By: Matt Spaulding
After the high that was the last two weeks, this episode brought everything crashing down. I'm going to put it right on front street: not only was this the worst episode of the season, it was one of the worst episodes of the show that I can remember.
It all began with a terrorist attack. Two extremist Muslims committing a suicide bombing. You (sadly) know the story. This brings into the lives of Agents Mulder and Scully the younger Agents Miller and Einstein. Miller (played by Robbie Amell, whom you may remember as Firestorm on The Flash) is a young clone of Mulder, a believer in all things paranormal. Einstein is a younger version of Scully, only ramped way up. Miller believes it is possible to communicate with the terrorist who "survived" (though he is only alive in the sense that his heart is beating) to find out more about the cell he belongedto and Einstein, of course, believes it's nuts.
Scully, driven by regret that she couldn't communicate with her mother in her final moments of life, privately suggests to Miller that they may be able to use readouts of the man's brainwaves to get answers to simple questions. At the same time, Mulder privately talks Einstein into the idea that he may be able to communicate with the terrorist by taking "magic" mushrooms.
The episode sort of falls off a cliff at this point. It was teetering before, but it really just lost me from here. Einstein procures the hallucinogenic mushrooms (or does she? Later she calls "placebo") and Mulder goes on a weird trip involving dancing to "Honky Tonk Badonkoadonk" with a bunch of hot women and playing cards with The Lone Gunmen (who deserved a MUCH better return to the show than they got). I'm not even going to hide the spoiler: he ends up talking to the "dead" guy. There, I saved you.
The saving grace of this episode was the final scene in which Mulder and Scully talk to each other in beautiful riddles about the way people communicate and the complexities of life. They walk hand in hand, they hug each other, they give us more of that beautiful romantic tension we enjoy between them. If not for that, the episode would have been a total bust. I have to rate this one D-.
