Two FBI agents, Fox Mulder the believer and Dana Scully the skeptic, investigate the strange and unexplained, while hidden forces work to impede their efforts.
OK so it wasn't the cleanest path to the truth, but it was at times a gripping, if not campy, journey to get there. The episode did have some genuinely scary and disturbing moments.
Actively, this is short-sighted, spotty-ass writing, beholden to high-concept ideas without the intelligence or imagination to give them weight, to anchor all the weirdness in anything but grim, typically grotesque bloodshed.
I kind of liked it? I mean, there's more to criticize, and we'll get to that, but up until the last five minutes or so, I enjoyed "Familiar," in no small part thanks to the predictable but deeply creepy set-pieces.
"Familiar" works in a way no other "serious" episodes have lately. There's no incoherent William drama, no awkward struggle to incorporate fan-service cameos.
There's something refreshing about how standalone this episode is - after so many episodes that doubled as commentary on The X-Files, here this season relaxes into the sort of unselfconscious story that made up the bulk of the show.
In a perfect world there might be at least one or two more episodes like "Familiar" in the mix. But as always with The X-Files, we take what we get, and are more often than not grateful we're getting it at all.
