X-Files--"Bad Blood"

“Bad Blood” asks the question of whether The X-Files can do a Darin Morgan style Rashaman story with absurdist humor without having Darin Morgan write the script. The answer is yes, with some caveats. “Bad Blood” is certainly a welcome break in the tension of late, but I do not regard the episode as highly as many X-Philes do.

The story revolves around an ethical inquiry into the murder of a teenager Mulder suspected of being a vampire, but was only wearing fake novelty fangs. The FBI is being sued for nearly $ 500 for the wrongful death. Mulder and Scully recount the same sequence of events from each’s perspective. While exaggerating events and the characteristics of the other. In Scully’s version, Mulder is gung ho about the case being about vampires while abusing her skeptical ways even more than usual. In Mulder’s version, he is passive and conciliatory to Scully, who is mean-spirited towards him and disinterested in the case. The final third of the episode is a return to the scene of the crime for a final resolution.

The entire sequence of events is muddled and played for laughs. The gist of it is that Mulder drags scully to a small Texas town to investigate the murder of a tourist who has two fang-like puncture wounds on his neck from which all his blood was drained. Scully eventually discovers through autopsies two victims of the same type killing were drugged by a pizza before being murdered, so she suspects the pizza delivery boy. She confronts him in Mulder’s motel room after he has been drugged by a pizza, too, and and shoots the kid twice to no effect. This is enough to convince the still dazed Mulder the kid is a vampire, so he chases him down, stabbing him through the heart with a chair leg. He then discovers the kid’s fangs are plastic.

Just before the inquiry in Washington, the agents are sent back to Texas when the kid’s body goes missing from the morgue. Mulder and scully eventually discover the entire town is nothing but vampires. The townsfolk drug the two, but do not kill them. Convenient. When they waken, the town is deserted.

“Bad Blood” features some of the most famous jokes in The X-Files’ history: a drugged Mulder sings the theme from Shaft, Scully gets a food craving after emptying the contents of an autopsy subject’s stomach, Mulder cannot shoot the tires out of a slow moving RV, an impromptu crucifix made of breadsticks does not ward off a crowd of vampires, they both have radically different viewpoints of what the local sheriff looked like, and we learn to never put fake cream cheese on Scully’s bagel. Ever.

The jokes make “Bad Blood” entertaining and worth watching, but I have a hard time overlooking some glaring errors. It is stated the town is too small to maintain a morgue, but scully performs two autopsies in a local morgue. The pizza boy’s body is kept in one, too. The local coroner is attached by the kid as he escapes. But if everyone in town is a vampire, why is the coroner not one, too/ The whole gimmick is too lure in tourists for fresh kills, not regular townspeople. There are a couple technical errors, too. Scully records she is weighing the large intestine at one point whren it is clearly the small. The chair Mulder breaks to make a stake has conspicuous fissure marks before David Duchovny breaks it. I know--picking nits. But still.

I have heard most of the inconsistencies defended as part of the warped stories the agents were offering. Feeling generous, I will accept that answer, mostly because two subtle clues were offered up early on the townspeople were all vampires. One, Mulder remarks there are an awful lot of coffins in the funeral home for such a small town. Second, Scully is immediately and unusually smitten with the sheriff, played wonderfully as different caricatures in both agents’ recounting by Luke Wilson. The Bram Stoker mythos of vampires establishes they are a sexual allure that helps them lure in victims. The powers that be were able to include such subtle foreshadowing, so surely what I think are glaring errors must not be.

I think ‘Bad Blood” is good, but not great. I have been lectured enough over the issue by adamant X-Philes to leave it at that. To its high credit, "Bad Blood" is far better than the last vampiric go round "3." Then again, what is not?

Rating: *** (out of 5)