It look a long time for reyes to grow on me as a character. In many ways, she has been little more than a minor character who steps in from time to time in order to impede Doggett and/or Scully with New age mumbo jumbo, often with an emotional detachment that makes me wonder if Annabeth Gish took on a role she did not want in order to pay off gambling debts or something. She seems…bored. “Hellbound” changes that to make her a fascinating, driven character. It feels like a course correction after the powers that be realized reyes was not clicking, but I will take it either way. The ninth season certainly needs some kind of life in it.
:hell bound’ is one of the few final two season episodes I would put on par with the classic Mulder and Scully episodes of the series’ early days. It is incredibly gruesome--three murder victims are depicted skinned alive--but unlike many episode which feature comparable gore, it is not there to compensate for a weak script. The nightmarish murder method compliments what is going through Reyes’ mind as she suffers a psychic connection to the victims and the murderer which extends over the decades. I offer up bonus points here because the script is written by David Amman, a writer I have skinned alive myself in five of his six scripts for the series thus far.
Reyes is drawn to a murder in which an ex-con attending an therapy group session is skinned alive after revealing he dreamed about it happening to him. Reyes, too, is dreaming about the victims, but is too late to stop all but the final murder. The murders are tied to an incident in the 1880’s when a man was skinned alive by four others in a dispute over mining rights. Every forty years, the victim and his four killers are reincarnated wherein the victim murders the four the way he originally died in revenge.
In the end, Reyes believes she is reincarnated every forty years as well as the law enforcement officer attempting to prevent the murders. The last time around, the local sheriff in 1960 failed, then killed himself in grief on Reyes’ birthday. All the current victims were born on the same day as one of the 1960 murders, as well. Reyes saves the fourth victim this time around when she discovers the murderer is the local detective assisted Doggett and her. But the episode ends with his essence emerging into a newborn baby’s in a hospital elsewhere, signifying the cycle has begun again.
If you are thinking this sounds a great deal like a twisted version of “The Field Where I Died,” you are right. I had that vibe by the end of the second act. There is a lot of “Grotesque” and "Paper Hearts" here, too, with Reyes losing her emotional grip while experiencing the mind of a serial killer. Gish does not have David Duchovny’s range of emotion to play the part of a tormented FBI agent quite like he did back then, but in comparison to what normally passes for intense Reyes, she is practically Emmy bait.
I have yet to highly recommend a monster of the week episode centering on Doggett or Reyes, but I am now. “Hellbound’ is a breath of fresh air among a gaggle of mediocre episodes. Many of the episodes I even begrudgingly liked have had some major flaws which would have doomed them at any other point in the series run. Not ‘Hellbound.” it is quite good. If there had been more like it in the ninth season, Chris carter might not have just been blowing smoke when he claimed Robert Patrick and Gish could have carried the show for another nine years.
Rating; **** (out of 5)
It look a long time for reyes to grow on me as a character. In many ways, she has been little more than a minor character who steps in from time to time in order to impede Doggett and/or Scully with New age mumbo jumbo, often with an emotional detachment that makes me wonder if Annabeth Gish took on a role she did not want in order to pay off gambling debts or something. She seems…bored. “Hellbound” changes that to make her a fascinating, driven character. It feels like a course correction after the powers that be realized reyes was not clicking, but I will take it either way. The ninth season certainly needs some kind of life in it. 
