Written by Chris Carter
Directed by Joe Napolitano
A lot of sci-fi series have the
problem of figuring out what they are in their first season. On both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel's inaugural seasons, Joss Whedon
didn't quite have a vision for what he wanted his series to be, so he spent
most of the season dealing with anthology stories that focused on certain
supernatural tropes. Something similar happened in the initial seasons of Smallville and Charmed.
Because X-Files predates all of
them, one can understand why the writers were having the same problems, and one
can certainly see how Carter would be in a similar situation--- one can imagine
pitching ideas in the writer's room, and bringing up the idea of the show doing
a Bigfoot episode. So, one can
understand why an episode like this would come up here and now.
Unfortunately, that excuse only
gets you so much leeway. Admittedly, it would smack less of cliché then it
would a decade earlier, but still, there's a lot of other problems with The
Jersey Devil that not even that can excuse. The coverup level smacks of falsity
from the beginning--- it's one thing when the government is trying to coverup
evidence of alien abductions; it's far schlockier when Mulder is being stopped
from investigate a Neanderthal woman by Atlantic City police who are afraid of
the tourist trade being maligned. The far more serious problem is one that
will, unfortunately, never entirely go away--- in trying to express the majesty
of supernatural, Chris Carter will hand his characters--- particularly Mulder
and Scully---- purple and downright unspeakable dialogue. And they will say it
at ridiculous times--- few scenes in
the first season are as unintentionally hilarious as Mulder's attempts to
describe the primitive woman he sees rummaging through garbage in spiritual
terms, or when he describes her --- after that same woman attacks him---- as 'beautiful'. I'm not going to even try to
describe the exchanges Mulder and Scully have when they have their debate over
whether this version of humanity is better than theirs--- it's bad enough that
you actually have to here.
The bigger problem is that Carter
seems to know that this a weaker script than usual, so he will fall back on a
topic that will come up repeatedly in the show's first season: he will
introduce some element of the central character's personal life as background.
So he falls back to have Scully avoid investigating with him to go to her
godson's birthday, thus treating to us to the even more clichéd atmosphere of
an army of six year olds, and a friend of Scully's (never to be seen again)
suggest about the possibilities of motherhood. Fans of the show can talk about
foreshadowing of later seasons in this
episode; right now, it just seems like one of these things you have your female
lead do in any series. It seems even more absurd when Scully goes out on a date
with the dullest man imaginable, and refers to Mulder as 'a jerk'. Frankly, at
this point, one can hardly blame her for her assessment, considering how
ridiculous Mulder seems to be when it comes to pursuing a lead. I'd be
wondering about his sanity as well.
Even the 'twists' that seem to
pervade this story have no oomph to them. The fact that the Jersey Devil is
actually a woman seems no different then if they were pursuing a Neanderthal
man. What were given amounts to shots of a naked person rummaging through
garbage, leaping through deserted building, and finally getting shot in the
forest. Which would be different if we saw the male version that we see in the
flashback, doing anything remotely
different. And the fact that the devils seem to have died protecting their
young doesn't bring us any clarity either, or even attempt to explain how any
of the men or women in the forest have survived as long as they have, if every
generation they head out into civilization to get killed. The discussions that
Mulder and Scully try to have with anthropologists about the same subject seem
to amount to little more than tosh as well--- I kept waiting for Graham Chapman
to step into the room, and say: "This program has a tendency to get
silly." Problem is, it's doing this, and everything else in the episode in
dead earnest, when it could've used a few laughs.
That's perhaps the biggest problem
with The Jersey Devil. Later episodes will have humor levied into them very
delicately, which will make the shows more entertaining and watchable. But at
this point in the series, Carter doesn't seem to know that--- he's playing
everything in dead earnest, and it just makes things seem even more silly. (It doesn't help matters
that of all the show's writers, Carter will have the least comic aptitude.).
There will be more than our fair share of ridiculous monster of the week's in
our future--- but few with so little imagination. And to find that we're facing
this problem barely four episodes in---- no wonder nobody was paying much
attention to the series at this point.
My score: 1.5 stars
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