Written by John Shiban
Directed by Rob Bowman
In rewatching
some of these episodes, it is difficult not to let certain predispositions
towards their creators come into ones opinion. Perhaps no writer better
demonstrates this than the one who makes his X-Files debut with this episode, John Shiban. About his ability it
is difficult to speak with any confidence. For while I consider him to be one
of the weakest writers for the series, the fact remains he would stick with it
far longer than many of the better ones, lasting until the very last season. He
wrote some truly terrible episodes, it is true (we'll be encountering one such
later this season) and he also wrote
some gems, but because so many of the latter were collaborative efforts with
much better writers, one wonders just how good they were. (Vince Gilligan
clearly thought very highly of him; Shiban would be one of the fellow writers
who would be on the staff of Breaking Bad
more than fifteen years later.) Unfortunately, given the nature of the
majority of his scripts, one can't help but consider him a poor man's Howard
Gordon.
One can see the
comparison with his debut episode, which seems at first glimpse an homage to
Gordon's Sleepless last season. What makes it have a flavor of its own is the
fact that Shiban updates it to the First
Gulf War. There's a real coldness to the rage of Rappo Trimble when Mulder
finally confronts him, and he calls him--- and by extension, the audience---
for watching the War on cable like it was a video game with no concern for the
boots on the ground. In its own way, it could be considered an indictment of
how the average American views war these days--- except I seriously doubt
Shiban was that prescient.
There's also a coldness to the way Trimble
enacts his revenge against his victims in this episode that was lacking----
he's not interested in anything as simple or as merciful as simply killing
them, no, he makes them feel a far worse fate by killing their families and
refusing to allow them what they consider the mercy of death. The teaser is one
of the most gruesome we've had on the show so far, and considering just how far we find Trimble willing to take
this; perhaps the most chilling thing in The Walk is watching how long it takes
for General Callahan, standing firm and reassured to become utterly a shell of
himself to the point of putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
So we will give
the episode a fair amount of credit for it. Unfortunately, this doesn't change
the fact that it's just another supernatural revenge story, and considering
that it's already the third this season,
one is starting to wonder about the general laziness of a writer who decides to
debut with that kind of episode. Oh, I'm not going to deny that the technical
aspects of the episodes are spot on. The scene where Janet Draper is murdered
by what appears to be phantom in a swimming pool is very chilling, even if it
is a ripoff of Val Lewton's Cat People. And
the scene where General Callahan's son is stalked twice is very chilling, and
I'm not going to lie about how unsettling
it was to see a child murdered among his toy soldiers. But it takes
Mulder an awful long time to finally reveal to Scully what the hell is going on
here, which is not like him at all. (I'm still not a hundred percent sure how
those dental X-rays did it or what exactly they were supposed to prove.) And
considering how quickly the killer is acting, the fact that he waits until two
more people have been murders seems pretty damn negligent to me. I'm surprised
Scully waits so long to call him out on it. But unfortunately, like the last
several episodes have been demonstrating, once again our heroes seem completely
detached from all of the action. The confrontation at the end doesn't have much
tension because they don't really do anything in order to prevail, once again,
an outside factor removes the killer from the equation--- this time,
permanently.
When it comes
down to it, I'm more inclined to be favorable to The Walk then I am the last
couple of episodes. There's a bitter pang to this one that make it a bit more
satisfying then the last couple, and the technical aspects are much better too.
(At the very list, it had a better use of insects than The List did). But
considering we don't get much motivation for Trimble's action, a couple too
many blind alleys, and too much of an anticlimax, it's not going to rank as one
of the great ones either. Still, given who the author is, it's a lot better
than it has a right to be, which says more about Shiban than the episode in
general.
My score: 3 stars.
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