Hidden Truth/Hidden Truth.iso/data/xfiles/x-files3/oubliette.rvw

Text File | 1996-09-22 | 7.8 KB | 145 lines

                           Oubliette

                       by Sarah Stegall

                copyright 1995 by Sarah Stegall


     This review very nearly didn't get written.  It took me
several tries to get all the way through "Oubliette".  As the
mother of two small daughters, who received their school
pictures in the mail this week, who lives in the county where
Richard Wade Davis will shortly go on trial for kidnapping a
young girl out of her bedroom two years ago and leaving her
body in a shallow roadside grave, this episode was nearly
impossible for me to watch.  It struck too close to the fears
that lie in every parent's heart, that keep us awake and
listening for sounds in the middle of the night, that make us
get up at three in the morning to make sure the doors to the
house are locked--again.  What the childless (or the
oblivious) don't understand is that this bone-deep fear
translates very, very easily into a rage unequaled in the
human psyche.
     The world is divided into two groups:  those with
children and those without.  Most of the time this division is
invisible, but on issues that deal with children in peril, the
gulf is often wide and uncrossable.  Last spring's furious
Internet debate on child endangerment following "The Calusari"
showed just how deep that chasm is. While I usually am
uninterested in the personal lives or agendas of the people
behind "The X-Files", I had to wonder halfway through if
writer Charles Craig has children.  Did he realize how
powerful were the feelings he was rousing in part of his
audience?  Portrayals of imperiled children are not just one
more emotional button a screenwriter can push--hooks like this
short-circuit a parent's entire emotional control board.  At
the end of "Oubliette", I didn't just want justice for both
kidnap victims, I wanted to feed Carl Wade his own eyeballs.
When Mulder shot him down in the stream where he killed his
victim, it was not enough.  I wanted "The X-Files", which has
rubbed my nose in unnecessary gore several times, to show
Wade's head exploding in a slow-motion, highly satisfactory
reprisal.  Shooting him in the back was not enough.
     Needless to say, my reaction to this episode was not
terribly objective.
     When 15 year old Amy Jacobs (Jewel Staite) is abducted
out of her bedroom by a stranger, waitress Lucy Householder
(Tracey Ellis) across town bleeds the victim's own blood and
murmurs words spoken by the abductor.  Mulder wastes no time
crossing a continent to join the investigation (arriving ahead
of Scully while Scene of Crime men are still at work) in
Seattle, drawn to the case by this strange behavior.  Scully,
along with the rest of the FBI agents involved in this case,
assume that Lucy is an accomplice of kidnaper Carl Wade
(Michael Chieffo), even after they discover that Lucy is
herself the survivor of a five-year kidnapping ordeal.  Mulder
becomes her sole champion as her growing empathic bond with
Amy forces her to relive the nightmare.
     Writer Charles Grant Craig and director Kim Manners keep
the anxiety level high throughout the episode, as we who
remember the desperate hunt for young Polly Klaas are forced
to see reenactments of various incidents from that case.
Those of us who saw "Silence of the Lambs" cannot help but be
reminded by Wade's 'oubliette' (a dungeon whose access is only
through a trapdoor in the roof) of the similar homemade prison
in that movie.  Jewel Strait did a wonderful job of shredding
my heart with her depiction of a terrified yet resourceful
Amy, who very nearly escapes her tormentor.  Her solo effort,
when Davis stalks her during a bone-chilling scene in the dark
basement with a red viewfinder light, is a tour de force of
panic and bewilderment of which any actress can be proud.
     But top acting kudos go to David Duchovny and Tracey
Ellis for two unforgettable performances.  Ellis infuses the
wretched Lucy with enough anger, bitterness and self-pity to
make her believably hostile and defensive, yet gives her
enough courage and fighting spirit to win our sympathy.  Her
unhappy, unlucky life has left Lucy with little in the way of
inner resources, a victim trapped forever in her misery by
internal scars that neither time nor therapy nor drugs can
erase.  The title of the episode, "Oubliette", derives from
the French "to forget", and reminds us that for Lucy, death is
the only sleep that will not give her nightmares.  Mulder
alone understands that her stubborn wall of refusal is really
a fragile eggshell hiding the tortured soul within.  Ellis let
us see both the wall and the shattered self it protected.
Lucy's final self-sacrifice to save Amy recalls the
sacrificial theme introduced in "Paper Clip", where Melissa
Scully dies in her sister's place.
     Whole new dimensions of Fox Mulder are revealed in this
short hour, as we see his tender and protective side, a truly
gentle man who can show compassion without being maudlin about
it, whose kind and persistent sympathy finally wins past the
scars and pain that seal off Lucy Householder from the world.
David Duchovny unlocks this character more than in any other
episode but "End Game", showing us solicitude and warmth in a
character who was in danger of going cold this season.  When I
first finished "Oubliette", I came away marveling at the range
of facial expression Duchovny showed in this episode.  But
when I ran it a second time, I saw that I was mistaken:
Duchovny plays Mulder as deadpan as ever.  But his voice, his
intonation, and most importantly, his body language convey the
emotion seeping past Mulder's defenses, revealing Mulder's
emotions more convincingly than a mere grimace would have.
Duchovny will never win an Emmy for this sort of thing as long
as Academy judges are more impressed with ranting and raving,
but it is a fine, highly controlled performance and deserves
high praise.
     And finally, FINALLY, I hear the words I have been
wanting to hear from Mulder for more than two years:  "Not
everything I say and think and feel goes back to my sister."
It is way, way past time to acknowledge that even the most
defining moment of a man's life is only one moment among many,
and that for a complex man like Mulder one motivation does not
fit all situations.
     Two glaring flaws stood out in the otherwise seamless
flow of this story:  Scully and the CPR incident.  I don't
know what Craig was trying to do with Scully in this episode:
she was almost antagonistic towards her partner.  If my
partner turned out to be right in 100% of the cases I
investigated with him, I would have considerably more patience
with his theories and his hunches.  I cannot quite understand
the clumsiness of the scene with Amy beside the river, where
Dr. Scully makes a half-hearted attempt to resuscitate her
before giving up.  A young healthy child suddenly drowned in
cold water stands an excellent chance of revival, enough to
justify several hours of uninterrupted CPR.  I can think of
any number of cinematic techniques that could have telescoped
that time for us, giving us a clear understanding of the
effort real agents would have put into her revival.  If time
was a constraint, there were several other sequences that
could have been cut from this episode:  notably one showing
Mulder arriving at the halfway house, getting out of the car,
climbing stairs, walking across a porch, climbing more stairs,
knocking on a door, being admitted...etc.  The pacing of the
entire episode seemed off more than once, with some scenes so
rushed I could barely understand the dialogue being rattled
off at breakneck pace, and some scenes so drawn out I kept
thinking some revelation was at hand that never developed.
     As always, however, blemishes like this stand out only
because the rest of the story draws us in so thoroughly.  A
strong story and first rate performances lift this episode
above the ordinary.  I award it five sunflower seeds out of
five.
     Now excuse me while I go check the doors and alarms
again...