clue. I guess normal investigative techniques don’t work any more? Like, interviewing his family? His mom was just running around loose, and not in investigative custody, as a material witness or something?).
You must have missed the “twist”, although I think it’s a weakness of the episode that the twist was so easy to miss. The comatose bomber had felt remorse at the last moment - I think maybe even in time to not detonate his own bomb, although too late to do anything about his accomplice - and was trying as best he could to do something to make amends. He was able to communicate with his mother in dreams and with Mulder via his “altered state”. Scully and Mulder Jr. might have gotten something useful out of him too if they’d had more time.
But he still was a dirty jihadist suicide bomber. Just one that changed his mind. Not an innocent.
If that was the twist, it certainly didn’t twist too far. So, Mulder can’t read minds after all, but the bomber can send telepathic messages? To-may-to, to-mah-to. It’s still random, non-special people communicating telepathically. Developing a conscience doesn’t automatically involve the spontaneous creation of supernatural abilities. Not even in the X-Files world.
I enjoyed seeing them, as well. I hope that they play a part in next week’s episode, too.
Hey, if they can ignore the entirety of the original mytharc, with the impending (in 2012) alien invasion, they can ignore the LG deaths, and just have them appear without even a notice.
It worked for Bobby Ewing.
There are so many good points in this thread about last night’s episode. I didn’t know where to start. I mean Einstein was all about saving lives, until she sees her partner with Scully, then it’s “Let’s get Mulder here, so I can waist everyone’s time giving him placebos of magic mushrooms so on the off chance that this dude’s not COMLETELY a vegetable, or who’s soul is still trapped here, can communicate with him.” And, of course, it worked.
So Mulder gets a hotel name, and all of a sudden, all of the FBI is there.
I mean, were the writers under the influence of magic mushrooms?
Mulder’s trip was pretty cool with me, and would have worked in a better episode.
Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping for.
I’d like to think that there was a lot cut out, where the FBI did some reconnaissance and noticed who all was there, maybe even got inside the rooms before the raid. That the raid was shorthand for everything that had to happen first.
Otherwise, it’s beyond stupid. Did Mulder say “I have a name of a hotel. Don’t know if it’s the target, the base, or something else. And I got the name during a drug-induced hallucinogenic trip. Well, it really was placebos. So I wasn’t really tripping, but I did actually speak to dead people, and get the information. Anyway, the bomber told me that name while he was posed like a crucified Jesus. There was a whole bunch of religious imagery. The bomber spoke to me in Arabic. No I don’t speak Arabic. Why are you walking away?”
I didn’t say he was an innocent. I said Shiraz (apparently) chose not to detonate his bomb, which means he was not in fact a suicide bomber.
This revelation really was not handled well on the show, though. It was a line or two almost in the background from a grieving mother who had a dream that her son wasn’t as bad as he seemed, so it was both easy to miss and hard to take seriously. Given that the episode opened by showing a Muslim praying and then walking into a building that promptly blows up, if the intended message was not “Muslims = terrorists” then it was a really bad move to suddenly get subtle when it came to the twist.
I’m not defending the quality of the writing here, I’m just trying to explain what you missed. I don’t think there was supposed to be anything unusual about Shiraz’s ability to communicate with Mulder, though. The basic premise of the episode seemed to be that coma patients communicating with others is totally A Thing, and thus worth pursuing not as some sort of desperate last resort but as a first resort, apparently before even trying any conventional investigation techniques. That’s a lot to ask the audience to accept without any justification.
If the mother had showed up earlier claiming that her son was trying to send a message, thus prompting the involvement of the X-Files team, that would have made somewhat more sense.
Now that you mention it, yeah, that was weird… Though I’m not sure the authorities knew who he was right away. (I won’t re-watch the episode to verify; Chris Carter owes me my time back for this one.) It would have been impossible to contact his friends and relatives without an ID.
Something that occurred to me this morning, that may or may not be a plot problem. Don’t they keep individual jihadist cells separated, precisely to avoid one of the jihadists getting caught, and spilling the beans on multiple operations? I thought that if you were a jihadist, you were only told about **your **target. Besides, why would he need to know what the other group was going to do next? He’d be dead/martyred by then.
I was really not pleased with this episode overall. Sigh. And I was a fan of the original series! I was so looking forward to the miniseries. At this point, I’d prefer they let Mulder and Scully drive off into the sunset (with her new doggie).
The Mulder shroom trip scene was a lot of fun, but other than that I didn’t dig it.
Part of the problem was that there wasn’t really any sense of threat or danger to Mulder, Scully, or their doppelgangers during the episode. The other would-be terrorists were just vague notions until the end, and even then they were taken down by other agents.
I almost expected Mulder and Einstein to hook up, and Scully to hook up with Miller. What happens in southwest Texas, stays in southwest Texas.
Certainly not always. All 20 of the 9/11 hijackers knew each other and knew what they were going to be doing, even though they would have been just as successful as 4 teams of 5 instead of one team of twenty.
I wonder if the “terror cells” is more a holdover from cold war red scare communist hunting. “Well, of course this communist we found only knew one other guy, clearly they use a cell structure. There could be hundreds more cells he didn’t know about. That why we need to pass this bill I’ve proposed…”. We just changed “sleeper cell” to “terror cell”.
And what about the 2 Homeland Security agents who came into the hospital room and whispered what sounded like Arabic to one another?
I wonder if Homeland Security was supposed to be the new ‘syndicate’ controlled by the silver haired dudes and the cancer man, but the network balked at making it the central point of the episode? Maybe they didn’t want to play to 9/11 Truthers.
That might help explain garbage time like the acid trip and that horrible conversation with the music at the end - thought I was watching Dawson’s Creek.
I can’t believe I watched a new Walking Dead and a new X-files on the same night. Walking Dead was recorded, but those are two shows I feel are separated by years and to have a new one of each on the same night was glorious.