Reviews > Season 8 > Roadrunners
by Visimag.com (Cult Times)

It's all change this year. In Mulder's absence the people on The X-Files are finding new roles. We examine the cast's place in the latest episodes on Sky this month.

Gillian Anderson's suddenly got a massive responsibility to assume. David Duchovny's swanned off trying to get his film career into top gear, and if he succeeds, we'll never see him much again. If he fails, then Mulder will probably be back before we know it. But in the meantime, Anderson's Scully, as the established character, has to step up and carry more of the show than she ever has in the past.

This shouldn't be too much of a problem. Seven years into The X-Files and now a veteran of of a number of films (including, to great acclaim, the lead in Terence Davies's The House of Mirth), Anderson knows what she's doing inside out. In the past couple of years, as Duchovny has grown less interested in The X-Files, there have also been episodes that have almost been solo outings for Scully. And even with Mulder gone, it looks like those solo outings will continue. Roadrunners hardly features Scully's new partner, John Doggett, with Anderson hogging all the attention and putting in an outstanding performance as a vulnerable woman isolated and out of her depth.

One of the highlights of the season so far, Roadrunners is The X-Files at its ghoulish best. Scully hears about the corpse of a man in his mid-20's who was beaten to death, literally in the middle of nowhere, out in the desert. What piques her interest is the fact that the man's spine is prematurely aged - she tells Doggett that it's like that of a 90-year-old woman. But, thinking that she's been around a bit and can cope with performing the post-mortem, having a look round the murder site and going on her way, Scully doesn't even mention where she's gone to her new partner until she's already on the scene of the crime. Doggett grumbles down the phone at her, cross that he's been left out of the loop, but there's nothing weird to make Scully regret not having brought him to keep her company. 

Until, that is, the locals of the only village for miles around fill her petrol tank with water so that her car stalls, cut all their phone wires so that she can't call anyone for help, and beg her, in her role as a doctor, to treat a sickly stranger whose spinal column is playing host to a particularly nasty-looking parasitic worm. And guess who the locals think will make a good home for their pet worm when the current host dies...

Roadrunners plays heavily on Scully's unexplained pregnancy. The episode's events could (and should, but this is The X-Files, so events don't necessarily have their rightful consequences) have serious implications for the unborn child's safety. What's more, it doesn't take Freud to see something sinister and phallic in the mysterious worm. Despite Doggett's marginal role, it's an important episode for the relationship between the two characters, proving to Scully that, in Mulder's absence, she's got to trust and rely on new friends.    

Quote of the ep: "This wound in your back, it seems to be a point of entry for a parasitic organism....Now, this is something I'm completely unfamiliar with." - Special Agent Dana Scully.

Source: Cult Times, typed by me - Text © 2001 Visual Imagination Limited (see the Visimag Website)