Case 07, File 03: Hungry

AKA: The Adventures Of Sharkboy

By Season Seven, a show like The X-Files will have its formula down to a science, one which the audience can practically set their watch to. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the fun of a show like The X-Files is seeing what interesting or engaging stories they can tell within that framework. Still, it's occasionally nice to see them turn the entire premise, and normal way of telling an episode's story, on its head.

Our episode kicks off with a guy in south California pulling up to a fast food drive-thru very late and being a complete asshole when the worker tells him it's closed. He then gets pulled in through the drive-thru window and gets killed. No loss there, but a few days later, as one of the fast food place's employees (named Robert Roberts, or Rob) shows up for work, a handsome FBI agent named Mulder and his gorgeous partner, Scully, show up to investigate.

Turns out the dude who got killed had his brain sucked out through a hole in his skull and eaten, and also had a button from the fast food place's Friday promotion on him. The only guy missing his button is a shady looking motherfucker named Derwood, and Rob goes home after listening in on Mulder and Scully's conversation...where his uniform is blood covered and soaking in the tub to try and wash it. So yeah, he's the murderer, which is why we're following him around.

But Mulder shows up to tell him that Derwood has a criminal record, and also to check on the fact that Rob was the one who closed up on Friday, but nothing comes of that and Rob gets rid of his bloody uniform and everything seems fine...except there's a weird guy watching his apartment building. After getting a call from his insurers mental health professional (a fast food joint providing health insurance with mental health coverage is the least realistic thing in this episode and I'm including the brain-eating shark person) and trying to control himself with help from a...self help tape? Rob loses control and heads outside to kill the guy watching his apartment.

The next morning Derwood shows up at Rob's apartment and tells him he knows Rob killed the guy, showing him that he has a bottle of pills from the fast food joint that belong to Rob and which have a bloody fingerprint on them, whoops. Since he's got some primo blackmail material, he wants Rob to pay him off. Rob's natural response is to break into Derwood's house to try and find the pills, but when Derwood comes home, Rob pulls out his fake teeth, hair and ears, to reveal himself to look like a creepy shark person and kills Derwood.

My god, who are those stunningly attractive FBI agents? Where's their TV show?

Having now killed three people in less than a week, Rob decides he needs to visit that therapist his insurance told him to go check out and she thinks, based on what he says about eating brains without mentioning the brains part, she gives him an Overeaters Anonymous card. He then gets a visit from Mulder and Scully who tell him Derwood is missing and mention the fact that the initial victim had a shark tooth where his brain was sucked out. Weird that they would tell him that, but Mulder basically knows he did it by now.

Realizing he can't keeping killing people without getting caught (and you know, it's wrong) he decides to go to that Overeaters Anonymous meeting, but given that he kills his landlady and eats her brain when they get home, it goes about as bad as it could. The next morning he disposes of the body and decides to cover his tracks by smashing up his apartment with Derwood's bat and claim Derwood did it. Mulder and Scully show up and he tells them he saw Derwood cleaning up blood at the fast food place, but Mulder clearly doesn't believe him.

So Rob decides the best thing to do is quit his job and blow town, but the therapist lady comes over and tells him that she knows he killed all those people and that she wants to help him. He responds by revealing himself as a shark person and calling himself a monster, but she just feels sorry for him. But then Mulder and Scully arrive, having found the landlady's body, and Rob makes the uh...odd decision to charge at them, making them shoot him. And thus the episode ends with him telling the therapist that he can't be something he's not as he dies.

Hungry is one of those great episodes that takes what could be a solid but straightforward premise, uses its limitations (Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny were both off filming movies when shooting for this season started) and uses them together to make something really memorable. The series is going to have several major experiments in format changes this season and while they're not all great, this one is probably my favorite, as it's the one that uses its format change to the best effect and to actually achieve some thematic depth.

Aw man, brains on the grill? They're so much better sauteed.

A lot of the credit for this episode working has to go to Rob, both as a character and the actor playing him. Rob Roberts is, in my opinion, one of the better single episodes characters in the series, up there with  Donny Pfaster (and we'll get to him later) or Robert Modell. There's just so many small details that make him feel like a fully realized person, from him listening to a self help tape to him being an extreme neat freak, he feels like a lived in character, a person who is genuinely struggling against his own urges.

Equal credit must be given to the actor, who imbues Rob with a very weird energy. He has to strike a weird balance of sad and dangerous, and he does an overall excellent job. There's a moment where he goes to kill his landlady where he manages to make Rob look like he's genuinely acting against his own will, being compelled to kill her rather than wanting to. But it's nice to see an X-Files villain who's not afraid to look pathetic at other points; He even uses the word "Gee" apparently unironically.

Add in a genuinely unsettling creature design, and we've got probably the best all around monster of the season. I like the segments where they emphasize how much work he does to conceal what he looks like, even if it does raise some questions (how did he not get caught before he learned to do that? Like, as a baby?) but that's not important.

The final step in making this a really great episode is the flipping of the script, involving Mulder and Scully only when they come to talk to our monster, it what gives the episode more time and space to make Rob feel like a fully realized character. It also gives us time to spend with the therapist lady (she'd be on the cutting room floor in a more conventional episode), who is little more than a plot device as a character herself, but once she gets him to the OA meeting, she's mostly just there to tell him he's not a monster, which is a theme the episode kind of tries to explore, but mostly drops in favor of the question of him trying to control himself.

"People keep telling me they don't think I'm a monster, which is nice but uh, I think the sentiment loses something when I literally eat people's brains."

If the episode has a weak spot (aside from the occasional moments where Rob hallucinates brains, which is uh...it's on the wrong side of silly) it's our antagonist, Derwood. He'd probably be fine in a normal episode where he was the red herring, but in an episode with a more morally complex and complicated monster, he's so needlessly antagonistic that he feels like a cartoon. I get that you want to blackmail him, but maybe be a little more careful in how you treat him, you know for a fact he's killed someone.

Season Seven isn't the best season of The X-Files but it has a handful of episodes that I've been looking forward to reviewing basically all series, some because they're good, some because they're bad and some because they're just neat and worth discussing. And Hungry is one of those, an episode I've been looking forward to, because it's a really good episode, that does a good job of showing how interesting the formula can be when you just shift around perspective.

Case Notes:

• The dude in the cold open is treating a fast food worker like shit and thus I am not at all sad when he gets killed. Threatening to get a guy fired because he accidentally forgot to turn off the light (which is, as far as you know, what happened)? Yeah, you can die.
• The fast food mascot in this episode is terrifying.
• He's still acting like a prick when he pulls up, which is probably a one way ticket to getting your food spat in at best.
• It's kind of disconcerting to still be following a non-Mulder nor Scully character after the cold open, in a good way.
• Seeing Mulder and Scully, and their investigation methods, from the other side, is very interesting. I also like watching Rob figure out ways to watch them.
• Despite working at a fast food chain, Rob has a nicer apartment than I've ever had.
• Rob is very bad at covering his tracks but then Mulder is also intuiting stuff from random coincidence, as is his wont.
• I like the methods that Rob uses to hide the fact that he looks like a shark person, but I'm not sure how he got old enough to learn how to do that without being discovered.
• Rob with the shark teeth looks genuinely freaky.
• Scully suspects the ex-con, because that is the logical conclusion.
• I love Mulder basically walking up and telling Rob that he knows he did it, because he's Mulder.
• The slow buildup to the reveal of what Rob actually looks like, both over the course of the episode and over the course of the scene it happens, is really solid.
• I like the subtext of the scene where the therapist tells Rob that he looks fine, especially in context of all the things she mentions being artifice.
• The therapist picking Peter Jennings as her example of the most attractive man in the world is really amusing to me for some reason.
• Mulder using his usual terminology (monster, genetic freak) to refer to Rob to his face, after we've grown to empathize with Rob is a good way of reframing it.
• Rob saying there's no such thing as monster to two people who have fought vampires, werewolves and multiple varieties of ghosts is very funny to me.
• Most of the names in this episode sound very strange (Donald Pankow???) but it just occurs to me that Rob Roberts might be an intentionally made up sounding name.
• Rob describing how good the meat tastes at an overeaters meeting feels like a dick move.
• The brain pulsing inside the bald guy's head is really goofy in a way that kind of kills the tension of the scene.
• I really like Rob's acting in the part where he trashes his own apartment, he's doing it to throw off suspicion but he also seems to be acting out his anger at himself.
• Mulder clearly knows Rob is bullshitting and even Scully looks suspicious.
• I really like Rob's scene with the therapist in his apartment, with Rob trying to rationalize to himself and the therapist reading him like a book.
• The final shot being from Rob's POV is a good way to close the episode.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out because the fast food place paying enough for Rob to afford an apartment that nice is the real fantasy of this episode.

Current Celebrity Watch:

Our cold open victim is played by Chase Hampton, who was a member of the All-New Mickey Mouse Club in the late 80s and was also in a band called The Party which had a very very minor hit in 1991. I have no experience with either so while it's possible there's a massive The Party fanbase I'm unaware of, that's all the info I have.

Also notable is the therapist lady (who IMDB informs me is named Mindy) is played by Judith Hoag. She was recently on Nashville in a major role (a show I've never watched and likely never will) but my readers will probably know her better as April O'Neil in the original 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles moviw

Future Celebrity Watch:

Derwood is played by Mark Pellegrino, who has major roles on everything from 13 Reasons Why and Quantico to, of course, Satan on Supernatural. I still haven't watched it, but if the entire main cast gets cameo on the series before the end, I'll watch the first season or something. Wait, do they actually all appear? I should check that before I make that promise.