X-Files Episode Guide: Unusual Suspects

Written by Vince Gilligan

Directed by Kim Manners

One would like to give this episode a little more credit than it deserves. Here we are at episode 100 of The X-Files. Most normal series would do something fairly significant, either satirically or seriously to honor that fact. What does this series do? It chooses to show an episode with no appearance by Scully and practically none by Mulder, focus its energy on telling an origin story for a group of characters that might not, frankly, a background story, and tell a conspiracy story that bares almost no resemblance to any part of the mythology, only try to tell it as a comedy. Is it daring? Yes. Does it work? Not really.

If this episode were to work, it would have had to demonstrate what happened as a soul-changing event for all the characters involved. And unfortunately, it only works for one of the three characters. By choosing to focus the majority of the events around the story of John Fitzgerald Byers (one of the more clever elements is how he got his first name), the character who was apparently the least likely of the three to believe in the kind of conspiracy that this series traffics in, Gilligan manages to hold up a remarkable amount of what unfolds as interesting. To show Byers loss of innocence, from being called 'narc' by everybody at the convention to someone who has been unalterably shaken is one of the funniest and, strangely enough, most moving elements of the episode. Bruce Harwood's performance is so well done it covers up a lot of the episodes flaws. And if you've been with the series through the previous ninety-nine episode, you can tell that there are a lot of them.

For starters, neither Langley nor Frohike seem remarkably different from the characters we will first encounter in E.B.E, and neither seems to demonstrate a credible turnaround as well as Harwood does in the course of the episode. Both of them seem to be entrenched in the hacker lore (or at least what it would look like in 1989) and yet neither seems to have much of the paranoia that would enclose them. Admittedly, their 'come to Jesus' moment is one of the more convincing ones (its really hard to argue the level of conspiracy when you find a tracking implement in a tooth) but it still seems a little less convincing.

Then, there's the way that they handle Mulder, and this seems a rare example of Gilligan, who usually steps right when it comes to character, by illustrating Mulder as a by the book FBI agent who seems to inherit all of his paranoid delusions by inhaling a chemical designed to do just that after running into a security device that tells him aliens are among us. In one sense this might seem to work--- considering what we have 'learned' in Redux about how Mulder as 'made'----- but in a far more upsetting sense, it seems to be an example of the writer's trying to be clever by half It seems to be eliminating four years of backstory for the sake of a joke, and not a particularly good one at that.

And yes, while I admit that it's good to see Steven Williams again,  none of this what little we seem to know about X at all. The X that we knew throughout Seasons 2 and 3 would seem to be someone who would've just as easily killed the three of them for them looking at him the wrong way. Here, they witness the cleanup of what is clearly a major exercise in the conspiracy, and the only thing he seems to do is give the cabal their name. That would instill a level of humanity in X that I just don't believe he ever had.

 Part of the deeper grudge that I bear Unusual Suspects for is because this is, for all intents and purposes, a Homicide crossover. In time, the fact that Richard Belzer's character would end up becoming the most crossed over character of all time was not a punch line,  and the character still had something of edge. But here it just seems like yet another missed opportunity. Munch would be world renowned for the level of paranoia and conspiracy theories he would spin on every series he was a part of. Here, he's given an example of a genuine conspiracy, and what does he do? He says that it's bullshit. I'll admit that I was impressed that he was willing to parody one of his more famous lines on Homicide, but it seems like an utter waste. It's bad enough Belzer's appearance is almost negligible enough to be insignificant, but if you're going to use the character, use the character.

But even if Belzer had been utilized more fully, it is doubtful that he could've done much to raise this episode above the middling level that seems to have stagnated at. Instead, what we have is a conspiracy episode that doesn't add up in either the sum of its parts or as a whole. And yet, for some reason in Season 6, this would be one of the episodes that they would write a direct sequel to. All that Unusual Suspects seems able to do is convince us that the Gunmen don't have enough of a dimension to even deserve an episode to themselves. One can understand why it was done (something had to be done when both Anderson and Duchovny were unavailable because they were working on the movie at the time) but really one wonders if they couldn't have found another way around it. In a season that we already know is going to be shortened by necessity, this seems like something of a waste, and not a good way to demonstrate the series is getting back on track after a sluggish start.

My Score: 2.5 stars.