The X-Files Episode Guide: Orison

Written by Chip Johannessen

Directed by Rob Bowman

One can sort of understand why The X-Files would want to revisit the story of Donnie Pfaster, considering he was something of a loose end, and the show might have felt that they needed to tie it up before they closed up shop. But there are so many problems with Orison almost from start to finish that you want to cry out at the screen: "How could you do this?"

There's the problem of the writer for one thing. Considering that Chris Carter was still with the series, why in God's name would you hand the writing to someone who has never written an episode of the series before. Now I can understand, at least in principle, why Johannessen was chosen. He'd been one of the few writers on the show who had worked on Millennium all three years it was on the air, and considering that Irresistible was one of the complete straight-forward serial killer stories X-Files did, there's a certain logic to it. But from the very beginning, it's very clear that Johannessen didn't do his homework.

 For some reason, Pfaster is in an Illinois prison, though the episode took place in Minnesota, and though we only saw him commit one murder, it was upgraded to five, and now apparently in addition to being a death fetishist, he's something of a cannibal as well.  Because so much of the horror in Irresistible was because of how benign he appeared for much of the episode, to turn him into this monster seems to be an act of hysteria on Johannessen's part, weighing on the more extreme measures of Millennium that the X-Files had done with him. And from this point on, he can't seem to decide how harmless or dangerous Pfaster is supposed to be. It clearly confuses the hell out of Nick Chinlund, who spends much of the episode trying to maintain the banality of the killer we saw once. But that's part of the problem with doing a sequel in the first place: once you see his face, you can't lie to yourself that he's not dangerous.

Orison might have been able to recover from that had they just stuck to the basic nature of what made the episode work so well. But not satisfied with screwing up Pfaster, Johannsen proceeds to do a slapdash version by making it an X-File. Pfaster manages to escape from prison thanks to a trick caused by a murderer who has somehow become the prison chaplain. A chaplain, who because he drilled a hole in his head, is somehow able to hypnotize vast rooms of people into seeing things that aren't dare. How exactly he does this trick is never explained fully by Mulder. Why he does this massive amount of exercise apparently just so he can execute these killers himself, is something that is never explained either, and that's something that just doesn't fit on either of these shows. Scott Wilson is a great actor who does what he can with the role he's been given, but there's very little he can do to make either his character or behavior seem reasonable.

Then there's everything that happens involving Mulder and Scully. In Irresistible, their behavior was measured with sympathy. Here is where Johannsen clearly fails the most. There's the fact that Scully's alarm clock shows '666' prior to when Donnie is at his most dangerous. There's the way that the two of them argue about the presence of God - which never works well on X-Files. And then there's the repeated use of 'Don't Look Any Further', which seems to summarize the entire episodes problems. If it had been used once or even twice, one could've gotten the idea that someone was sending a message. But it shows up at least once an act. By the time it's played on a CD in Scully's apartment right before Donnie is about to kill her, all of the tension that should be in the scene is nearly dissipated by the desire to laugh at the ludicrousness of it.

It's bad enough that Orison is a mess. But by making it at all, it does a lot of damage to what made Irresistible a classic. In the scene where the Reverend is digging the grave which he intends to put Donnie in, Donnie morphs into the devil. Now when that happened in Irresistible, we knew that it was just symbolic for Scully as a way of trying to bring logic to the horror she was undergoing. By having it actually happen, it diminishes Donnie as a character - he's gone from something so benign in appearance to just another monster of the week, and not a particularly good one at that.

But the worst part of all happens when Scully murders Donnie. She's shot a lot of people over the course of the series, but this is the first one where it's clearly not justifiable. Now, I'll admit that it's very well directed, with the lights flickering and utter silence before Scully shoots him dead. But he's clearly surrendered, and is a threat to no one when Scully walks right up to him and pulls the trigger. This turns Scully from one of the great characters and diminishes her a lot. She's now either a person just like Krycek, who can cold-bloodedly kill an unarmed man, or someone who feels that she was being directed by a higher power, which makes her even less respectable, and is even more out of character. And worst of all is the fact that, for all the writer's effort to make him seem like an even bigger monster than last time, he seems as much of a pawn as Scully is - abducted by a reverend, attacked by an escort, and shot dead by the Bureau. And it's not like that there will be any repercussions for this - Scully expresses thirty seconds of angst, and next week she'll be just fine. That makes her seem, in a way, even worse than Pfaster.

We've had some disappointing episodes so far in Season 7 (and unfortunately we'll have a lot more) but there are very few as slipshod and poorly done as Orison. It's one of the last sequels X-Files will do, and its the first that makes us really wonder why they had bothered in the first place, considering that it just makes the original look a lot worse.

My score: 1 star.