Written by Greg Walker
Directed by Terrence O'Hara
Oh my, this episode is awful. Not because the effects are bad, or because
the idea is weak, it's mainly because the writing is so godawful lazy. It's the kind of excuse you could
expect from a first time writer for this series - God knows we've had more than
our fair share of those in the past - but at least those writers were
attempting to come up with something different or original in the past.
Surekill is an episode that reads like a writer whose saying: "The X-Files
isn't going to be around much longer, let me try and get a screen credit here
for a better, newer show." And that's what Greg Walker seems to be doing
here - this is the TV equivalent of a resume. Except its hard to imagine what
kind of series would hire a writer based on this.
The teaser is at least intriguing,
in that it seems to set up a killing inside a police station that seems tense
and has energy, even if its the equivalent of a locked room mystery. But from
then on, its straight downhill. We learn that the murders are being committed
by a man who has the power to see through walls. X-ray vision is such a
laughable idea that even Scully seems embarrassed to be suggesting it, and
Doggett openly mocks it, and then the idea is quick to dismiss the whole
concept. Even that gimmick might have some imagination if given the proper
X-Files spin, but Walker doesn't
even try. The only power he seems to
have is the ability to see through walls. And what does our X-File do with it?
He uses it to shoot drug dealers and spy on this woman who he has a crush on.
DC Comics should be embarrassed that this is what they used to come up with it.
No, what the writer seems
interested in doing is trying to use this concept to come up with a traditional
crime procedural. That would be forgivable, except he uses even less imagination to figure out how to
use the characters. The people behind this are the Cooper brothers, both
previous criminals. The brother who actually has the power to see through walls barely utters a
word of dialogue throughout the entire episode. The other brother is played by
Michael Bowen, and if you saw the villains he would play in other series like Lost and Breaking Bad, then really there's nothing else I need to say about
him. Walker's idea of giving him a
personality quirk is making him legally blind, which doesn't even begin to
explain how he manages to do half the things his character does in this
episode. The only remaining character with any dialogue worth a damn is the
secretary, who naturally turns out to be the woman who has been stealing from
the company, who one brother has been sleeping with, and the other brother has
a crush on. She's a cliché of every femme fatale we've seen in a better TV
series, except there's nothing about her that's worthy of killing or being
killed for. When Dwight is ultimately murdered because his brother loves Tammi,
it's the most thudding anticlimax the show could come up with. It seems to
hearken back to characters that we saw in the first season that were just there
to be devices of the plot. We're in the eighth season, boys; there's absolutely
no excuse for this kind of thing now.
This entire episode just makes us
wonder what the hell the show is trying to do. The series was supposed about to
search for the Mulder, we're now a third of the way through the season, and
nary a job has been done. And if this is the kind of MOTW were going to be
getting now, the kind of episode that even last year would've had less of an
excuse for being created, then really this is a cry for help. Doggett and Scully are given practically
nothing to do within this entire episode, and really the dialogue's so bad, you
wish they wouldn't try and say it. Doggett's line where he says that Randall
could maybe see into her heart is
something you'd expect of a 70s soap opera, not this show, not now. The eighth season has been erratic, but at
least with Doggett's arrival, there have been occasionally jolts and shocks to
the system. Surekill takes all that energy and drives it into a ditch. Where it
will remain for much of the next few episodes.
My score: 1 star.
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