Kitten

I'm still chipping away at the episodes of The X-Files that aired before their February break. Next up for me was "Kitten," an episode that had a compelling premise, but which ultimately came up a bit short.

When Skinner goes missing, Mulder and Scully undertake a search. The trail leads to a rural Kentucky town where Skinner has gone to reunite with someone from his old Vietnam unit. But soon it seems that Skinner has been lured there for vengeance by his friend's crazed son.

I've gone on plenty about disliking the mythology episodes of The X-Files, which I think is really a shame since they're the ones that get most personal with the characters of Mulder and Scully. But there are other characters on The X-Files, ones who haven't had their personal lives spoiled by entanglement with the series' nonsensical continuing story arcs. Focusing an episode on Skinner's back story is a good way, in theory, to have your cake and eat it too. You get a stand-alone story, but one with significant personal stakes for the characters.

Indeed, the Skinner parts of the episode are generally pretty solid. Overall, the story demonstrates that he does right by his friends and always has, and that he does count Mulder and Scully among those friends. As far as this impacts the ongoing story line, it suggests he has pure motives in his associations with the Cigarette Smoking Man. But more simply, and more compelling within this hour, it shows us a moral compass, a guiding light, that makes Skinner more relateable than he's been until now.

But the adversary that leads us to these revelations is frankly a complete failure. It starts with bad writing. Davy, the son of Skinner's war buddy, is completely untrained and a transparently terrible liar, and yet still manages to easily get the drop on Skinner. He's quirky and borderline crazy for undefined reasons -- are we meant to take it that he's experiencing hereditary effects from his father's war experiences; that the government gassing he's railing against has leeched his mental faculties (whereas for everyone else, it's just causing tooth loss); or is it something else entirely? The fact that he dresses up in a weird monster suit is a meaningless red herring never given any context; it's just there to goose the audience.

And the whole thing is undermined further by the stunt casting of Haley Joel Osment in the role. Even if his current physical appearance comported with that of a credible soldier (which it does not), he still looks so similar to his childhood self that it can be hard to see him and not think of The Sixth Sense. This isn't to say that he shouldn't be getting work. It's just that you shouldn't cast him in something that at any point is trying to be scary (as The X-Files is here) unless you want the audience to think: "I see dead people."

The result is a mediocre hour that squanders the intriguing premise of giving us "a Skinner episode." I give "Kitten" a C.