Somewhere in Canada a power line repair man is killed by a bee as the Children of the Corn look on.
Back in our current timeline, Mulder needs a magical alien to heal his mother, but the matter is complicated by an unstoppable alien bounty hunter who never runs. And I don't mean runs away, I mean, he never goes faster than a mildly brisk walking pace.
Okay, I remember way back when we first met the alien bounty hunter and he just had this small spike device that he shoved into shapeshifting aliens' necks and it killed them. It was literally just a little spring-action stabbing spike. But now you see, it's actually an amazing alien artifact of unimaginable killing power.
You can't kill a shapeshifty alien without one of these spikes. Don't bother trying to make your own, it has to be a special alien spike.
Yes, that's how lazy and silly our alien mythos stories have managed to become. Mulder's mother has been hiding a little alien spike weapon in her summer home on the lake for 30 years. That's her big secret.
I mean, are they aliens or are they vampires? It wasn't enough of a juvenile stretch in story telling that they could only die by being stabbed in one specific spot, like some ridiculous creature from a campfire tale, now it's gotta be done with a magical alien spike made of Uranium 239.5, forged in the Antares cluster, and blessed by a high priest of Kodos?
What if I cut the alien bounty hunter in two with a katana? Oh what's that, he's filled with magical death virus that's as magical as he is? Well I'm wearing a respirator I bought on Amazon for $34.95 so now that won't work. Do the two halves of his body magically pull themselves back together? How about I torch him with a flamethrower? He can't burn? What if I superheat him with a microwave array and boil all the liquid in his alien body? Do his desiccated remains scoop themselves back together to go find a jug of water to drink?
I can't help but think of all the ways Mulder, or anybody else on Earth if they were so inclined (and they aren't except for Mulder), could murder this alien bounty hunter. I know aliens often have magical biology in science fiction, it's how you work the supernatural into the story. From Who Goes There to Alien to ET, they all have capabilities that defy scientific reason. Yet Scully never chides this alien for breaking the bounds of empirical knowledge like she's constantly chiding Mulder.
Anyway, literally all that happens this episode is that Mulder drives the magical good alien around Canada, while the bounty hunter alien tracks them, and by tracks them, I mean magically knows where they are at all times for no explicable reason rendering the whole running away from him thing seem rather stupid. Oh, and we set up that the pollen is dangerous and the evil aliens are doing something with crops, and that tracks back with the smallpox vaccination and the massive medical records warehouse in the mountains. Why all that made the bee at the beginning of the episode so deadly I don't know.
Why the bounty hunter alien could get stabbed in the neck by Mulder and not die, I also don't know. Why all these people trying to help Mulder uncover the truth never just give him a 15 minute rundown of the entire alien conspiracy, I again do not know. They even call that out in this episode. The alien bounty hunter catches Mulder and is all like, "That stupid magical alien keeps giving you little pieces of the puzzle instead of explaining it all in five minutes as he could have done at any point in your many hours long car rides together." Which is a solid observation on his part. I don't buy his explanation that the magical alien only does this because he's a just a little meaningless cog in a large plan, that doesn't follow any causal relationship, but the point stands. If anybody just wanted Mulder to know, they could tell him everything. Why does he get so much bad help?
Anyway, the alien bounty hunter offers no menace because he's so arbitrarily unbeatable and magic, and also, and this is something I'm really noticing rewatching this series a second time, our heroes take some savage beatings and terrible injuries on the regular and are always fine after. You know the main character isn't going to die and isn't really in danger or else TV Guide would have already tipped you off about it, but we put that fact aside and let ourselves get scared for the hero in like 99% of all television shows and movies we watch. But I'm realizing when the hero is actually shown getting beaten and injured, it suddenly makes the fights lose all tension. Because I've seen them get beaten before, they're not going to die.
It occurs to me there is a bit of a trick to it, to maintaining the danger, and that's to not neuter the violence such that it doesn't worry me any longer than Mulder or Scully may get thrown through a car by a super strong alien or shot repeatedly in the face and chest. If that super strong alien can punch your head clean off, then I'm really worried if he swings at Mulder. The secret is, have Mulder duck. But if it's sort of like a professional wrestling match, then violence itself no longer suggests a lethal threat because you keep seeing the same violence done over and over with no lasting consequences. Whereas a likely lethal blow that just keeps missing maintains that ongoing menace, all it has to do is land and your hero goes splat.
If only our hero was an alien, in that case only a magical spike made by Cthulhu could kill them.
In the end the alien bounty probably kills everybody he wanted to kill, and then he heals Mulder's mother, but only after demanding an explanation from the Smoking Man so the Smoking Man can explain it to the audience. And then after hearing the explanation the alien heals her because he didn't actually need an explanation and was always just going to do what he was told to do.
These mythos episodes aren't as bad as the worst monster of the week episodes, but they are routinely boring and meaningless, and I can definitely see how they weren't everyone's favorite thing about the series back when it first aired.
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