"Zero Sum"

"Bees! Bees! Bees in the car! Bees everywhere! God, they're huge and they're sting crazy! They're ripping my flesh off! Run away, your firearms are useless against them!"
Originally Aired 4/27/1997

Another episode I watched only once before, however, it was well before I was a fan and I guess at that time I assumed Skinner was always a bad guy. I'm sure I missed a lot of the dialogue about a "deal" Skinner had made for Scully's life, among other things.

F...B...I.

I noticed at the core of this episode, its the same "run around" story they've done before with "E.B.E." and "Little Green Men." They spend the whole episode trying to figure things out but wind up at the same place they started. However this episode leaves Mulder with a sense of betrayal, Skinner is more than pissed off, we know more about bees and Marita, and a few people died from a lethal amount of bee stings. I really liked the entire opening sequence with Skinner performing these tasks for the Smoking Man, where he had to clean up the entire bee accident, including burning a body!

I remembered reading once about the possibility of a Krycek-centered episode, yet it feels a bit unnecessary after this episode. I imagine this is the exact thing all of the Smoking Man's unwilling associates have to do; X had to do a lot of "dirty work", its just sometimes he enlisted Mulder to help (like in "Wetwired".) I imagine if they did a Krycek episode it would be the same circumstances, just change the scenery. Krycek probably kills someone for the Smoking Man (rather than bees), then has to clean up everything, discard the body, only Smoking Man chastises him for messing up one minor detail. However, instead of telling Smoking Man to "suck it" like Skinner did, Krycek would probably kiss up to keep his status in the Syndicate.

Mitch and David were great here at conveying frustration towards the Smoking Man and he's just as evil as ever. I suppose I had started to forget just how evil he could be since he's been absent for so long, combined with realizing he's just a "clean up crew" for the Syndicate, not the actual head of the organization. I think if he were in charge that their meetings would be a lot quicker; that Elder guy is so fat it takes him awhile to spit out words. "Where....is the progress....of the project?" Those meetings must be so boring.

One other quick note, its weird that in back to back weeks, two people have pretended to be Mulder. And about Marita, she seemed really pointless to me as a character but here she served a purpose. The Syndicate guy asked Smoking Man for reassurance, so a few scenes later we see her show up and pressure Skinner to report the bee incidents. It was just a ploy to keep Skinner on track. This was a good episode but also a necessary episode. They needed to hit the cancer storyline again, especially this close to the end of the season. What makes it better is that AD Skinner was at the center of it.