The X-Files “War Of The Corprophages”

Oh hey, Tyler Labine is playing a stoner!

Even better, Darin Morgan wrote another great episode!

The Case:  Cockroaches!  Everywhere!

The Rest:  Oh man, the episode that breaks the fourth wall when a cockroach wanders across the TV screen.  The unlikely love between an older robotics expert with an electrical voicebox in a wheelchair and a hot bug scientist named Bambi.  Scully washing her dog and trying to enjoy a night in.  This one has it all.

Mostly it has cockroaches.  People keep dying under mysterious circumstances while cockroaches are all over the place.  Mulder happened to be in the area stargazing, and Scully is just trying to have a peaceful night at home.

Here’s the thing:  the cockroaches are innocent.  Every time Mulder calls Scully at home, she correctly guesses how the victim really died, and the cockroaches, well…they were there.  That’s it.  A scientist, working with experimental energy sources, may have brought in some manure to produce methane and brother a particularly friendly roach species with him.  Also, some of the roaches might be alien probes investigating the Earth, hence Mulder’s consultation with Dr. Bambi  and then the robotics expert.

That Bambi thing…Mulder is clearly flirting, to no avail since this is a Darin Morgan script that makes him the butt of many a joke, and Scully is clearly making fun of him the whole time.  People panic over roaches, and that actually is what causes a couple of the deaths as people panic and have heart attacks.

So, the weird thing was just weird and no one was killed by it.  They were killed by very mundane and explainable things, but none of them were killed by roaches.

And there we are.  Two researchers find love, there might have been alien cockroach probes, and Mulder gets another reason to not like bugs where he may or may not have screamed like a little girl.

Up next, teenage girls gain superpowers.