‘The X-Files’ season 10, episode 5 review: Robbie Amell, Lauren Ambrose, and Mulder line-dancing

There are some things that we just do not anticipate ever seeing on television these days. Fox Mulder doing a mushroom-laden line-dance in Texas on “The X-Files” is one of them. We had to check during this scene to really figure out if we were actually watching the show, or having some sort of flashbacks to times we witnessed public square-dancing.

This installment was entitled “Babylon,” and for the most part it was bizarre and then some. Mulder went under as a means in some ways of trying to understand the source of some strange sounds, some that many were claiming to be from the heavens. It was one of the few times this season the show has looked at religion more for an explanation, but the answer was neither that in the end or something purely supernatural. It always lies somewhere in the gray with this show, or at least it does outside of Mulder’s eyes. Yet, we never grow tired of that ten seasons in. We probably never will at this point.

So what did you think about the debut of Robbie Amell and Lauren Ambrose as Agents Miller and Einstein? It felt almost like that one episode of “Seinfeld” where the gang met bizarro versions of themselves, given that we had a young man desperate to believe paired with a more logic-oriented medical doctor. We imagine that there are some out there who wonder whether or not the show is plotting this out to be some sort of spin-off in the future featuring these characters, though for the time being we’d say that this is doubtful. Our feeling is more that this was meant as a projection that there will always be people with the same traits as Mulder and Scully, and the cycle will continue long after these two are gone.

While some other recent episodes of the show have been somewhat more supernatural or even physical, we’d say that “Babylon” dived more into the psychological, belief constructs, and whether or not it is okay to have faith in something. We don’t think that it ever enforced a particular ideology, not that it really needed to. We found this an entertaining episode from start to finish, but we don’t know if we would call it fully connected. With some of its strange montages and fever-dreams, we feel like it needed another ten or fifteen minutes to really get the point perfectly across.

Now, let’s make sure Mulder never has mushrooms again. Grade: B.

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