Case 05, File 04: Detour

AKA: Mulder and Scully vs. Florida Man

The X-Files was, for the first 5 years of its existence, shot in British Columbia, which is where a lot of stuff is shot (more than you might expect, frankly). And that makes sense: British Columbia already looks like (broadly speaking) a lot of different locations around the United States, and with the right shot choice and editing, it can look enough like many more. But there are limits to its powers and one of the places it absolutely cannot play is Florida.

Our story opens with a pair of surveyors out in the Florida forest who get attacked by an unseen (literally) enemy. After some theme songs, we return to the same stretch of Florida forest where a father and son are going hunting, when the father is attacked by the same unseen enemy. We then join our intrepid heroes on their most harrowing assignment yet: Going to a team building retreat. So of course when they're stopped by a roadblock looking for the missing father, Mulder jumps on the opportunity to go check it out.

Later that evening, Mulder having spent the entire evening on the internet (like a nerd) and discovers that no animal in America will attack an armed adult when there's easier prey available and starts to get suspicious that this is an actual X-File, so he heads back to the family whose father got attacked earlier. Good thing too, since the invisible assailants lure the mother of the family outside and sneak in to attack the kid, Mulder showing up just in time.

So with invisible assailants, leaving muddy human footprints and attacking people, Mulder decides this is indeed a case and heads out to the woods with a local cop named Michelle (who was in previous scenes but I failed to mention) and a tech guy armed with a thing that lets you see in Predator vision and head out to find the invisible monster. This goes about as well as you expect, as the first time they run across one, they group separates and Michelle gets taken by the monster.

The cut to this is my favorite edit in the entire episode.

So after some arguing about whether they should go searching for Michelle or head back and finally decide to head back to the trail head. But the creatures have been stealing Michelle's trail markers and they get lost. Mulder is attacked, but Scully manages to save him, while the tech guy runs off and is killed. See, this is why you should stay with Scully. That night Scully and Mulder have a conversation about their mortality and Scully sings a song. Badly. It's actually really funny.

Anyhoo, in the morning, Scully falls into a pit, encountering all the victims (minus the tech guy) who are still alive and also one of the monsters, but Mulder hops down to join her and she kills it. Before they can figure out how to get out, they're found by the two other FBI Agents they were going to the team building retreat with. Everyone gets out alive and Mulder muses that he thinks the monsters were descended from Spanish Conquistadors but also that they might attack anyone who went into the forest. Suddenly afraid for Scully, Mulder bolts back to their hotel but finds her fine and they drive off...but it turns out one of the monsters was under the bed! DUN DUN D-oh wait the episode is over.

Detour is an example of The X-Files doing what it does best, taking an interesting concept, building a solid script out of it and making a good hour of television. It's not the best episode of the series or season but it's a great example of what the show can do when everything lines up properly. It also manages to deal with, in a small way, the fallout from the Season premier, even if we're still moving just a little bit too fast to properly deal with it.

About 80% of X-Files fanfics start this way. The other 20% it's either Skinner or Krycek at the door.

The way they deal with it may be small, but it's also part of the best scene in the episode, the scene where an injured Mulder and Scully have a conversation in the woods. The series was always good at wringing genuinely emotional moments out of small conversations between its leads and this is one of the better examples, finally addressing Scully's feelings of anger and helplessness from when she had cancer. It reminds me a lot of the conversation on the rock from Quagmire, in a good way, primarily in the way it helps contextualize the events of the episode into a larger character arc. Also it contains Scully singing Joy to the World. Love it. Love everything about it.

As for the monster, they're exactly what you'd expect when you hear the sentence "Invisible people from Florida," but they work really well. The vague outlines and fast moving eyes in the darkness are easy, but they're also very effective, and they create a lot of tension with just a shot of empty forest and some mysterious leaf rustling. I quite like the sudden shot of the eyes just staring at Scully in the cave, and I'd be lying if I didn't say the scene in the house doesn't still get me a little bit. Again, the monster isn't that complicated, nor that original (although the specifics, like the fact that they evolved from the Conquistadors, are pretty interesting) but it works really well in execution.

If the episode has problems, they're most little irritations. I feel like more work could have been done with the secondary characters. None of the characters get much screen time, so we don't get much of a feel for them as people; Michelle gets the most screen time, and it's barely anything, so all we get is that she's "Good in the forest," and most of the rest don't even get that much. And I guess the ending is a little weak. Not that everyone lives, but the fact that the episode ends, it resolves its plot and gets its explanation and then just...keeps going for a few minutes. Scully gets stalked in her hotel room to no consequence. I honestly feel like the original script ran a bit short and they just had to make up for it.

"Oh hey. No it's cool, I'm just going downstairs for some Oreos."

Oh and the Florida thing. I promise not to harp on this (I'm gonna try to keep this paragraph 4 lines or less) but honestly, the thing looks nothing like Florida and it's very distracting. I don't know why they decided they needed to keep it Florida, the plot could have worked just as well in like, Maine or Washington, but I guess they wanted to check off every state in the union. And hey, 4 lines.

But those are all nitpicks. The episode as a whole cooks most of the time and slows down when it needs to. It's our first proper Monster of the Week episode of the season (a season that is, if we're being frank, pretty light on Monster of the Week episodes) and it's a great note to open on. I don't think my opinion will be too controversial when I say that this is a really solid episode.

Which is good, because my next opinion will probably be very controversial.


 Case Notes:

• I promise not to harp on it, but while Canada has done an admirable job filling in for various parts of the US, this episode is where it hits its limit, it looks absolutely nothing like Florida.
• The conversation between the two surveyors is a little blunt, but its gets our theme of sadness at the death of the ecosystem across really fast.
• "This is where they're gonna put the Blockbuster" Well the forest outlasted THAT joke.
• I'd forgotten that this episode opens with the implication that one of the surveyors stuck his spike right into one of the monsters and the monster just didn't react until it attacked him.
• Having a patch of ground or trees suddenly snap open to reveal they're eyes is a cheap scare, but it works pretty solidly and they don't overdo it too much, so I'll forgive it.
• The conversation between the father and son at the beginning might as well be them turning to the camera and saying "Hey, the monsters in this episode are gonna be humans with better hunting abilities."
• I really cannot overstate my love for Mulder and Scully sitting in the back of the car looking deeply uncomfortable.
• Who sent Mulder and Scully to a team building exercise by the by? Like, maybe they need to communicate better with the wider Bureau, but Mulder and Scully can basically read each other's minds at this point.
• I'd forgotten that Mulder wasn't even assigned to this case, he just falls ass backwards into it. Mulder just attracts this shit.
• Mulder is looking up animal information on the "Information Encyclopedia," website. Oh the 90s.
• The sudden pair of glowing red eyes in the darkness is much scarier than them suddenly flicking open on the ground.
• Mulder showing up at the kid's house right as he's crawling out the doggy door is pretty convenient, but whatever.
• I do like the scene with Mulder telling about the tracks, although the kid watching The Invisible Man was also a little convenient.
• There's a lot of exposition getting dropped when Mulder and the team head into the woods, but it also sets up our theme nicely and I like the heat signature thing they get.
• I am very amused by the bit where the Infra-red guy says that we can get blinded by nature and Scully assumes that it's Whitman when it's actually When Animals Attack. Also: Vertical Integration.
• The chase scene is pretty solid, although you'd think Mulder would remember what he said about "Divide and Conquer" and not split up, given that he'd said it like 20 minutes earlier. Come on.
• I wish they'd done more with "Mulder needs to learn how to communicate," it could have made the conversation in the woods after Michelle gets taken better.
• Mulder tries to tie this into the mothman. Nah-uh episode, I'm not letting you get away with Jersey Deviling another cool cryptid, this does not count.
• I get the logic of Glasser running away, but I would want to be closer to the two trained law enforcement agents with guns, personally.
• Mulder makes a crack about how lucky you are if you get 50 years with a good head of hair. Well Duchovny is 58 and his hair is still going strong, so he's very lucky.
• Scully singing Joy to the World is always going to be a classic X-Files moment.
• Mulder has healed enough to stand up and go looking for Scully in the morning, cause the episode is done with him being injured. I'm not complaining mind, his being injured has run its course of usefulness to the story.
• Mulder and Scully stacking bodies to escape? Funny. The two boring FBI Agents rescuing them before they can escape? Even funnier.
• I'd forgotten that everybody lives in this episode. 
• I like Mulder's little logic chain to why the monsters in this episode evolved from the Spanish Conquistadors, and not just because it involves Latin.
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Current Celebrity Watch:

Stretching the definition a bit is Glasner being played by Anthony Rapp, who originated the role of Mark in the broadway show RENT, as well as in the movie (I have no idea how he scheduled this, he played Mark all the way through to 1998). I detest RENT in general and Mark in particular (for reasons I'm not going into here) so I'll focus on his other famous roles: He's played a main character in another Broadway show If/Then (which I have not seen) and is a main character on Star Trek Discovery.

Also the woman who plays Michelle, Colleen Flynn who had gotten an Emmy nomination 2 years earlier for a single episode role in ER. She appeared in a lot of stuff afterwards, but never got a role that was stable, which is a shame.

Audio Observations:

Scully sings Joy to the World by Three Dog Night in this episode. I have nothing to add to that except that I love it and that it has thoroughly supplanted the original in my brain. They were originally going to have her sing I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams incidentally. I think they made the right choice.