1x05 - "The Jersey Devil"

This one's kinda goofy. But in a good way.

What Happened? It's 1947 in Jersey, according to the chyron, and a nuclear family is driving down the road singing "BINGO" when they get a flat. The dad steps out of the car... and is immediately mauled by a beast! Oh no!

In the present day, Mulder is looking at a porno mag. Scully gives him side-eye. He says he's reading it for the articles. (Articles on aliens, duh.) Scully tells him that a body was found cannibalized in New Jersey, and Mulder immediately suspects it's the Jersey Devil. One quick trip to Atlantic City later, Mulder and Scully are chatting with the coroner. The local sheriff comes in and tells them to go away, it's his case. Mulder tells Scully, hey, why don't we get a hotel and spend a wild weekend at Atlantic City? Tragically, rather than play baccarat, Scully goes home to chaperone her godson's birthday party. Mulder then does some solo investigating - he talks to the park ranger, chats with a homeless guy who knew the dead guy, that sort of thing. All the while, he is being stalked by some sort of beast. Mulder gives the homeless guy his hotel key and sleeps in a parking lot, to try and spot the Jersey Devil. Which he thinks he sees on a roof - but he gets carted away by local authorities. The sheriff yells at Mulder for getting in the way of his investigation. Mulder accuses him of keeping the murders under wraps so that tourists don't get scared away.

Scully bails Mulder out of jail and takes him to see her old professor at the University of Maryland. The professor explains that the true monsters... are the humans. Mulder then asks whether it would be possible for a human to devolve into a neanderthal and then eat people. Professor We-Are-The-Virus says, um, probably not? After which Scully goes on a date with some generic 90's businessman guy who's the dad of one of her godson's friends or whatever. He is not a compelling man. Scully then gets a beep on the beeper she has, because this is 1993, and Mulder tells her his latest theory: what if the cave man... is a cave WOMAN! Or at least, that's what we intuit he means, from the way he is staring very very intensely at the tits on a line drawing of Sasquatch.

Mulder assembles a ragtag crew of cavewoman hunters: him, Scully, Professor We-Are-The-Virus, and the park ranger - who is now holding a big-ass shotgun full of tranqs. The local cops are also there, for much the same reason. Mulder finds the cave lady and gets mauled by her. There's more chasey hunty shooty. Oh no, the cave lady gets shot by the cop. Mulder is very distraught about this and says the neanderthal was "beautiful." Okay? A week later, Scully tells Mulder that the autopsy's come in, and it looked like the cave woman had given birth at some point. Oh, Mulder says, it all makes sense now - she was just protecting her children! And then the episode ends with us in the Joisey woods, where a little cave girl is poking her head out of a crevice. Aww.

Is It Any Good? "Jersey Devil" starts with Mulder looking at porn, which sets the tone for a weirdly horny and not especially compelling (but surprisingly charming) episode. The "monster of the week" is phenomenally underwhelming, but the way this episode is structured as a series of intercut Mulder and Scully solo adventures works pretty well and almost makes up for how thin the plot is. This episode has a lot of cute moments that serve to humanize our leads - Scully gets to interact with a room full of kids and is given a hint of a romantic and family life, while moments like Mulder casually giving his hotel room to a vagrant and shows his fundamental decency. And the episode seems intermittently aware of how goofy the premise is: the mock jump cut where the viewer is "assaulted" by a kid in a gorilla mask, or the mock-tense scene where Mulder is led into an alley and given super secret intel, but the intel is a doodle of Bigfoot with boobs, are pretty funny. The attempts at legitimate "tension" sort of fall flat, though.

The only dour note about the episode is that the characters (all white, incidentally) keep making wisecracks about Africa ("you want a safari, go to Africa," "eight million years out of Africa," etc) in ways that are probably innocuous but kind of weird in the context of an episode about feral "de-evolved" people who live in the jungle. This got my "problematic 90's genre show" spidey sense tingling. Less problematically but more annoyingly the episode wastes a perfectly good metaphor by portraying Atlantic City and its casinos as a tourist trap rather than a destination that caters to - or systematically exploits - our dumb lizard brains' pleasure center. Oh, and it goes without saying, but it's immensely disappointing that the episode isn't about an actual Jersey devil, because those things are cool looking.


(art by Nathan Anderson - he has a whole set of these, one for each letter of the alphabet, all badass)

Should Scully Believe in Aliens? No aliens this time, just ludicrous pop-evo-psych.

Most Nineties Moment: Scully has a beeper, which she removes from a leather purse.