"Sanguinarium"

I felt like I should start out this episode review with that image because its about the only redeeming part of this hour of The X-Files. If I didn't already know in advance, I think it would be easy to tell that this episode was not written by a regular writer. I have no clue who Valerie Mayhew & Vivian Mayhew are, though I am glad this is their first and only X-Files episode.

I know this is a fantasy/science fiction series that just had an episode dealing with the possibilities of soul mates and/or reincarnation, but I just thought they made Mulder go a little overboard here. Some lady pukes up needles that couldn't have been swallowed and he rattles off his usual facts about how there are known cases of this happening. It felt really far-fetched to me and Mulder came off a lot dorkier than usual.

A friend of mine linked me to an article online that talked about scrapped plots for episodes from Star Trek's many tv series. Deep Space Nine was absent from the list and he questioned whether or not the DS9 staff just filmed every script that they had, good or not. I am wondering if this was the case with The X-Files; did they just film every script that was submitted to the producers? Perhaps they just added a few Mulder one-liners into the script before shipping it to the crew up in Vancouver. Certainly seems likely since they're back to their "good episode, bad episode, good episode, bad episode" rotation from Season Two. I was already considering if I should stop assigning a score to each episode and after watching this, it was easy to make up my mind. "Sanguinarium" was less than average; it was cookie-cutter X-Files at it's finest. Not even upping the level of "gore" could save it.