By Nia Edwards-Behi
Chris Carter was recently posited as the George Lucas of television. It’s hard to argue with that assessment when an episode like Babylon comes along, an ultimately enjoyable but extremely flawed tale of terrorism, politics, and existential angst. In this episode a terrorist attack on an art gallery draws the attention of open-minded FBI Agent Miller (Robbie Amell) and his sceptical partner Agent Einstein (Lauren Ambrose), who visit Mulder and Scully for some advice. The two pairs of agents approach the task at hand in different ways: how can they communicate with a comatose bomber in order to determine where will be targeted next?
My biggest issue with this episode is that the way Chris Carter depicts his story is sometimes at odds with what he seems to be trying to say. There’s no doubt that Carter condemns many people in this episode – be it presumptuous passers-by, the racist nurse, the government, or extremist Islamists. What’s muddied by Carter’s clumsy story-telling is his ultimate sympathy for the young man who committed the bombing. He certainly doesn’t condone his actions, but Carter doesn’t want us to hate the young man in the hospital bed. The fact that the episode centres on the attempts of four intelligent people to communicate with him is in some way testament to that – gathering intelligence is really secondary to the manner in which each person approaches the task. When tackling such a hot-button topic as religious extremism, though, I can’t help but wish Carter had made it a bit clearer that he was condemning the really heinous views and stand-points held by some of the characters in the episode. The casual dismissal of these views by characters doesn’t quite seem like enough – if he allows the space for hate speech – which, as far as I’m concerned, is not a bad thing when he’s not condoning it – I wish he’d allowed a bit more space for its condemnation.
The depiction of Islamist terrorism isn’t the only way in which the episode is unsubtle (see also: Carter’s continuing obsession with the power of motherhood, and the on-the-nose discussions of love and hate), but the saving grace then is the comedic doppelganger-ing of Mulder and Scully with Miller and Einstein. Many aspects of the episode hark back to previous episodes – Fight Club, Field Trip, The Sixth Extinction – and the manner in which these are done are very welcome. Mulder gets to experience a very entertaining hallucinogenic trip, which not only features some classic Mulder embarrassing himself moments, but also sees the all-too-brief return of some familiar faces.
The best, most successfully satirical moment of the episode once again comes from Scully, with a line of dialogue that’s all too easy to miss in amongst the rest of the opining that’s going on. It feels to me that there was a reticence to go full-comedy with this episode, due to its subject matter, and that’s a loss, I think – I daresay it would have been more successful in making its point had it injected a bit more humour and removed the heavy-handed speech-making. Even so, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy what I watched, but there was definitely room for something a bit more.