I am quite confident the title “Patience” has a double meaning. In the context of the story, it represents the plot of waiting 44 years to seek revenge. As for the show as a whole, it is a request for fans to give the new dynamic some time to gel. The former is easier to cope with than the latter.
“Patience” is a standard monster of the week episode. In certain ways, it is a throwback to the earliest and best of the series. Unfortunately, it terribly misses the mark in others. The plot is that a giant man-bat, which is very much like a mute version of the Man-Bat from DC Comics, is committing a string of murders relating to a 44 year old corpse dredged out of a river. The man-bat appears to be stalking a man who killed another man-bat back in 1956, but does not appear to be intelligent enough to know the difference between the man it is looking for and others like the undertaker and police detective associated with the newly discovered corpse.
To mention the good first, the make up job on the man-bat is superb. I would rank it right up there with Flukeman. But aside from the agents literally engaging in a physical brawl with the man-bat in the climax, that is where the similarities to Flukeman and any other classic critter end. The early days of The X-Files were famous for keeping the mystery as long as possible, oftentimes leaving the enite decision of what really happened up to the audience. In “Patience,” we see the man-bat in all it glory in the teaser. No mystery whatsoever, which is particularly bad since the first act has scully and Doggett sparring over what their killer is when the audience already knows. The teaser could have been the opening scene to any generic horror film. Like any horror film, there are subsequent gruesome kills shown in their full glory, too. For horror fans, that is great. For X-Philes, not so much.
X-Philes have to take pleasure in something else in “Patience.” it does feature an extraordinary amount of character development for a monster of the week episode. I have mixed emotions about it. Mulder’s shadow hangs heavy on Scully. It is reasonable for her to miss her partner terribly and to keep Doggett at arm’s length in anticipation of Mulder’s quick return dump him. The problem is how much the creators are forcing her to play Mulder’s role as the Believer against Doggett’s Horse Sense Skepticism. He cannot play the scientist role she used to do, but he is the longtime jaded cop who has seen everything, but still cannot believe the wildest bits of the X-Files.
The dynamic is strained. For one thing, the episode is book ended by Scully staring sadly at Mulder’s desk nameplate. In the beginning, it prompts her to curtly insist Doggett not get too comfortable. When mulder returns, this will be his office again. By the end of the episode, she thanks Doggett for looking out for her, then puts the nameplate in mulder’s desk and tells Doggett she will get him a desk, too. The latter look at the nameplate before putting it away felt like an apology to the absent Mulder. I do not feel as though what came between the bookends was terribly convincing enough to get us from one to the other.
Scully tries too hard to be Mulder. Doggett makes a statement early on that he has read through the x-Files and notes most of them were solved through a leap in logic by Mulder, who was probably the only one who could make such a leap. Scully makes such a leap as well when she finally assumes the killer really is a man-bat monster. The local detective, who is not hip to the idea of a woman senior FBI agent in the first place, does not want to play the investigation her way. Just to prove scully is not doing a very good job playing mulder, her request to exhume the corpse only she thinks is related to the man-bat gets the detective killed. Talk about piling on to her failure.
To his credit, Doggett is sympathetic. He knows she misses Mulder for one. But he also casts his ego aside to force the chauvinist detective to respect Scully. He intervenes to get him to cooperate with her seeming leap in logic even though he does not buy the man-bat theory, either. He does not browbeat her mistakes when she is obviously out her comfort zone here. Finally, he has her back when the man-bat physically attacks.
What it boils down to is Scully is being humor at best, patronized at worst throughout the episode. Ultimately, she realizes this and accepts Doggett’s way of doing things has merit. I feel like Scully is being demeaned, but I am going to chalk it up to a heavy handed attempt at closure for the way she used to interact with Mulder. Doggett as a character has to be given a chance to find his own groove with her. He never did so all that well, but we have thirty-eight more reviews to explore that.
When I rate episodes of a series, I do so within the context of the series. The final two seasons of The X-Files are so radically different than those that came before, it is not always fair to compare them to old episodes. I am not keen on the man-bat’s reveal in its entirety during the teaser, now did I enjoy all the scully trying to find her way stuff while Doggett runs interference. But as far as seasons eight and nine go, “Patience” qualifies as a decent outing. I cannot see how it could be anyone’s favorite, but I cannot see anyone despising it, either. It is necessary viewing for any X-Phile who did not abandon the series once David Duchovny went off to pursue a failed movie career as a way of introducing the Scully/Doggett partnership.
Rating: *** (out of 5)
I am quite confident the title “Patience” has a double meaning. In the context of the story, it represents the plot of waiting 44 years to seek revenge. As for the show as a whole, it is a request for fans to give the new dynamic some time to gel. The former is easier to cope with than the latter.
