"The Jersey Devil" is so typical of why the first season of "The X-Files" is the weakest of the Vancouver seasons and why one could be forgiven for being frustrated with the quality of several of the monster of the week episodes in this season.
The episode lacks any sort of worthwhile characterization aside from the first Mulder porn joke (forgive me if I'm mistaken regarding that) and the dialogue is wildly inconsistent although occasionally fun. The episode's real flaw however is the utterly lazy plotting; beyond just not being a particularly interesting take on the Jersey devil mythology, the plot inexplicably changes course far too many times for a 45 minute episode, and the transitions are not handled well by writer Chris Carter.
This was, of course, the first standalone script by Chris Carter, so I'm not going to be too harsh on him as he certainly did improve later on. Some other stuff worth mentioning: Scully's personal life is explored more here as well and it makes me glad that this didn't become the norm later on in the series and is mostly confined to early episodes, and the direction by Joe Napolitano is actually pretty solid and wasted on a mediocre script by Carter.
4/10
The episode lacks any sort of worthwhile characterization aside from the first Mulder porn joke (forgive me if I'm mistaken regarding that) and the dialogue is wildly inconsistent although occasionally fun. The episode's real flaw however is the utterly lazy plotting; beyond just not being a particularly interesting take on the Jersey devil mythology, the plot inexplicably changes course far too many times for a 45 minute episode, and the transitions are not handled well by writer Chris Carter.
This was, of course, the first standalone script by Chris Carter, so I'm not going to be too harsh on him as he certainly did improve later on. Some other stuff worth mentioning: Scully's personal life is explored more here as well and it makes me glad that this didn't become the norm later on in the series and is mostly confined to early episodes, and the direction by Joe Napolitano is actually pretty solid and wasted on a mediocre script by Carter.
4/10