The ending of season one appears to have been filled with an unsureness about whether the show would return. Thus, they filled it up with monster episodes. And not, as early on in the season, typical X-Files monster episodes: gruesome happenings lead to a monster trying to survive, then it is stopped, but not really… his terror will continue in another form, or after hibernation, or whatever. Creepy and cool, and the survival made it super-interesting.

Now though, they’ve filled up with more cliched monster stories, such as this one, “Shapes.” I’ll summarize. A man thinks he shoots an animal, but turns out it is another man. More gruesome deaths follow. Scully wonders why they’re there, it’s not an X-File, oh no! Mulder and Old Indian Chief think it is a shapeshifter (i.e., a werewolf) (they never use the word ‘werewolf,’ for some reason). The shapeshifter gets Scully alone in a house, who is saved at the last minute by Mulder. They shoot it, and go home.

There really wasn’t any suspense, nor any of that X-Filean twist about trying to survive. (Though the Old Indian Chief did say to Mulder at the end, “we’ll see you in 8 years” which I guess was some hint that it would happen again.) And to to top it off, the shapeshifter looked only slightly more realistic than Oz in Buffy. There was also some stuff about the very first X-Files, which were about these shapeshifters.

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