AIR DATE: January
21, 2001
Written by John
Shiban
Directed by Tony
Wharmby
As I was getting ready to watch the tv show "Ed" on videotape Sunday night the station I had the VCR on was showing from the X-Files 1st season the episode "Squeeze". It was the scene where Mulder, Scully and Colton were in the office of Tooms first victim and Mulder goes over to the small vent and picks up a fingerprint. After this Colton gets all prissy with Mulder’s suggestion that the murderer came through the vent while Scully looks at Mulder as if saying what do you expect, but I won’t totally dismiss you outright though you will have to really prove it to me. This was the third episode of the X-Files and we can see and feel a chemistry between Scully and Mulder and a trust has been built between them. This is the 10th episode of the 8th season with Doggett and Scully and I have yet to feel any chemistry between them or any trust. This is mostly due to the awful episodes that we’ve had to watch this season where there has been no character development of either characters. There has been little real interaction between Doggett and Scully this season and if "Badlaa" is any indication we now know the reason why. Writer John Shiban could not write any interaction between Doggett and Scully without Doggett appearing to be a close minded jerk and Scully straining to do her best Mulder imitation. Let’s not forget Scully’s soul searching when she believes she failed Mulder in a way after she shot the Beggar Man. According to her Mulder would have seen right through the Beggar Man’s act and she is most likely right. Only one thing to say to this and all the Mulder’s mention in this episode as the old cliché goes "A Little Too Little, Too Late". These are issues that should have been brought up in earlier episodes, but those episodes were wasted with Doggett and Scully chasing Bat Man and having slugs put into one’s back.
One of my pet peeves this season has been the lack of a compelling Monster of the Week and "Badlaa" was no exception. What do we get for a Monster of the Week, a Beggar Man from India who is a part of a religious sect who can get into people’s bodies and control the bodies and mess with people’s minds so they see what he wants them to see. Oh yeah, there is some reason why he is killing all these people, but all we get is another lame revenge plot of the Beggar Man going after some Americans who could have been responsible for a chemical plant leak that killed 118 Indians. As far as we can tell there was never an attempt to connect the people who were killed to the chemical plant in India so who knows if this was the case. All we get in this episode is the Beggar Man wandering everywhere with his squealing flatbed wheel cart and looking evil while making everyone think he is a janitor or whatever while he is killing all these people for whatever reason since a direct link was never made in this episode. For all we know he is only doing this because he likes to kill people. I know this episode was an attempt to get Scully to deal with having to think like Mulder more often than she had in the past and to get some actual interaction between her and Doggett, but if the overall story is terrible and the interaction isn’t much better then it’s a failure. One of the big failures was the last 30 seconds of the episode. They couldn’t leave it that Scully had killed the Beggar Man. No, they had to go back to India and show us the Beggar Man looking at another person in the airport. Wow, I’m scared now. When are they going to learn to leave well enough alone. Leave them dead when they have been killed. Compare "Badlaa" to "Squeeze" and you see a stark contrast on how it should be done. If you had a choice between "Badlaa" and "Squeeze" which do you think you would choose? I know which one I would.
A few miscellaneous comments on "Badlaa" or as I like to think of it, "Baaaaad":
I don’t know of any airport in the world where I would sit on the toilet and read a newspaper unless I had a bad case of diarrhea and I think the last place I would want to be is on a plane. At least this continues the grand tradition on X-Files of bad things happening to people in bathrooms or anywhere near a toilet.
Why would a maid be entering a hotel room if someone just checked in 20 minutes earlier?
Don’t they do any kind of background check at that Elementary School? Or did the Beggar Man have the power to know that so he had the Principal believe he was safe to hire right away. This Beggar Man was amazing, he is able to take over Mr. Burrard’s body and know he would have to make a plane change in Paris, get his bags and a taxi to his hotel. He had the power to make Doggett and Scully think the janitor was in the interrogation room when he’s in another part of town trying to kill Quinton. It was never explained why the Beggar Man wanted a job at the Elementary School or why he went after Quinton, his father, Trevor or Trevor’s mother. Since Beggar Man had no clear motive for what he was doing it was confusing why he was killing these people. Was he trying to kill Trevor because Trevor could see him? Somehow I don’t think one 7th grader would be considered that much of a threat to him.
How to make Doggett look like an idiot? Well, the whole episode made him look like an idiot and jerk, but this is where we know Doggett isn’t too smart: his explanation on how Mr. Burrard died. How does Doggett explain it? He tries to explain to Scully that maybe Mr. Burrard was carrying drugs in his stomach and someone took them out before he got to Dulles International Airport. I’m surprised Scully just didn’t laugh in his face. Not that people don’t smuggle drugs that way, but Mr. Burrard’s wound was located nowhere near where someone would cut open someone for drugs and he was still alive for quite some time after Doggett said it happened. At least when Scully was trying to refute one of Mulder’s wild theories it made sense. Throughout this whole episode Doggett acted like a jerk as if working with Scully was beneath him because of what she believed was really happening to these people. I kept expecting him to just quit the investigation because of Scully. How many times did he walk out on Scully after she explained something to him. Maybe Mulder’s old friend Chuck Burks is right, he isn’t smart enough to get it while Scully always was smart enough to get it. If there was one thing as Mulder pointed out in an episode (whose title escapes me) even when Scully didn’t agree with Mulder she always respected his wild theories. If only Doggett would show Scully the same respect which is why the final scene felt false as Scully was all upset over shooting the Beggar Man who at the time appeared to be a young teenager and Doggett is consoling her for a good job.
The scene at the hotel where Doggett is all giddy about finding the bloody handprint on the sheet made me think of Mulder and how excited he would get at a crime scene when he was showing Scully things he found. Too bad if they wanted Scully to be Mulder they should have had her doing this act.
Actor Michael Welch must be in demand since not only was he in tonight’s X-Files episode as Trevor he was in tonight’s "Malcolm in the Middle" as Josh the new next door neighbor from hell, at least for Malcolm. Maybe that’s it, Scully is Malcolm and Doggett is Reese.
Anyone else annoyed at Doggett sitting in Mulder’s chair like it was his own. For some reason the only person who I feel should be in that chair is Scully.
How many more times could they show Scully’s gun on the medical tray to indicate she will be needing it in a few seconds. It was only put there so Scully would leave to get it so Beggar Man could get out Quinton’s father’s body before Scully could see him. So what would have happened if Scully had gone into the closet would she had tripped over the now invisible Beggar Man since as far as we know he has only made himself invisible which means his physical body is still there. If she had gone into the closet like any good investigator it would work better, but it would have ruined it if she had found him.
Isn’t that cute that there is an alien head coffee mug on Mulder’s desk.
Mr. Burrard was right, Beggar Man should put some WD40 on his little cart, but if he did that then how could he creep people out with the sound of his cart.
As Quinton ran down the stairs I kept asking myself how is Beggar Man going to get down those stairs. What is he a Dalek and just flows down stairs. Hmm, maybe if he was a Dalek he would at least have a motive and would be far more interesting than what we are stuck with in this episode. Also, it was amazing how the Beggar Man was able to be out of the way of the acid Trevor tried to dump on him. (It’s also amazing how Trevor got in the closet, got up to the top shelf and still manages to find acid without getting caught or hurt).
I don’t know what Scully’s problem was with shooting the Beggar Man as he approached Scully appearing as Trevor since we remember her shooting Donnie Pfaster in cold blood in "Orison". Maybe she’ll think some outside spirit made her do it like in "Orison".
"Badlaa" was a bad attempt at some real interaction between Doggett and Scully because it was awful and the episode continued this season’s trend of lame Monster of the Week. Let’s not forget the attempt at getting Scully trying to grapple with being Mulder now since the plot dictates that she becomes Mulder and Doggett has to be Scully.
Claudia
E-Mail: Claudia.Cauchon@unh.edu
01/22/01
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