Agua Mala is an episode that had a lot of potential but fails in some aspects.
It starts out with a super scary teaser with the mom and the son frantically trying to protect themselves from a yet unknown assailant. They are then attacked by some tentacled monster. It had the perfect setup to be a truly terrifying classic X-Files episode. However, it gets laced with too much humor.
The X-Files excels when it has a scary premise interspersed with some subtle humor, usually consisting of witty one-liners by Mulder or some funny dialogue between Mulder and Scully. But, in Agua Mala, writer David Amann wanted to make every guest character funny, from the bumbling deputy to the gun-toting patriot. This episode could've been so much better had it just concentrated on the already frightful premise of the sea monster and left the humor behind.
Besides the great teaser and the frightening premise I also liked how the episode sprinkled clues to the solution of the sea monster throughout the episode, beginning in the teaser. It kind of makes the viewer the detective. I also thought the crew did a good job at recreating a Floridian hurricane.
Darren McGavin does a fine job returning to his role as Arthur Dales.
The ending was very abrupt to me. Mulder is struggling in the hallway, the sea monster bursts out of the ceiling light, George shoots at it, and then....storm over, different scene. Everything is okay. The conclusion is resolved through exposition instead of action. It's almost as if they ran out of time for the episode and had to wrap it up quickly. I don't like how they did that.
Agua Mala is still an entertaining episode and I enjoy it a lot. However, the too frequent humorous lines dampens what could've a truly horrifying classic x-files.
It starts out with a super scary teaser with the mom and the son frantically trying to protect themselves from a yet unknown assailant. They are then attacked by some tentacled monster. It had the perfect setup to be a truly terrifying classic X-Files episode. However, it gets laced with too much humor.
The X-Files excels when it has a scary premise interspersed with some subtle humor, usually consisting of witty one-liners by Mulder or some funny dialogue between Mulder and Scully. But, in Agua Mala, writer David Amann wanted to make every guest character funny, from the bumbling deputy to the gun-toting patriot. This episode could've been so much better had it just concentrated on the already frightful premise of the sea monster and left the humor behind.
Besides the great teaser and the frightening premise I also liked how the episode sprinkled clues to the solution of the sea monster throughout the episode, beginning in the teaser. It kind of makes the viewer the detective. I also thought the crew did a good job at recreating a Floridian hurricane.
Darren McGavin does a fine job returning to his role as Arthur Dales.
The ending was very abrupt to me. Mulder is struggling in the hallway, the sea monster bursts out of the ceiling light, George shoots at it, and then....storm over, different scene. Everything is okay. The conclusion is resolved through exposition instead of action. It's almost as if they ran out of time for the episode and had to wrap it up quickly. I don't like how they did that.
Agua Mala is still an entertaining episode and I enjoy it a lot. However, the too frequent humorous lines dampens what could've a truly horrifying classic x-files.