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"She's honed all her other senses around her blindness."
This was a good season five episode: wonderful direction, a spectacular guest performance, engaging writing. It was missing one thing - what has now become the glaring blind spot of the season - the Scully/Mulder partnership. It's the big movie sacrifice the fans have made for the season. Not the mere 20 episodes. The severely limited appearance of a good episode featuring BOTH our heroes. It's boiled down to: Mulder feels for the guest star episode, Scully goes on vacation or has personal issues episode, flashback no-Scully episode, let's feature the supporting players episode, and a few "give the dog a bone" episodes where they both actually participate in something interesting. This show gets technically better and better all the time. It is slickly produced. It attracts good actors. However, this year it has been stunning in its blindness to the root of its success: the dynamic duo of the FBI. I hope to see them work together again some time. I kinda liked them.
Now that I'm done whining about that (or at least temporarily distracted from it) I'll get back to the episode at hand. As I said, the direction was wonderful. I was especially intrigued with Kim Manners early on as he chose non-standard shots: a distorted window view, cameras from below and from above, shadows, extreme closeups on objects rather than people, the great revolving camera sequence in the first interview with Marty - all accentuating different ways of seeing things.
Lili Taylor's performance in this episode is one of the biggest casting coups in the show's history. Equal parts cocky, scared, self assured and vulnerable she was a complex bundle of emotions. I'll be quite shocked if this appearance does not end up earning her a guest performer Emmy nomination. Luckily for a show that so prominently featured the guest star they got her. I thought her finest moment was her reaction to "seeing" herself through the killer's eyes. The blind woman struggling desperately to understand and process her terror.
Writer Minear weaves visual allusions throughout the episode - I liked the effect of the blind woman saying "I'm all ears" or "not much to look at". There are a lot of moments where Minear's turn of a phrase gave me a chuckle: "doing a formula 409" or "you probably don't know a feather duster from a duck's ass". He is at his best in writing the scenes between Mulder and Marty as Mulder refuses to buy into sympathy and instead challenges. I am disappointed that circumstances seem to have precluded Scully being a very active part in this episode. I would have enjoyed seeing Taylor and Anderson have some important moments together, but it was not to be. So instead of hanging around she is off to Los Angeles for movie reshoots. Um. I mean off to DC to "hand deliver" evidence. Whatever. At least they gave her a new cell phone to call in her appearance with. Duchovny clearly enjoyed working with Taylor. We see that when Mulder tells us "I like you Marty. I admire you" he clearly means it. What I don't think the episode tells us so much is why.
The "why" questions are where the writing stumbles. Why was Mulder so convinced of her innocence before he even met her? Surely with all he's seen a blind woman committing murder is not such a leap. Does his spidey sense just go off during the slide show? Why does Marty plead guilty? Especially if, as she tells us about prison, she never wanted to spend her life in a place like that. Maybe I lived in Texas too long, but somehow I think if an armed murderer entered a blind woman's apartment and was killed it would be tough to convict outside self defense. Yes, she dinged the detective, but it seems to me she could have gotten out of all charges.
-We've had a lot of scary pop culture references on the show before, but having Mulder bring "Kung Fu" into the picture with his pebble story gave me a chill down my spine.
-On the up side it is not often that Scully gets to do the slide show. I bet she liked the feel of that clicker in her hand.
-Retread Alert: The lead detective was seen in "Ghost in the Machine" as the building super and the A.D. has been in "Small Potatoes", "Lazarus", and "Fresh Bones".
-Frank's Fashion Spot: I was starting to really wonder who the blind person in the episode was as Detective Pennock seemed to spend most of his time dressed like a frightening vision test with clashing ties. When he showed up with a spotted tie and checked blazer even I started to lose focus.
-Mulder and Marty were playing "handsies" in the last jail scene. Every time the camera changed perspective so did their hands alternating between holding and not.
-I'm beginning to think that Mulder may have had some sort of a traumatic experience as a child at the Ice Capades as this is the second time this season he has slammed them.
-Gotta love Scully. We are told they turned that tiny bathroom "upside down and inside out" and yet she is able to carry on a cell phone conversation, chastise Mulder, and discover the bloody gloves with a quick glance around. That, my friends, is multi-tasking.
-We've got a date stamp on the episode. The mug shot from the first murder reads 3/6/98.
-I'm sure Scully is thrilled to have her call to Mulder answered with a derisive "skeptical". Plus I'm not sure what he was complaining about as he's seemed pretty proud of his skepticism of late.
-Speaking of skepticism Agent Scully seems to have gotten fairly blase' about hers. Sure she tosses out a couple of patented Scully Rational Explanations (SREs), but doesn't even seem to put up a fight at the end anymore. OK. The blind girl sees. Next.
-I did enjoy Mark Snow's score for this one. The theme music he used for the prison interviews was particularly striking.
Autumn
"Well how else did she see? Bat vision?"