It comes as no surprise to long-term readers of my blog that I love The X-Files. Reviewing every episode has been a long-term project of mine, second only to my X-Files Facebook Project. And so, until I have finished said project, I am lucky to have been given permission to share my friend Max’ reviews of The X-Files as posted on his wonderful website, Apt. 42 Revisited. I am starting to share reviews from the middle of Season 2 as that’s where I am currently in my project-based re-watch.
Apt 42 Revisited‘s review of season 2, episode 22: ‘F. Emasculata’
“You never had a chance, Agent Mulder. For every step you take,
they’re three steps ahead.” – Walter Skinner
“Well, what about you, where do you stand?” – Fox Mulder
“I stand right on the line that you keep crossing.” – Walter Skinner
Agents Mulder and Scully are dispatched to a prison in Virginia to assist with the recovery of two escaped inmates. What they find going on within the prison walls and without pushes them to dig into a cover-up in the works…
Max: There have been a lot of tremendous, quality, standout episodes this season, and “F. Emasculata” is a perfect addition and complement to those we’ve recently covered. A package containing a diseased looking animal leg ends up in the cell of an inmate of that Virginia prison, eventually ending up dead due to unknown circumstances. When two fellow prisoners are sent in to clean up the cell, they seize on an opportunity to escape the jail in a laundry cart. Mulder and Scully are then brought in to help apprehend them, but when Scully notices some people with hazmat suits and containment units at the jail, she begins to believe there is more going on.
While Mulder helps out the US Marshalls in arresting the fugitives, Scully stays behind at the jail to look into what exactly these men are at the prison for. Initially stonewalled by a doctor claiming to be from the CDC, her persistence in the matter leads eventually to corpses with large boils on their skin. Probing these boils, she discovers some kind of insect burrowed within. After trying to stop her from looking at the bodies, one of the boils erupts in the doctor’s face, and his fate is forever sealed. Later, he confesses to Scully that he is not from the CDC, but rather a large pharmaceutical company that was investigating the properties of that insect (found in Costa Rica) for medicinal use. The package was sent to the jail as part of an illegal controlled experiment on the prison population. The problem now though is that the escaped convicts became infected, and Mulder needs to work with the Marshalls to capture them before the infection spreads even more.
Read the rest of this review here.
First published on Sahar’s Blog on 15 August 2015.