X-Files Episode Guide: Brand X

Written by Steven Maeda & Greg Walker

Directed by Kim Manners

This one is a mixed bag, to say the least. Here are some of the things that Brand X does right. It has a sense of timeliness that the X-Files generally lacks, dealing with an issue that was very relevant at the time, especially considering that the movie 'The Insider' had just gotten a slew of Oscar nominations for a variation on the same subject. (On a side note, it's also fairly daring for the series to finally do an episode on the key brand of cigarettes on the series - Morley - and not even mention are old friend the Smoking Man). It gives Skinner something to do instead of growling behind a desk - indeed, after  spending most of Season 7 with him making only cameos, to have an episode where he goes from being chewed out by his superior to fighting for his favorite agent's life, and actually doing something to save him almost seems like overcompensation. It's good to see 'Saw' criminal mastermind Tobin Bell not doing a dramatic turn where he seems to be hamming it up, and the most imposing thing we ever see him doing is about to light a cigarette. And after years of dealing with government conspiracies to little avail, its also interesting to see the series finally take on a corporate conspiracy, and see that armies of lawyers can be just as unnerving as the Syndicate.

The major problem, however, with this episode is that while it has all the elements of good story, it has a great deal of difficulty putting it all together. There are some good ideas in play - a corporate whistleblower is killed not by the company that he might be financially damaging to, but by the research that he was responsible for managing. There's the idea that the tobacco beetles that seem to be part and parcel of North Carolina are actually the cause of the deaths that seem to be part of this. And the idea that the most damaging thing about this X-File turns not to be murderers but rather second-hand smoke has a kind of clever twist to it. Unfortunately, when you try to put this together in an actual plot, it doesn't hold up as well, even by the admittedly slim standards of The X-Files. One could see how Dr. Scobie got infected - he was monitoring the focus group that was the cause of so much death, and that kind of exposure might have been enough to kill him. One could almost see how that might have led to Darrell Weaver's neighbor passing away -  we don't know how long he lived there. but he might have been there at least a couple of weeks. But Mulder is only exposed to Weaver for a matter of minutes, and somehow he gets enough of a dose to be nearly  fatal. And other people who are involved with the project - Dr. Voss in particular - never seem to be sick at all. It's a big enough hole that you could miss in the fear for Mulder's life, but it doesn't seem to hold up nearly as well.

You get the feeling that this is an episode that Walker and Maeda, who, big surprise were writing their first script for the series in Brand X, could've corrected if they'd had at least one more draft. There are a lot of good ideas in the story - including the idea that Morley was actually trying to do something good in genetically engineering  a safer cigarette - but a lot of its overshadowed by the amount of gore and bugs in the story. Now by the comparison of some of the stories in the canon, this isn't a very gory tale, but there are also a lot of bugs involved, and as is often the case when the X-Files traffic in insects they don't seem to add very much. We never get a clear idea how in engineering the cigarettes they made the bugs this effervescent, and instead the writers tend to traffic in the level of gore that we see instead. And the climax of the story, where Skinner holds Weaver at gunpoint seems anticlimactic because we never seem to get a clear explanation as to why, after nearly two minutes of Weaver saying Skinner's not going to shoot him, he does it anyway, and somehow that's enough to get him in the hospital where Scully manages to figure out how to save Mulder's life. Though admittedly, there is a nice level of irony that having been infected by tobacco, nicotine is what ends doing the job.

There are so many elements in this story that work, its especially disappointing that Brand X turns out to be yet another in a long line of mediocrities for Season 7.  Looking at everything that was good about, its a shame this is another episode that's basically smoke and mirrors.

My score: 2.5 stars.