Very Hottest Photos

Back in the day, it was with “Roadrunners’ that X-Philes began seriously complaining how the departure of david duchovny was negatively affecting the show. Specifically, fans believed the creators were over compensating with too much gore and the working relationship between scully and Doggett was being forced. The former is nothing new. The series has been compensating for bad scripts with bloody shock value from the beginning. Not that the unnecessary gore of “Roadrunners” does not detract from the bad script, but it is the development Scully/Doggett relation that really kills the episode.

Much of the story is based loosely on the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It is a about a small town that holds a lottery in order to choose a person to stone to death. In “Roadrunners,” citizens of a not on the map small community are a religious cult which periodically selects someone new as the host of a giant, parasitic worm which attaches itself to the chosen one’s spine. The cult believes this worm is the Second Coming, but cannot find a host who can survive long enough for the worm to do…whatever wonderful thing it is supposed to do. Grant special powers or something. No one ever clarifies. Maybe they do not know themselves. There is a running theme these religious folks are idiots, so maybe they are being played by the worm. Like I said, it is a bad script. Do not waste time thinking about it.

Think instead about Scully, and how badly her character is demeaned. She runs off to Utah without Doggett in order to investigate a missing persons case. She is looking for a hitchhiker who accidentally became part of the exchange of the worm. In spite of showing him respect as a colleague at the end of the previous episode, she still does not want to connect with him in anticipation Mulder will return. It is a petty thing for her to do. I am not an expert on the real FBI, but I would imagine upward promotion means changes in partners quite often. It is professional courtesy to work with new agents. So Scully is being unusually petty for the character. She is not normally a pouting woman.

Nor is she normally as dumb as she is here. She becomes trapped in the community through every contrived horror film cliché known to (wo)man--her gas tank is sabotaged by a station attendant, no one has a working phone, only the creepy people at a boarding house will even speak to her, she has to spend the night there, and they have a medical crisis with the new guy infected with the worm in order to distract her. If that is not bad enough, when she is along with the guy, she decides to look for a way to escape, so she gives him her freaking gun! Again, I am no expert on the FBI, but I do know giving up your gun is verboten. Heck, I am not an FBI agent and I would not have done it. There is immediate danger ahead.

Naturally, she is captured, sans gun, and the worm is forced on her spine. Scully begsw pitifully for them to stop because she is pregnant. There is something that should have crossed her mind before handing over her weapon. The whole sequence is demeaning to Scully. You should never reduce your heroine to a crying, whimpering mess in the face of the bad guys. She has never done that before when her life was threatened. In fact, the times she has broken down in tears were always after such incidents when she felt she could privately rely on Mulder for consoling.

Scully has been the damsel in distress before, but never quite this way. She got herself into this mess by doing dumb things. She was reduced to a puddle of tears when the worst of it occurred. When rescue finally comes, because Doggett has followed his cop instincts to find her, he finds her half-naked, spread-eagle tied to a bed. Every bit of this is the classic male fantasy of rescuing the naïve, helpless female, and she will be yours, you dashing hero, you. The only point that diminishes this thought is Doggett taking his knife and cutting open Scully’s back, sans anesthetic, to pull the worm out and kill it. Nothing like slicing between a woman’s shoulder blades to ruin the knight in shining armor wins the damsel’s heart archetype.

The cult does not seem to much care Doggett killed god, either. They just stand around in silence as he carries the profusely bleeding Scully to the arriving emergency personnel. If the thought of scully profusely bleeding disturbs you, realize that is the tamest of the gory scenes. We get the whole visual joy of watching Doggett slice into her back and yank the squiggling worm out, which is on top of her pulling part of the worm out of the first guy’s back earlier in the episode. It is hard enough to swallow Scully survived the emergency surgery period, but even more difficult to know ahe did not miscarry under all the stress she suffered. Stress suffered from any of the three previous episodes, either, for that matter.

To top it all off, she apologizes to Doggett for not involving him initially. She does not thank him for preventing a giant worm from burrowing into her brain, but I suppose she is taking small steps here. Doggett assures here she was, in fact, very dumb. In the span of a lackluster episode, Scully has been reduced to incompetent second fiddle in favor of Doggett This comes after her stumbling from the previous episode. Very, very bad for ardent members of Team Scully.

Very, very bad describes “Roadrunners” in general. It is a bad script that destroys everything we love about Scully in order to make Doggett look good in the eyes of the audience. It does not work. “Roadrunners” breaks Scully down to far while making Doggett look invincibly heroic. Performing emergency surgery on a woman with a pocket knife? Really, guys? Just so he can lecture her later how important he is to these cases? For heaven’s sake.

Rating: * (out of 5)