AKA: I Wouldn't Say The Man-Bat's Most Notable Trait Is Patience
Let's be honest, the real test of the Doggett/Scully team up wasn't going to be a Myth Arc episode. As important as they are to the fabric of the show, they aren't a big percentage of any given season and they aren't what kept people coming back. No, for Doggett and Scully to work as the lead pair of the show, they'd have to be able to navigate a Monster of the Week episode. And sure, that's easy to do when the episode is good, but they might also have to navigate some pretty mediocre episodes.
Our story kicks off in Idaho, where a mortician comes home from work and is immediately mauled by a...look, I keep calling him Man-Bat in my notes, I'm gonna just roll with that. Anyway, turns out that's weird, so the FBI sends in our veteran X-Files Agent and our newbie X-Files Agent in to investigate it, but the cops on the scene don't like that the FBI is there, and also keep treating Doggett like he's the one worth taking seriously, instead of Scully.
So our heroes hang around the house a bit, Scully observing some weird stuff, arguing about weirdo explanations and finding regurgitated fingers in the attic (ew). But before they can, an old lady across town gets mauled by the Man-Bat while looking at a photo album. The photo album isn't why she dies, but it's relevant to the investigation. Anyway, after an autopsy, Doggett finds an old newspaper about some hunters catching and killing a Man-Bat, after which most of the hunters went missing.
They check out the dead old lady and find that her daughter's burned body was fished out of the river a couple days ago, and Scully starts thinking that the body is relevant, especially since the daughter had originally disappeared right after the original Man-Bat was killed. Scully brings this idea to the lead cop who calls her a crazy person, but she orders the body exhumed anyway. There they find that the coffin has been dug up and scratched up already. Oh and I guess the lead cop gets killed by the Man-Bat.
At this point, the cops are mad at Scully (not sure why and it ends up not mattering) but Scully is completely convinced that the body is involved so they go and seek out the guy who found the body, only to find out he's the brother of one of the hunters who disappeared, and he wants to be left alone. So they decide to surveil him for a bit, and chat about their respective beliefs, while the Man-Bat does the same thing. Eventually they find him leaving some food on a boat and follow the boat.
Following the boat, they find that the guy's brother (the missing hunter, whose name is Ernie) has been living on an island to avoid the Man-Bat for years, and the dead body was his wife, because the Man-Bat is hunting him and will hunt him forever. Doggett realizes Ernie's brother is in danger and goes to help, but gets attacked by the Man-Bat. Oh and then the Man-Bat attacks the cabin, bypasses Scully and kills Ernie, but Doggett shows back up and he and Scully shoot it a whole bunch. And then the episode ends with them back in DC a few weeks later, with Ernie's brother having gone into hiding and them wondering the Man-Bat is coming for them. Oh and Mulder's still on the spaceship.
I don't blame the series for being in an awkward spot right now. They're late in the game, eight seasons deep (which is almost universally a moment when a show begins to show its age, if it hasn't already), it's down one of its leads and it has to start figuring out how the new dynamic is going to work between its leads. Falling back on a pretty straightforward Monster of the Week plot is understandable, and it doesn't need to be a bad thing, I like straightforward Monster of the Week episodes. That's not really the issue here.
And the dynamic isn't the issue either, not directly. We're very early in Doggett and Scully's partnership and while I maintain that Patrick is a good actor, it's very clear and and Anderson aren't going to have the easygoing back and forth she had with Duchovny, which is fine, I respect the show for not only creating a character who is distinct from Mulder, but also trying to find a different dynamic with Scully (even if that means that a lot of Mulder's plot relevant traits, like his observational abilities and his wild leaps in logic, get shunted off into Scully). It must have been tempting to have the new partner be Mulder-lite, and I like that they didn't do that.
And there is some really good stuff here. A lot of it feels like Anderson working with the script to find organic moments, like how clearly uncomfortable she is giving Mulder's slide show, or how she initially tries talking to Doggett and the cops like they're Mulder and it just bounces off. And Patrick is doing good work too, how he's clearly not super comfortable with the goings on, but trying his hardest to be on board with the hashtag Weird Shit and defer to Scully's wisdom whenever possible. So we've got the two actors, and the writer, feeling out a dynamic and some solid subtext to inform it. Now all we need is a good mystery and monster for them to investigate.
And there is the sticking point, the Man-Bat is just an INCREDIBLY lame villain. It doesn't have to be, The X-Files has accomplished a lot more with a lot less, but in practice the thing just fucking sucks. The design and execution look incredibly cheap, like a bad Buffy monster (and I liked Buffy fine, but it has a very different style than The X-Files) and it just doesn't look good in motion (it keeps feeling like its hopping instead of swooping). It honestly feels more like a Season 1 monster, but at least in Season 1 they might have had the good sense to keep the thing off screen. It's also a very flat antagonist as monsters go, in a weird void where it's not quite an animal like the Flukeman, but doesn't really have a personality either.
The mystery is also kind of lame in a way that's hard to categorize. I don't think the broad strokes are necessarily bad; The mystery surrounding how the Man-Bat chooses its victims is actually pretty good, but it gets resolved pretty early and there aren't any strong secondary characters to hold our interest (Ernie, the guy living on the island, is conceptually interesting, but he only shows up when there's 5 minutes left, and the lead cop is just a dickbag). It doesn't help that it feels that there's a beat or two missing in the story; Scully and Doggett shoot the Man-Bat a whole bunch and then the episode just brings it in for a close, I feel like there needed to be another moment in there. Or at least something that made Doggett feel like he's confronted the weirdness of the X-Files universe for the first time. I want some existential horror dammit.
I'm willing to give The X-Files some leeway in figuring out where it's going, it's bordering on a completely different show with Doggett in the cast, but that leeway will only extend so far; Way back in Season 1, the series was spitting out great episodes as early as the 4th episode, and given how the quality dipped at the end of Season 6 (and through Season 7), it's easy to get to want to write Season 8 (and thus 9) off when it takes them a few episodes to find their feet. I'm obviously not going to do that in these reviews, but the initial audience for the series might not have been so kind.
So our heroes hang around the house a bit, Scully observing some weird stuff, arguing about weirdo explanations and finding regurgitated fingers in the attic (ew). But before they can, an old lady across town gets mauled by the Man-Bat while looking at a photo album. The photo album isn't why she dies, but it's relevant to the investigation. Anyway, after an autopsy, Doggett finds an old newspaper about some hunters catching and killing a Man-Bat, after which most of the hunters went missing.
They check out the dead old lady and find that her daughter's burned body was fished out of the river a couple days ago, and Scully starts thinking that the body is relevant, especially since the daughter had originally disappeared right after the original Man-Bat was killed. Scully brings this idea to the lead cop who calls her a crazy person, but she orders the body exhumed anyway. There they find that the coffin has been dug up and scratched up already. Oh and I guess the lead cop gets killed by the Man-Bat.
 |
| "Oh. His name plate. He just...he just hated his first name so much." |
At this point, the cops are mad at Scully (not sure why and it ends up not mattering) but Scully is completely convinced that the body is involved so they go and seek out the guy who found the body, only to find out he's the brother of one of the hunters who disappeared, and he wants to be left alone. So they decide to surveil him for a bit, and chat about their respective beliefs, while the Man-Bat does the same thing. Eventually they find him leaving some food on a boat and follow the boat.
Following the boat, they find that the guy's brother (the missing hunter, whose name is Ernie) has been living on an island to avoid the Man-Bat for years, and the dead body was his wife, because the Man-Bat is hunting him and will hunt him forever. Doggett realizes Ernie's brother is in danger and goes to help, but gets attacked by the Man-Bat. Oh and then the Man-Bat attacks the cabin, bypasses Scully and kills Ernie, but Doggett shows back up and he and Scully shoot it a whole bunch. And then the episode ends with them back in DC a few weeks later, with Ernie's brother having gone into hiding and them wondering the Man-Bat is coming for them. Oh and Mulder's still on the spaceship.
I don't blame the series for being in an awkward spot right now. They're late in the game, eight seasons deep (which is almost universally a moment when a show begins to show its age, if it hasn't already), it's down one of its leads and it has to start figuring out how the new dynamic is going to work between its leads. Falling back on a pretty straightforward Monster of the Week plot is understandable, and it doesn't need to be a bad thing, I like straightforward Monster of the Week episodes. That's not really the issue here.
 |
| "I'm carrying Mulder's child, so I have access to his powers of plot-relevant observation." |
And the dynamic isn't the issue either, not directly. We're very early in Doggett and Scully's partnership and while I maintain that Patrick is a good actor, it's very clear and and Anderson aren't going to have the easygoing back and forth she had with Duchovny, which is fine, I respect the show for not only creating a character who is distinct from Mulder, but also trying to find a different dynamic with Scully (even if that means that a lot of Mulder's plot relevant traits, like his observational abilities and his wild leaps in logic, get shunted off into Scully). It must have been tempting to have the new partner be Mulder-lite, and I like that they didn't do that.
And there is some really good stuff here. A lot of it feels like Anderson working with the script to find organic moments, like how clearly uncomfortable she is giving Mulder's slide show, or how she initially tries talking to Doggett and the cops like they're Mulder and it just bounces off. And Patrick is doing good work too, how he's clearly not super comfortable with the goings on, but trying his hardest to be on board with the hashtag Weird Shit and defer to Scully's wisdom whenever possible. So we've got the two actors, and the writer, feeling out a dynamic and some solid subtext to inform it. Now all we need is a good mystery and monster for them to investigate.
And there is the sticking point, the Man-Bat is just an INCREDIBLY lame villain. It doesn't have to be, The X-Files has accomplished a lot more with a lot less, but in practice the thing just fucking sucks. The design and execution look incredibly cheap, like a bad Buffy monster (and I liked Buffy fine, but it has a very different style than The X-Files) and it just doesn't look good in motion (it keeps feeling like its hopping instead of swooping). It honestly feels more like a Season 1 monster, but at least in Season 1 they might have had the good sense to keep the thing off screen. It's also a very flat antagonist as monsters go, in a weird void where it's not quite an animal like the Flukeman, but doesn't really have a personality either.
 |
| "Would it be gauche if I started singing the Batman Theme right now?" |
The mystery is also kind of lame in a way that's hard to categorize. I don't think the broad strokes are necessarily bad; The mystery surrounding how the Man-Bat chooses its victims is actually pretty good, but it gets resolved pretty early and there aren't any strong secondary characters to hold our interest (Ernie, the guy living on the island, is conceptually interesting, but he only shows up when there's 5 minutes left, and the lead cop is just a dickbag). It doesn't help that it feels that there's a beat or two missing in the story; Scully and Doggett shoot the Man-Bat a whole bunch and then the episode just brings it in for a close, I feel like there needed to be another moment in there. Or at least something that made Doggett feel like he's confronted the weirdness of the X-Files universe for the first time. I want some existential horror dammit.
I'm willing to give The X-Files some leeway in figuring out where it's going, it's bordering on a completely different show with Doggett in the cast, but that leeway will only extend so far; Way back in Season 1, the series was spitting out great episodes as early as the 4th episode, and given how the quality dipped at the end of Season 6 (and through Season 7), it's easy to get to want to write Season 8 (and thus 9) off when it takes them a few episodes to find their feet. I'm obviously not going to do that in these reviews, but the initial audience for the series might not have been so kind.
Case Notes:
- The mortician in the cold open kinda looks like the Tall Man from Phantasm.
- The opening dialogue between mortician and his wife is slammed with exposition, not certain why we need that much exposition about two characters who are dead 10 seconds later.
- Just Scully and Doggett in the opening credits for the first time.
- Scully taking Mulder's nameplate off the desk and then putting it back later is a small moment, but it works really well.
- Doggett bullshitting about how bad the assignment is with his friends is a little blunt, but I like Scully's quiet irritation about it.
- I like Scully being irritated that the cop is talking to Doggett over her. This episode is good at finding small moments.
- The lead cop is basically a dick for no reason.
- Scully basically has to pick up Mulder's superpowered observations, because she's the one throwing out crazy theories now.
- Scully saying that Mulder referred to Occam's Razor as "Occam's Principle of Limited Imagination," is really cute.
- The next kill is really fast, we get like 10 seconds of the last looking at her photo album and now she's dead.
- Doggett finds a newspaper that suggest a Man Bat and he's instantly on board with the Man Bat explanation.
- Scully jumping at the Photo Album and Burned Daughter's Body explanation is a very Mulder thing to do, really emphasizing how they've handed her a bunch of Mulder's traits. Anderson does manage to put her own spin on it, and the cop telling her she's jumping at too many wild explanations is kinda fun, in a meta sort of way.
- Cutting to the bats is clearly supposed to be creepy, but I love bats and I think they're adorable.
- I like how it was clearly day when Doggett told the lead cop to dig up the body but it's night when it happens because it legally has to be creepy (and also the man-bat has to attack him).
- Jerk cop is dead and all of the other cops immediately absorb his jerk qualities and ramp them up to 11. Not 100% clear on why they're blaming Scully.
- "We should be out there hunting this down," is the dumbest thing they could have said. What are you going to look for, and where?
- Doggett explicitly calling out how Scully is trying to act like Mulder is kind of overly meta, but it works for his character. They're trying to push him as a straight shooting old-school cop to Scully's more scientifically minded outlook and they're doing okay at it.
- The monster may still look silly, but the crane shot up from the truck to it hanging from the rafters is a good shot.
- Scully yelling "Stop right there" from a rowboat is inexplicably funny to me.
- Ernie having lived on an island for 44 years to avoid the man-bat sounds like a really cool concept, and the actor sells his grief at his wife's passing really well.
- It still looks silly, but the man-bat attacking Doggett is a reasonably well edited scene.
- I assumed that the man-bat couldn't get to the island cause it was too far for it to hop but it was just on the island waiting to ambush Doggett, so I'm not sure what being on the island accomplished.
- Ernie having mad respect for Scully is a nice payoff to everyone giving her shit all episode. She should still have kicked someone in the balls.
- "How are you [going to protect me]?" With a gun mate. "Are you prepared to spend your life terrorized by a monster?" I dunno dude, she's already got the Conspiracy and the Alien Colonists after her, she'll adjust.
- Not sure why Scully decides to step outside to see if she killed the man-bat, she could just wait for morning.
- Doggett just walking up to Scully calmly despite his injuries, man he's like the......................... Terminator.
- The wrap-up feels kinda awkward, like there was a missing beat where they actually finished off the man-bat, but the episode is over so I guess that's our lot.
- As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can afford to go on the run from the Man-Bat that's hunting me.
Current Celebrity Watch:
There's not a lot here on the acting side (okay, the actor who plays the Sheriff played Izzy Mandelbaum Jr. in two episodes of Seinfeld, I am legally required to bring that up) but I do want to acknowledge that the guy who plays the Man-Bat, Jay Caputo, is an incredibly seasoned Stuntman and Stunt Rigger, including serving as the Head Stunt Rigger for multiple episode of The Walking Dead. Stuntmen and women have an incredibly tough, dangerous job and they don't get enough credit.
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