Is anybody not looking for Krycek?

The X-Files

3.16: Apocrypha

The unsettling feeling washed over me – a little like black goo itself – during this two-parter that my recollection of the series’ central arc being pretty solid until at least Season Five may have been remiss. Did it all actually fall apart during Season Three? Together, Piper Maru and Apocrypha are easily the least compelling instalments of the arc plot thus far. They aren’t bad so much as desperately underwhelming and uninspired.

Apocrypha finds a possessed Alex Krycek pursuing his oily home (a UFO in an abandoned missile silo in North Dakota) – his spewing gloop from his (visible) orifices is an effectively icky sequence – while a rather disengaged – because, like who cares about him? He has no personality and no story – subplot involves tracking down the guy who shot Skinner and Scully’s sis (Lennos Britos’ Luis Cardinal). There’s a welcome reappearance by the Well-Manicured Man (John Neville, as ever, being disarmingly charming and chatty, this time when talking to Mulder on the phone and subsequently meeting him; there’s a cover story regarding nukes… so what’s new?)

The Lone Gunmen reappear on an ice rink (Frohike’s expression as he skates between a couple of young ladies speeding in the opposite direction is priceless). There’s also a dose of the increasingly irksome fan-baiting continuity of generational Mulderism, as we flashback to an investigating Bill Mulder and CSM in the 1950s.

Perhaps part of the problem is that there’s little sense of Mulder and Scully acting with due agency themselves in these two episodes. They’re reacting to a flow of plot that will largely continue on without them (if anything, this is more Krycek’s story, but his character is so thin, you’d hardly call the events that overtake him compelling). Compare that to the previous Nisei/731, where you were entirely invested in Mulder’s mission, and you’re left coming up severely short.

There’s also the kind of scene that gets on my wick, where Mulder graciously goes to tell the Skinman how he’s really grateful to him for doing… what, getting shot? ... because it shows he cares, and the Skinman rebuffs him, saying it’s got nothing to do with anything to do with being on the side of the X-Files, and you’re left wondering why either bothered, since one doesn’t really mean it and the other is stuck in the most rigid of irascible character straightjackets.

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Maybe he had one too many peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches.

3000 Miles to Graceland (2001) (SPOILERS) The kind of movie that makes your average Tarantino knockoff look classy, 3000 Miles to Graceland is both aggressively unpleasant and acutely absent any virtues, either as a script or a stylistic exercise. The most baffling thing about it is how it attracted Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell, particularly since both ought to have been extra choosy at this point, having toplined expensive bombs in the previous half decade that made them significantly less bankable names. And if you’re wondering how this managed to cost the $62m reported on Wiki, it didn’t; Franchise Pictures, one of the backers, was in the business of fraudulently inflating budgets .

I must remind you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one.

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White nights getting to you?

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Maybe I’m a heel who hates guys who hate heels.

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Remember. Decision. Consequence.

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You absolute horror of a human being.

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You cut my head off a couple of dozen times.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (SPOILERS) I first saw A Nightmare on Elm Street a little under a decade after its release, and I was distinctly underwhelmed five or so sequels and all the hype. Not that it didn’t have its moments, but there was an “It’ll do” quality that reflects most of the Wes Craven movies I’ve seen. Aside from the postmodern tease of A New Nightmare – like Last Action Hero , unfairly maligned – I’d never bothered with the rest of the series, in part because I’m just not that big a horror buff, but also because the rule that the first is usually the best in any series, irrespective of genre, tends to hold out more often than not. So now I’m finally getting round to them, and it seemed only fair to start by giving Freddy’s first another shot. My initial reaction holds true.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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