On their first case together, Scully and Doggett visit a town where people are being bitten to death by a giant human-bat hybrid.

This is so traditional an X-Files episode that you can see everything coming a mile off and tragically Chris Carter doesn’t pull any surprises at all. You get the impression that he wrote and directed this episode more to get the Scully/Doggett team off to a good start than to produce a high quality episode with lots of intrigue. With Doggett far more ready to believe than Scully ever was and willing to trust that the more experienced agent knows what she’s talking about, it’s a different dynamic, but it kills the hours Mulder usually spends trying to prove his theory. Scully suggests it’s a man-bat and everyone agrees that unlikely as that is, that must be it. Case closed.

The man-bat itself isn’t particularly well realized, there’s no story behind it (it’s just a bat creature that appeared from nowhere, apparently) and it’s killing people for persecuting it, as far as I could tell. I was expecting a final act revelation where it turns out to be one of the locals, but the creature is never explained, killed or caught. It’s all very unsatisfying.

On the positive side, Doggett is certainly a different person to Mulder and a breath of fresh air to the series. Robert Patrick has plenty of presence, and Doggett is shown to be fiercely loyal and an overall Good Man. Whether he’s in danger of becoming boring further down the line remains to be seen, but Chris Carter does give him a good introduction and it’ll be interesting to see his and Scully’s relationship build. But they do also need some decent stories that don’t play like a greatest hits of previous ideas. We’ve had enough mutations now and it’s time to move on after eight years.

**

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