“Darkness Falls” taps into The X-Files season 1 formula, as an apparent writing exercise to see if they could make trees scary. I think this was about the 3rd episode in a row to begin with Mulder showing Scully a case, and explaining that he had to pull some strings to get to go investigate it. She’s baffled–it does not appear to be an X-File! But Mulder pulls out some old case that is remarkably similar, so off they go.

This time they head deep into a forest, where a bunch of loggers have gone missing. Local police keep saying it’s ecoterrorists, murderous and evil and unseen and scary. But after finding some really old trees cut and a corpse inside a giant insect cocoon, Mulder gets other ideas. Apparently it was some sort of dormant insect, that swarms in the darkness. The actual explanation given was not very clear, or interesting. Visually, they were neon green fuzzy sparkles in the dark. There wasn’t much investigating though, as much of the 2nd half was Scully and Mulder trying to keep the lights on (the insects don’t swarm in the light).

The insects swarmed 2 or 3 people, killing them in their cocoon. Bizarrely, at the end, Scully and Mulder get cocooned. BUT DON’T DIE! This appeared to be explained by luck of timing… someone rescued them just in time. Stupid. Don’t cocoon them for no reason or consequence.

Wiki says this episode won some Environmental type award, so I assume there may have been deeper levels and commentary about living in nature and survival of the forests, but I can’t be bothered to think about the episode any more.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under XFiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.