I Saw Elvis In A Potato Chip Once 6 - The X-Files 1.06 - Shadows

It's back to the adventures of Mulder and Scully and things that go bump in the night...

Episode 1.06 - "Shadows"

It's almost as if the makers of "The X-Files" have been thumbing through a battered copy of "The Junior Guide to the Paranormal" and thinking "...right, we've done UFOs and alien abductions and Bigfoot - what's next - ooohhh poltergeists!...". So what we get in episode six is a perfectly serviceable but incredibly generic "ghost" story that would only just have passed muster in an early 80s episode of "Tales of the Unexpected".

In fact it's so generic that within a few seconds of the start of the cold open when the glass paper weight moved, I immediately thought "Okay, so this is going to be either a ghost or telekinesis". Admittedly I did then think the writers had wrong-footed me when our hapless heroine was jumped by thugs at the cashpoint and then *they* wound up dead in a dumpster - but that quick twist is probably the only time the episode surprised me.

The real weirdness lies in the acting of all the supporting cast. I mean seriously - why is *everyone* behaving so oddly? If it was meant to heighten the atmosphere and the spookiness, then it failed, because all I kept seeing were strange affected performances. Firstly there's mysterious black guy in the morgue with his mono-syllabic delivery and dead-behind-the eyes stare. Then we get the matronly secretary and her passive-aggressive treatment of poor Lauren and to top it all off her deceased boss's partner goes from concerned colleague to serial killer in ten seconds flat (okay so he is the eventual bad guy, but it's bloody strange). That's without mentioning the old guy at the graveyard who looks a bit like the Cryptkeeper on a good day and Lauren's new boss at the very end being extremely forceful (way to inspire your new staff). It's all very peculiar.

The one bright spark is medical examiner Ellen Bledsoe, played by the late Lorena Gale (who I recall from "The Chronicles of Riddick". She's delightfully deadpan and sarcastic and definitely not in the mood to take any kind of crap from two wet behind the ears FBI agents who want to prove a dead guy still walks the Earth.

Things move along at a leisurely pace until we get to the confrontation between Lauren, the villains sent to do her in and whatever it is that's protecting her. The flashing lamps, thunder and lightning, fake blood and destruction of the living room are all a bit 1970s Hammer Horror and over the top, but it's worth it for Mulder's jaw-hitting-the-floor reaction when he bursts through the door to see the bad guy suspended in mid-air. Of course Scully doesn't arrive in time to see a damn thing.

To be fair there are some mildly interesting things going on, even after the denouement of the levitating knife trick and the reveal of the hidden floppy disk (which Scully misses once again because of a conveniently locked office door). We still don't get a definitive answer to the question of whether Howard Graves is really doing all this or if it's actually Lauren's latent mutant abilities coming to life because of all the stress she's under (I think I've read too many X-Men comics...). The problem is this is all surrounded by such a join-the-dots plot that you can predict exactly where its going to go next. Even Mulder and Scully's motivations seem to be on autopilot, as they take their default paranormal / rational positions - although for once Scully's insistence on Graves faking his own death and being in league with Lauren seem more far fetched than her colleagues wild theories.

Other thoughts and facts:

• Did people really still get  physical pay-checks in the 90s? I started work in 1984 and even then it was an electronic bank transfer.
• It's a clever trick Mulder pulls with his glasses and the finger print. Very smooth.
• I can't help but think that the other cases of "internal strangulation" that Mulder mentions would have been more interesting than this one. 
• How come the regular cops didn't think of looking at the camera footage from the cash machine? Shouldn't that have been the first thing they did? It's a lucky break that the thugs grabbed Lauren in full view.
• I'm not sure why Scully decides to tease Lauren with the whole "have you seen these men before?" routine. She also puts an awful lot of faith in a burry smudge that only *might* be another person in a photo. Sometimes she seems to wilfully ignore things right in front of her just so she can remain the paranormal sceptic.
• Being able to magically enhance a grainy surveillance image  - that's an X-file on its own.
• Lauren is a brave woman investigating the noise in her apartment. After all she's been through I'd have been a gibbering wreck.
• Elvis is alive ! I knew it. Apparently David Duchovny can't stand him.
• It's actually quite nice to see our pair doing some real FBI work with interrogations and statement taking, followed by a confrontation with those CIA-ish people conducting a bigger investigation into corporate espionage and  suspected terrorist arms shipments. It's almost an episode of NCIS: Los Angeles!

Overall all then this case was not particularly exciting, nor particularly frightening - and the real world terrorist elements seemed slightly shoe-horned in. It's a bit of a confused jigsaw. Maybe it would have been a bit more interesting if they'd gone down the route of the recipients of Howard Grave's organs being possessed, or Lauren turning out to be the reincarnation of his dead daughter. I'd consider it a bit of a step-up from "The Jersey Devil", but only just - and that's purely because there of the supposed paranormal elements.

Onwards...