review: Scully and Mulder face off against a buxom videogame vixen.

February 29, 2000

Series The X-Files

Episode First Person Shooter

Airing Date 2000-02-27

Sci-fi Bits A video game character who moves in and out of reality, and makes the leap from one program to another.

Juicy Bits A clever little take-off on Sharon Stone's interrogation scene in Basic Instinct.

Featuring David Duchovny as Fox Mulder Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully Mitch Pileggi as Skinner Nick Lea as Alex Krycek William B. Davis as CSM

This week, the agents are called in by the Lone Gunmen, who have been consulting with a video game design firm --- a perfect gig for three people who have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality.

A sexy female character named Atreya has popped up out of nowhere into a newly designed game and started killing. Live human players are ending up as so much cold meat on a slab -- a possible problem for the firm's financial backers, who might question the advisability of funding the development of a game whose players end up dead.

Oddly, besides the potential pullout of the money men, the fatalities themselves don't worry Ivan, the head of the firm, who seems to have had all normal mental processes short-circuited by the magic phrase "IPO." Even a small amount of reflection should have brought this guy to the conclusion that not a lot of these games are going to be sold if they are invariably fatal. Are parents going to want to put this game under the Christmas tree? How do you buy the upgrade if you're dead?

The behavior of most of the men in this episode made me suspect that there was a secret conspiracy to make every male in the show look like a baboon. The police, who pick up a stripper who looks like the video game killer, according to Mulder's instructions, act like a bunch of giggling nine-year-olds who have just found Dad's stash of Playboy magazines.

Look into the blue light, you are getting very, very, sleepy.

Mulder is especially obnoxious; he smirks unbearably and eyes the stripper as lasciviously as any of the L.A. cops. And when he puts on the game battle gear and goes out to single-handedly to do battle with Atreya -- bwaa-ha-ha, I can't help it, he looks so dorky in those shoulder pads and teeny little sunglasses!

The women carry off the honors here. The stripper, Jade Blue Afterglow (what a great name) ends up looking much smarter than the police, parrying the agents' questions skillfully and without saying yes or no to anything. Phoebe, who works for Ivan and has unwittingly introduced Atreya into the company's new game, only designed Atreya as a way to keep herself sane after having to spend all her working hours in what she calls a testosterone haze. And Scully, of course, goes into the game and almost single-handedly saves Mulder's butt.

Hey Mel Gibson, what do you think about me for the lead in Braveheart II?

Why that butt was still around to save was just one of the questionable leaps of logic in this episode. Why did Atreya kill two players without hesitation and then leave Mulder alive? Scully went in with the same weapons that Mulder did -- why was she able to kill Atreya and Mulder wasn't? And why did any of these fools go in alone after the first death?

Besides the amusement value obtainable from watching Mulder make a complete ass of himself, this episode wasn't much more than a bunch of shoot-'em-ups strung together, and it certainly wasn't as clever as William Gibson's first screenplay for The X-Files.

--Laura Schlee secretly wants to be Lara Croft, tomb raider.

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