Case 08, File 08: Surekill

AKA: Did Rob Liefeld Name This Episode?

The X-Files needs to strike a weird balance in how it spreads its time, at least in a normal Monster of the Week episode. We have to spend enough time with the monster to know what it's doing and why, enough time with Mulder and Scully to keep the plot moving and maybe get some banter, and if there's time we might want to have a plot running with the episode specific characters. With Mulder out of the picture at this point, banter has taken a back seat and as such there might be more time to develop episode specific characters, depending on how they want to execute an episode.

Our episode kicks off with some guy running down the street, and using a payphone to call a friend of his to beg for his life and also say that some lady is lying to him. Before he can do more than leave a message, the guy stalking him shows up and he runs to a police station, ranting about how he's in danger. And given that he gets shot in a steel room, with the cops watching, seems like he was right. The cops think that's odd, so they call in our heroes to check it out.

Once there they find evidence that the shooter stood on top of the roof and shot the victim through the vent, despite being unable to see down it, confusing our heroes. Meanwhile at an exterminators (which for some reason has the same name as the episode) a woman named Tammi shows up for work, intercepts and deletes the message from the cold open, checks on a box in her desk and gets briefly menaced by her creepy boss, Dwight, who then heads off to menace his brother, Randall. Back with our heroes, they check our victim's real estate office and find that he did a lot of business with the titular exterminators.

They also find that the office has a TON of bullet holes in the walls, indicating that someone in the office was shooting at someone outside of it. And if you haven't picked up on where that's going, the next scene Dwight goes and menaces some drug dealers before Randall shoots them through the walls. You've got the idea now and so does Scully, proposing that the shooter has the ability to see through walls. She spends a bunch of time talking about how the eyes sees light to justify it, but that's the core of what she's on about.

This shot isn't relevant or anything, I just find it amusing.

Which instantly makes it weird when Dwight coerces Tammi into having sex with him with Randall outside, but Doggett and Scully show up to interrogate him about his connection to the victim. And after finding out Dwight is legally blind and his criminal record (plus an interlude where it's revealed Randall lives in the same building as Tammi and watches her through the walls) they decide to raid Dwight's office. They check Tammi's weird box but find it empty and also a lot of business that Dwight did with the cold open victim. Like, 600,000 dollars worth of business.

They drag all three of them in, but none of them talk, even when Scully realizes Randall is looking through the walls. And so, that night, Tammi goes and sees Randall, who emptied out the box to protect her, and she suggests they bolt. So he gives her back her safe deposit box key and plans to meet him at the bus station but Dwight intercepts her, takes the money she's been skimming (oh yeah, she's been skimming money) and orders Randall to kill her. But, he shoots Dwight instead, because of course he does, and the episode ends with Tammi on the run and Randall in prison. Oh and Mulder is still on the spaceship.

Surekill is an odd episode, one that's more devoted to the characters of this episode than it is to Doggett or Scully, a pattern that's becoming more pronounced as the season wears on. The monster and the plot are both interesting enough to hold up their end of the plot, and it's not a bad episode, but the pattern that's building reveals a bigger issue, one that they're going to have to deal with over the course of this season: The writers don't trust Doggett and Scully to hold up an episode together.

When it was just one or two episodes where they were apart or offscreen, I could ignore it, but it's starting to become obvious; They've had six Monster of the Week episodes together at this point and in all but 2 of them, they were either separated or sidelined. This episode doesn't sideline them as hard as Redrum did a few episodes ago, but it's very clear watching it that Scully and Doggett's screentime in comparison to the episode specific characters that they're not being given the percentage of screentime normally reserved for our heroes.

"Tell me Agent Doggett, are you familiar with a band called Korn?"

I'm not certain why this pattern has been emerging, but I have some theories. Biggest of all is the simple fact that a big chunk of Mulder and Scully's screentime was spent just generally bantering, using their easy chemistry and excellent line delivery to get some tension cutting laughs. Robert Patrick, whatever his strengths as an actor, is not built for banter (the biggest laugh I got in the episode was from a joke bouncing off him and Scully) and he doesn't have Duchovny's easy chemistry with Anderson that can carry weaker dialogue. With those things in mind, it's no wonder that they cut back on time devoted to Scully and Doggett.

But without much to replace it, the episode feels a little deflated, because the episode specific characters are rarely strong enough to carry an episode themselves, and this episode is no exception. The big problem is a focus issue; Most of the episode's dialogue and story movement comes from Dwight and he's the most well realized character (he's a dickbag), but the third act requires us to be emotionally invested in Tammi and Randall's relationship, but we don't get any reason to care about it. All Randall seems to do is stare vaguely at Tammi until they team up at the end.

So what does this episode having going for it? Well it's a flashily directed episode; This is the only episode of the series directed by Terrence O'Hara, who would go on to direct some really good episodes of Angel before becoming one of the primary directors on NCIS, and he's got some real visual flair. Okay so he's just a little too into the moving the camera through the walls shot, but he's got other tricks up his sleeve too, like the opening shot which moves from the cold open victim grabbing the payphone, to security camera footage, to shooting the TV with the footage on it, and then circles around the guy. It's a really neat shot and since it's the first shot, it buys the episode a lot of goodwill.

"Welp, it's 7 O'Clock, time to stare at my crush creepily through the wall."

It's not to last though, as while the episode opens strong and has some solid shots and a fun enough plot, it just begins to run out of steam come the third act. The acting is mostly strong; Randall has strong presence both as a threat and as sympathetic victim of his brother's cruelty, Dwight is a believable kind of asshole. Tammi isn't so much a weak spot, she does what she can with the material given, but she's a badly underwritten character, especially when the episode's coda is about how Randall saw something in her that she couldn't see. Would have been nice if the audience got to see it too.

The X-Files has created much worse episodes than Surekill, from episodes that were annoying, to episodes that were cringey to episodes that were just plain boring, but even in those dark nadirs, they could still fall back on Duchovny and Anderson's easy chemistry to get laughs or just a sense of comfort. Doggett isn't a bad character, and the episodes' writing and directing didn't get worse just because Duchovny wandered off, but without that aspect to lean on, the episodes that have some dysfunctional elements feel a lot worse.

Case Notes:

• Not sure running into the police station ranting and trying to grab a cop's gun is your best choice there guy.
• The cop really under-reacts to the guy's head suddenly exploding.
• The bullet having come through the roof and down the air vent is pretty cool.
• Doggett says he field tested tech that could see body heat through walls in the Marines and it's impractical, but he left the marines in 83, maybe it's improved in the intervening 17 years.
• The logo for Surekill Exterminators is horrifying, no one would actually hire them. Shouldn't a front be like slightly convincing?
• Jesus Dwight is a complete asshole to Tammi. I know she's lying to him, but he doesn't know that, chill.
• AND he's also an asshole to Randall, maybe if your brother can see through walls and has no qualms about murdering people, you should be a bit nicer to him?
• Doggett calling Scully "Agent" is kind of an interesting way of noting that he's still uncomfortable with her a bit. I wonder why I never noticed it before.
• The room with all the bullet holes looks a bit like the room from that one Korn music video.
• A Chris Rock reference feels like it should be incompatible with The X-Files but there it is.
• I like that the episode recognizes that thing you do when you have an ally who can hit perfectly from outside a room is the "Point the fingers and they get shot" thing.
• Scully basically has to soften suggesting X-Ray Vision as their solution.
• Dwight being blind is a weird wrinkle that doesn't add much, but I like that both Doggett and Scully just steadfastly refuse to react when Dwight tries to make a joke about Chase being Jewish.
• Did Randall light a cigarette between shots, just so he could have a lighter to threaten Tammi with or did I miss it?
• Did Tammi really try to pull the Rose Mary Wood excuse?
• Randall watching Tammi shower through the walls is deeply uncomfortable.
• Tammi is very very bad at not getting caught stealing from the two murderers she works for.
• The episode is just a little too happy with the moving through walls effect.
• The interrogation scenes are pretty good, all of the actors selling their parts pretty well, especially Anderson.
• I can't tell if there's supposed to be something off about Randall or if he's just supposed to be kinda slow. I guess it's better if it's subtle, pushing it too far can get awkward.
• The episode shifting to be more about Tammi and Randall's relationship is interesting, but I think they're a little underdeveloped. Dwight is a complete asshole, but he's a stronger character for it.
• The bit with Randall and Tammi is actually both of their strongest character scenes, and they do well with it. I guess if they'd spent more time on it, the misdirect towards Dwight wouldn't have been as strong.
• I like Randall seeing the cops coming and just walking away, he's got a lot of silent presence.
• Dwight pulling out some classic abuser tactics to bully Randall into killing Tammi is good stuff, even if it doesn't really explain why he doesn't just shoot Tammi himself. Maybe that's what him being mostly blind was supposed to go?
• It's pretty clear from the word go that Randall isn't gonna shoot Tammi but the episode does a decent job selling it.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I won't have to resort to killing gangsters and laundering their money for supp-wait was that really the plan in this episode? Seems needlessly complex.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Big one here: One of the cops in this episode is played by a young James Franco, who was just past his earliest noticeable role in Freaks and Geeks and was just about to break out in James Dean and Spider-Man. He's recently been accused of a lot of awful shit that I won't talk about here and in fact, I'm not gonna give him any more space.