The X-Files “Trevor”

Actress Catherine Dent has a good-sized guest role this time around.  She was a castmember on The Shield, an underrated series that was among one of the earliest examples of serialized storytelling that seems to have been largely forgotten these days compared to contemporary shows that likewise experimented with serialized storytelling.

Here, she’s an angry escaped con’s ex.

The Case:  Intangible Convict!

The Rest:  Oh man, the nastiest man in a Mississippi prison is in a work farm when he’s tossed in the hole and…wait, did they still have those in the 90s?  Never mind.  There’s a bad storm.  Tornado and everything.  And the warden was cut in half by something that reduced his insides to ashes while Big Bad Pinker was missing.  It’s weird enough that when Mulder and Scully arrive on the scene that Scully is the one to theorize spontaneous human combustion.

Yeah, that was weird.

But there’s a better explanation for all this, one that comes up when Pinker escapes from a cop by slipping through the handcuffs.  Mulder later easily breaks the cuffs because, hey, when this guy passes through solid objects, it makes them brittle.  Or turns people to dust.  He does that to a former partner’s face.

Yeah, that was something else.  Pinker wants what’s his.  Is that the $90,000 he stole from a bank and his ex-girlfriend June took with her?

Um, no.  She has his son, gave the boy away for adoption, changed her name, and used the money to buy a house while hinting she wanted her new boyfriend to marry her.

As it is, Pinker asks June’s sister, then hitches a ride in Mulder and Scully’s car by slipping into the trunk, and he sure does look unstoppable.  Then Mulder notes he couldn’t pass through glass when he was writing threats in a wall and that just means that whatever changed him won’t allow him to pass through insulators like glass and rubber.

Meanwhile, Scully earns her pay when she realizes Pinker doesn’t want the money, he wants the boy, and June gave the kid to her sister Jackie.

Which would be where Pinker went.

By the by…most of the moments of Pinker passing through solid objects happen off-screen.  I’m fine with that because the idea of using 90s era special effects to show him going through solid objects except for one really impressive shot when Jackie tosses a pit full of hot soup at his head.  By then, Mulder tries rubber bullets while Scully gets the boy (the “Trevor” of the episode’s title) to safety, but it turns out Pinker was looking to take the boy not to hurt him but to raise him, and he goes down when June runs him over with a car.  Sure, most of the car passed right through him, but that glass windshield on the other hand…

Oh, and for some reason, the episode tries to frame this as sad as Pinker was maybe, according to Mulder, looking for a second chance.  But this dude killed, like, three people over the course of the episode.  Or maybe four since Jackie’s left in an ambiguous state at the end.  He was violent and didn’t seem to care who died to get his son back, and he only backed off when he realized being a naked man smashing through a phone booth with a rock was too scary for the boy.  Yeah, not good enough for me.

Up next, psychic surgery!