Case 07, File 05: Rush

AKA: Today's Tom Sawyer Gets High On You

The X-Files is not a show that usually felt the need to borrow from contemporary popular shows (okay, Twin Peaks, but that's the one exception). As popular as it was, The X-Files was and is a kind of weird show, with a weird tone and its own style. Adding in elements from popular other genres wouldn't suit it well, and The X-Files' style would suit those other shows even less. So despite the popularity of high school set shows in the 90s, even supernatural high school shows, The X-Files usually steered clear. Usually.

Our episode kicks off with a trio of teenagers, Tony, Max and Chastity, hanging out in the woods while Tony is nervous about joining the gang(?) and Max being obtuse about what's going to happen. A cop shows up and tries to arrest Tony after Max and Chastity disappear, but then something appears and hits the cop with his flashlight so hard that his head explodes. That seems kind of odd, so Mulder and Scully are called in by the police, who think Tony did it.

But Tony denies it, claims he doesn't know what happens, and Mulder believes him, because he's Mulder. And after a visit from Chastity, the murder weapon turns up missing and the police's case against Tony is shot. Meanwhile Max passes a test in under 60 seconds without sitting down and then Mulder and Scully go visit Max and Chastity, who refuse to talk but Mulder does notice that Max is the sheriff's son. That seems like it's going to be more important than it is.

So after examining where the murder weapon went missing from, they find a weird substance on the floor and a weird blur on the security camera, which Chuck runs through a thing on his computer to discover it's the same colors as the high school where Max and Tony go. Meanwhile, Max takes Tony on a drive and crashes the car but manages to get them both out of the car before it crashes. So that's a little weird.

Back at school the next day, Tony is freaked out by all this and is thinking of bailing, but Chastity tells him that's not really an option for him anymore. As if to prove it, Max gets a bad grade on the test because he cheated (which, you know, fair) and Max responds by killing the teacher without anyone seeing him touch him.  Mulder suspects Max is responsible, but can't figure out how he did it, and it seems unlikely since Max collapses out in the parking lot. Meanwhile, Chastity heads back out into the woods, followed by Tony, who finds a cave with a weird light that make him do the jerking head effect from Jacob's Ladder.

"Can you see this blur Scully? I think it's about to start playing Charmless Man."

So Mulder finally has his theory that he goes and tells Max and his father (the sheriff, remember): Max somehow got super speed and has been using it to kill people. And his theory seems to be supported by the fact that Max's body is breaking down and also by the fact that Chastity uses super speed to sneak Max out. Max's dad goes to check out Max's room and finds the flashlight and also the shoes he's been shredding by running fast and realizes Mulder was right. Max returns home and attacks him, but Tony, who has been granted super speed by the weird light in the cave, intervenes and stops him.

Hokay, home stretch: Mulder and Scully realize that Max et. al. got their powers from the woods and head out to stop them, while Max and Chastity go to get another powerup from the weird light, but they're beaten there by Max who tries to kill them. But Chastity decides she's gonna shoot Max but also tell Tony she can't go back to being slow and lets the bullet kill her too. And thus the episode ends with Tony in the hospital and the county deciding to fill the cave with the weird light in with concrete. Next best thing to taking off and nuking the site from orbit.

Rush isn't a terrible episode, it's a mediocre one with a couple of great sequences and the potential to be a great one, which makes it feel worse than it is. Its biggest issue is just a slightly weak and unfocused script. Despite the opening paragraph, I don't know how much it was intentionally cribbing from teen dramas of the day and how much it felt like that, but there is enough conceptually to make a teen drama work, but it gets utterly buried in the structure of being an X-Files episode.

I mean, take the character relationships, which feel like they should be the core of the story but keep getting muddled. The initial relationship seems to be focused on Tony and Max, which is a good starting point, but then they spend most of the episode apart, except for one moment where Max crashes the car. I wanted them to get more of a relationship, give us an idea of what Tony sees in this group, why he's willing to cover up a murder to get to be in it, other than the pretty obvious fact that he has a crush on Chastity.

He's jerking around mysteriously, but it could just be religious, this is rural Virginia after all.

The episode begins to lean more heavily on Chastity in the third act, but she's bordering on a non-character, more of a vague desire for Tony. Her characterization changes from scene to scene; Initially she seems into it, then she seems like she's forced into being part of the group but then when Max is in the hospital she sneaks him out, but then she's really scared of him but THEN she doesn't want to keep living without the super speed? Her character is a complete mess and honestly, the episode would have probably have benefited from cutting her entirely and refocusing the plot on Max and Tony.

But what would really help is if the episode could figure out what it's actually about. The script makes various gestures at making the super speed a metaphor for peer pressure or drug use, but it doesn't follow through on any of those metaphors in a real way, and it switches metaphors in the third act from peer pressure to drugs. The closest it comes to really following through on the drug use metaphor is by talking about how much Max and Chastity need their speed to live, but we don't get a lot of the sense of what that means, and it's mostly just a way of getting Chastity's sad ending. A greater focus on Max could have made it feel more like a drug and more focus on Tony could make it work more as a metaphor for peer pressure, but the episode doesn't really commit to either and doesn't really do either well.

Which is a shame, because I think there's a lot of potential in the story and the episode as a whole has a couple of absolutely killer sequences. I like the way it's managed to find unique ways to make super speed a frightening power to have (Mulder explaining that force equals mass times acceleration always stuck with me) and the scene where Max kills his teacher in the lunch room is really solid, a great use of the power to be scary. The series still knows how to make unique use of the concepts it comes up with.

Also this is a really neat shot and I kind of just wanted to put it up here.

And that's the thing, there are moments where I can see the great episode this mediocre one nearly was peaking out from underneath it. The final confrontation between Max, Tony and Chastity has a couple great character beats in isolation, but they're wasted cause they're mostly unsupported by the rest of the episode. Max telling Tony that all he ever wanted was for Tony to be his friend would land a lot better if we got more of a sense of a relationship between the two of them. Eh, maybe they were worried it would be too homoerotic.

Look, we're in the twilight of The X-Files at this point, and even though we still have three seasons, a spin off, a movie and then two more seasons in front of us, almost all of the truly great episodes are behind us. Maybe I should lower my expectations a bit, or lean more heavily on the fact that, no matter how mediocre an episode is, it's still The X-Files and I still enjoy watching it. But that smacks of being too nice. I love this show, and I enjoy this episode, but that doesn't get the writers off the hook for writing a mediocre hour of TV.

Case Notes:

• Just the cold open is reminding me how much of the super speed in this episode lives in the edit.
• Kid, if you think something bad has happened to someone, maybe don't go picking up random stuff and getting your fingerprints on it.
• The effect of the cop with his caved in skull is pretty great.
• Scully really doesn't want this crime to be more than some kid beating a guy to death, same as the Sheriff. Neither of them seem to be appropriately worried about how he did it, which seems like an oversight.
• Mulder says he knows what the kid is going through living in a small town, but I've never considered Martha's Vineyard to be that much of a small town. I guess being on an island might do that.
• I like Scully telling Tony that he's not gonna get a fairer hearing than Mulder. She's basically saying "He's nuts enough to believe you kid."
• Mulder guessing that it's poltergeists is nice, I like that he didn't jump immediately to the right answer.
• The teacher telling Max that he doesn't care who his father is, is a really clunky way to tell us that his father is important.
• Max is really really bad at covering up that he's got super powers, at least pretend to do it normally.
• I actually unironically love Mulder noting that Max and the Sheriff have the same last name, I like Mulder being observant.
• I'm kind of impressed that a VCR in 1999 could do frame by frame analysis without catching on fire.
• The scene with Tony and his mom is some deeply clunky exposition to give us some frame for Tony and his struggles. It works by that metric but it feels very clunky.
• I actually kind of dig the scene where Max crashes the car for no reason, it's a very teenage way of showing off his powers.
• Wait, is Chuck gonna be a more consistent character now?
• Chastity is an under developed character, but the actress is trying to do what she can with the material. It's not a lot, but it's not nothing.
• The fact that Max's super speed is killing him is a nice wrinkle in his power set, as is the fact that it's shredding his sneakers.
• The "Super Speed as Drug" allegory comes out of nowhere in the 3rd act and adds very little, especially since we were already rocking the "People with super speed as a gang" allegory, which isn't necessarily stronger but is better established.
• Max's bedroom is a little too much "Angry teenager" for my taste. Also, there's band posters all over the walls and not one for Rush? Come on props department, easy joke.
• Why did Max keep the flashlight in his bedroom instead of like, running it to the ocean or something?
• Tony is the character who gets so much buildup in the beginning of the episode, it's weird that the back half of the episode focuses on Max.
• Chastity deciding to die at the same time as Max makes very little sense, especially since she seemed unhappy with her powers, but whatever the episode is over.
• As always these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can afford to live into the next decade.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Max is played by Scott Cooper, a guy who never made it super far as an actor, but transitioned to writing and directing in 2009 and did pretty well. His first directorial feature was Crazy Heart, the movie that got Jeff Bridges an Oscar.

The actress who plays Chastity is Nicki Aycox, who has had a handful of lead roles on some shows I've never heard of (notably something called Dark Blue?) but I'm mostly here to mention the fun coincidence that she was one of the victims in The X-Files: I Want To Believe. So that's fun.

And finally Tony's mom is played by Ann Dowd, who already had minor roles on some well received shows like Nothing Sacred, but has recently been doing even better, with major roles in The Leftovers and The Handmaid's Tale.