Remember a couple days ago when I said much of the seventh season is phoned in? “Hungry” is a sad example. It is a character study which focuses on the struggle of a guest character with Mulder and Scully playing minimal roles. The powers that be are attempting to make sympathetic monster who suffers from self-loathing because of what he is. Try as I might, I just cannot bring myself to sympathize with him like I am supposed to do.
Rob is a young fast food employee who is hiding the fact he is a genetic mutant with a taste for brains. For most of his life, he felt only a compulsion to eat brains, but in the last month, he has given in. Mulder and Scully are brought in--inexplicably why this is a federal matter--to investigate a corpse found brainless, but with a token from the fast food restaurant where Rob works.
Most of the episode focuses on Rob. Mulder pops in and out of his life with hints we suspects rob’s true nature, but otherwise we see rob struggling to control his compulsion through diet pills, therapy, and group counseling. He keeps giving in anyway. He kills an ex-con co-worker, a private detective spying on a cheating wife in his apartment building, and his neighbor. He is caught by the agents as he is about to kill his therapist, but rushes them in order to be shot and killed. The guilt of what he has to do in order to survive is too much for him to live with.
In spite of the best efforts to present him as a good guy, I really do not sympathize with Rob, so the emotional impact is lost on me. He is a loser in a dead end job who gives in to a compulsion for cannibalism which is overtly compared to overeating on comfort foods. I think that is selling the horrific nature of what Rob does short. It is one thing to eat a carton of ice cream when you are depressed, yet seek help for the urge to do so. It is quite another to want to eat brains, and indulge under the rationale you cannot fight biology.
It probably would have been better to have rob as a vicious, uncaring monster from the beginning so ’hungry” could have been straight forward horror instead of a character piece. As it is, the episode does neither well. Rob is not an interesting character, nor is their any suspense in what he does. We know from the first act what he really is and what he does.
I get the sense “Hungry” is the victim of multiple rewrites. Scully is inexplicably absent for two acts. Mulder gives no hint as to why he suspects Rob right off the bat, but he obviously does. It is odder still because Scully has the ex-con employee as her prime suspect, yet he is never a true red herring. Rob states he is leaving town at the end because he no longer has a job. Did he quit or was he fired? I do not know. It feels like these little tidbits which could have illuminated the story never made it out of previous drafts.
Perhaps other fans can get more emotionally attached to Rob. If so, they probably like the episode better. I think he is a bad guy right from the start, and have no sympathy for him when he is killed t the end. The agents have run into all sorts of vampires, fat sucking freaks, and cannibals before. No hint has ever been given we should sympathize with any of those monsters. Why are we supposed to do it now with Rob? Because he is a highly functioning psychopath? Sorry, but that does not cut it. I will give ‘Hungry” an added star for the cool make up job done on Rob’s true form, but getting a good glimpse at him is not worth sitting through “Hungry.”
Rating: ** (out of 5)
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