“Badaa,” which means revenge in Punjabi and Hindi, generates mixed emotions. On the positive side, it features a wonderfully disturbing monster of the week. The episode also begins the slow, but steady journey towards Mulder’s return as his shadow begins weighing heavily on Scully. But for the bad, the monster of the week has a laughably bad motif that sounds like a South Park gag and there is also some very forced drama.
The monster of the week is a legless Indian mystic who travels inside the bellies of his victims. He gets in there and out again but entering you-know-where. If he did not fatally injure the digestive systems of his victims, his method of booking passage would be absurd. As it is, the concept appeared to be used solely for the gore factor, which makes it even sillier. But the Legless Mystic is such a disturbing villain, he makes up for a lot. He never speaks, looks like he is about 800 years old, and uses one of those carts to pull himself along with his hands. At several points, he is chasing victims with it. Along he is slow going with hope of physically catching up to his quarry, he is still terrifying because his mystical powers, though not well defined, have already been used successfully to kill.
Not to mention kill brutally. Aside from ripping opening a couple of digestive systems, the Legless Mystic casts hallucinations to force others into deadly situations, such as convincing a woman her son is drowning. She dives into a swimming pool to save him, but winds up drowning herself. Drowning is a horrible way to go, folks.
The Legless Mystic is motivated to come to the United States in order to seek revenge on families associated with a chemical company whose industrial accident involving a toxic spill killed 118 of his native villagers in India. The connection is not very well drawn in order to preserve the mystery of his motivations for as long as possible. Because of this, we get distracted by the appearance he is just making a couple kids orphans. So much so, the idea he has that weird fetish rather than is motivated by revenge still dominates in my mind. Chalk that up to bad writing.
The less than skillful handling of the Legless Mystic’s motivation is not the only awkward bit of drama. Scully has been channeling Mulder with varying degrees of success since the beginning of her partnership with Doggett. She really kicks it up a notch here, causing two large problems. One, Doggett hs clearly lost patience with her by this point. He all but calls her a fruitcake right up until the end for pursuing the mystical angle of the case when he sees no logical connection between the murder victims at all. Presumably, this conflict is why the Legless Mystic’s mystic’s motives were kept secret until the end. Manufactured drama. The second problem is more poignant. She is attempting to be Mulder, but does not have it within her to pull it off.
Aside from causing friction with Doggett, her pursuit of the case is spot on, though unorthodox. She is right at every turn, even if she is not following standard FBI practice. That is until the end. The Legless Mystic is projecting himself as the image of an eleven year old boy to her. She has her gun pointed at him at the behest of another boy who swears it is really the Legless Mystic she is pointing her gun towards. She fires when the boy refuses orders to stop coming towards her. For a brief moment, through the pained expressions of everyone around her, there is a suspicion Scully made the wrong choice and killed an innocent kid. She did not. It really was the Legless Mystic, but that does not prevent her from suffering an emotional breakdown.
She confides in Doggett she fired because she believes that is what Mulder would have done. He would have had the capacity to see through the Legless Mystic’s ruse. She could not, however. When she made her decision to pull the trigger, she feared she was shooting a young boy. The realization she cannot be like Mulder makes his absence more pointedly felt. To his credit, Doggett expresses sympathy while consoling her as best he can. Nothing about this case makes sense to him even now, but at least he has stopped being a total jerk to my girl Scully.
“Badaa” is gross for the sake of being gross. The dramatic tension, save for scully’s emotional turmoil, is not well defined, and there largely ineffective. But there is still much worth seeing. The Legless Mystic has all the elements of a classic monster of the week if only better written. Crawling up people’s butts? Really, The X-Files? Come on. But the well done creepy aspects of the Legless Mystic and the shadow of Mulder hanging over Scully save the episode from becoming typical monster of the week filler.
But barely. There are only a few more episodes left before Mulder’s return. At that point, the series will desperately try to recapture the feel of the way things used to be. For the most part, it will be too little, too late, but I am looking forward to it with a surprising amount of anticipation. Most of these early eighth season episodes are lost in the doldrums.
Rating: *** (out of 5)
“Badaa,” which means revenge in Punjabi and Hindi, generates mixed emotions. On the positive side, it features a wonderfully disturbing monster of the week. The episode also begins the slow, but steady journey towards Mulder’s return as his shadow begins weighing heavily on Scully. But for the bad, the monster of the week has a laughably bad motif that sounds like a South Park gag and there is also some very forced drama. 
