When a woman's head explodes for no apparent reason in a car, Mulder decides he and Scully should go and take a look. However, he soon finds himself kidnapped by the woman's husband, who has a very strange ailment: he has to drive at high speeds without stopping in a westerly direction, or his inner ear will burst, the same thing that happened to his wife.
This has to be one of the weirdest ideas ever for The X-Files. People whose heads explode if they slow down? What were they thinking of? The strange thing is, the idea actually comes off with a plausible explanation and works as an idea, so all credit to last season's weirdness king Vince Gilligan for that.
However, what doesn't work is the episode itself, mainly because it's difficult to pad out 45 minutes with just someone travelling across the country, and Scully trying to figure out why. It's not clear why, but the episode just doesn't really hold together. It might be the non-meshing styles of documentary footage (scenes made in the style of a news report) and the normal X-Files look. It might be that the show's move to LA has made it look all sunny, and it looks wrong. Or it might be that deep down you always have the feeling that the whole concept is just silly. On the plus side, Drive does have an unusual ending, but it doesn't really redeem an episode too weird even for The X-Files.
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