"It's not really black hole season, either."
Originally Aired 2/24/95
Mulder says it may not be black hole season, though it sure feels like it is, since the middle of Season 2 could very much be the 'black hole of suck.' I feel like it started off pretty awesome, then ended on a super high note with it's best season finale in "Anasazi", while the middle of the season is hit or miss. Much like Season One, you can almost bet that an outstanding episode will be followed by a turd. That might sound really harsh towards Season Two, which I absolutely love, yet "Fearful Symmetry" is one I can say I never watch. I put it right up there... or down there, with "Space." So much for February Sweeps.
The opening teaser is pretty intense and looked incredibly life-like as an invisible elephant stampedes through town and light poles bend, road construction barricades are sent flying, and a car's windows explode. This is from an area before computerized effects were commonplace, so I'm wondering how this was achieved by the special effects crew. Those guys were ahead of the curve , so I'm sure they devised some practical means of executing it. The teaser also features the stellar dance moves of a young janitor named Roberto, though I can't place his older janitor partner. I recognized his familiar face, though I misidentified him as the guy on
Seinfeld who said, "you don't want to wear the ribbon?!" I think that guy had thicker hair, so I relied on an internet search to end the mystery. Turns out I was wrong, and he actually shows up later in the series as a henchman of the Cigarette Smoking Man, named Luis Cardinal. Coincidentally, he was smoking a cigarette in this episode.
The plot of "Fearful Symmetry" involving zoo animals and UFO's reminded me of an episode of
Kolchak: The Night Stalker, although its been far too long to remember what the connection was other than "zoo" and "UFO". That's probably a good thing. I completely forgot the episode includes a wildlife organization that butts heads with the zoo over animal rights, reminding me somewhat of Season One's "Darkness Falls" where an environmentalist was a red herring. That environmentalist was another familiar face, who'd later portray the villain on the series Lost, while the guy in "Fearful Symmetry" was also one I didn't recognize off the bad. Another internet search led me to find out he was in
Halloween II as the EMT that helps Laurie in the hospital. Except he looks like he didn't age as well as Jamie Lee Curtis.
This episode's plot may not have thrilled me but I did get a kick out of the brief Lone Gunmen appearance, and this is a time where two out of three really isn't bad. Frohike and Byers appearance "live via satellite" in a video chat with Mulder long before webcams and Skype chats, and Frohike even makes a crack about how much it'll cost the taxpayers.
"Beam me up, Scotty!" is also said by Frohike. For such a lukewarm plot, the one-off writer of this episode (Steve De Jarnatt) really nailed the humorous dialogue between Mulder and his buddies. That's one thing I noticed early on in my fandom, that when it's a regular series writer you can usually bank on a good episode, though when it's a one-off writer it's nearly always a stinker. Much like the opening teaser, the series always had cool visuals and I rather liked the sequence where a tiger mauled a guy with the environmental group. They masked it by filming it as a reflection in a camera lens. Later Scully actually performed an autopsy on the elephant!
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