Written by William Gibson & Tom Maddox
Directed by Rob Bowman
A couple of provisos must be
considered before writing this reviews. Not knowing anything about either
Gibson or Maddox before or after seeing this episode, there is a very good
possibility that this is only a very simplistic version of their cyber-fiction.
And even if that wasn't the case, this really isn't much more then a very
updated version of Ghost in the Machine from Season 1, albeit with much more
advanced hardware and ideas (that still, nearly twenty years on, can't help but
seem a little dated). That said, Kill Switch still approaches the idea of an evil
AI with so much more verve and sophistication than the previous episode came
even close to doing, and in return does what Chinga tried to do last week, and
mostly failed at: let a guest author have a crack at the X-Files and create
what appears to a totally new version of what the series can do.
The idea of artificial intelligence
being let loose in the world is one that has been done quite a bit before this
episode, and has been developed quite a bit after. (Indeed, the series Person
of Interest would take it into territory that not even Gibson and Maddox would
have been prepared to consider.). But there's a level of creativity and
imagination that is really the series own, starting with the teaser which may
be one of the most ingenious variations on the setup in quite some time, and
followed through with what the AI is willing to do to protect itself, as well
as the 'sense of humor that Esther Nairn says it has. By now, the creation of
the Goth hacker is so overdone that it's bordering on a level of repetition. Invisigoth
on the other hand, is one of the more imaginative variations in the X-Files
lexicon, in part because her ambitions are far more vast than the usual ones we
get for hackers. (It also creates some genuinely funny scenes when Nairn comes
into the world of the Lone Gunmen, who all but drool over her, and she
considers them nothing more than rank amateurs in the cyberworld that she seems
to own.)
The episode also deals with a
skewed perspective in a way that has been rather absent from the series
recently. The AI clearly seems to have a way of defending itself that it is
perhaps more engaging than usual, so when it takes possession of Mulder halfway
through the episode, the sequence that follows is simultaneously one of the
more frightening and funniest of the entire season. Mulder finds himself in a
hospital which is solely populated by geriatric surgeons and nurses that have
to be creations of the numerous pornography views. So watching Mulder being
surrounded by these buxom nurses who try to comfort him each time he loses an
arm is entertaining, and just when you think it can't get any more interesting,
Scully shows up in a kick-ass versions of herself, beats the crap out of the
nurses, without mussing her hair, and then starts the whole interrogation
process all over again.
As if to make the whole thing even
more endearing, there's also an unusual love story in the mix. Typical for the
cyber-version, the designers of this AI reveals that her ultimate plan was to
upload her consciousness onto the Internet, an idea that, given certain trope
in sci-fi, was even more ahead of its time than perhaps even Gibson had in
mind. While one may debate whether it was a genuine attempt at fulfilling her
dream or just a version of suicide when she learned that her lover was dead, it
leads to philosophical concepts that are intriguing, and lead to even greater
amusement when Esther's first cogent act while on-line is to send a message to
the Lone Gunmen.
There are slight flaws in Kill
Switch, to be sure. The setpiece where the AI uses a weapons satellite to
destroy Nairn's shipping container house is one of the more suspenseful bits of
the episode, but it gets repeated once to often, and its never really explained
why the AI would kill itself off in such a fashion. And the last sequence in
the trailer park in Nebraska
seems a little too pushing for a
sequel then I would've been comfortable with. (It still would've probably been
better than the Gibson-Maddox follow-up we eventually got, but we'll worry
about that in Season 7.) But overall, this is one of the more entertaining
episodes of Season 5, a story with verve and energy and ideas. It says
something about the series that these guest writers had a better idea of what
X-Files stood for than some of the actual people currently on staff did, but
that's more of a creative quibble than any particular problem with the episode
itself. Now, why couldn't they have gotten someone like Richard Matheson or
Harlan Ellison to write an episode or two?
My score: 4. 25 stars.
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