Possibly now in it’s final season, The X-Files (FOX, Sundays, 9pm) continues to be purely enjoyable, even without David Duchovny front and center for every episode. Meanwhile, FreakyLinks (FOX, Fridays, 9pm) is attempting to pick up the inevitable slack once The X-Files ends it’s run. Unfortunately for fans of the genre, FreakyLinks has been subject to dismal ratings and lousy reviews.
When it was announced last summer that Robert Patrick, who hadn’t done a whole lot of impressive work outside of 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day and 1997’s CopLand, would be taking over the male lead on The X-Files I was pretty skeptical. Luckily, it turns out that all Patrick needed was good material, and The X-Files has loads of that. Gillian Anderson and Patrick are good together, in fact, the episodes that have featured Duchovny’s Fox Mulder are less interesting than those that haven’t. Anderson’s Dana Scully is pregnant now, but it hasn’t dominated the show, or even really affected it much, although I’m sure it’ll figure in later in the season. Recent episodes, especially one involving a guy with x-ray vision, have been as much fun as the best of Duchovny’s episodes. I'm looking forward to the whole Mulder thing being resolved so the agents can get on with investigating odd occurrences every week, with the occasional conspiracy episode, the way Mulder and Scully used to do.
My favourite young actor is Ethan Embry (pictured above, center, with rest of cast), last seen on CBS’s clichéd Work With Me for four episodes last season. He’s Derek Barnes on FreakyLinks, brother of Adam Barnes, who committed suicide in the first episode. Flash forward a bit and Derek is running brother Adam’s website, investigating odd occurrences with the help of some friends and an odd stranger (Dennis Christopher, who is on the show so infrequently, I have to wonder why he appears in the opening credits). The show, originally known as Fearsum, is saddled with a lousy timeslot - the same one The X-Files had during it’s dismally rated first years. Fox has barely been promoting it and I have yet to see a single cast member on a talk show. It’s too bad because FreakyLinks is a fun show. Created, and then abandoned by the guys behind the first Blair Witch Project, the show is sometimes actually scary but is more often theoretically scary. It has stories about zombies and vampires, just like The X-Files has had, but the mood is usually too light. If the writers would stop basing scripts on old episodes of the superior show, like next week’s killer shadow episode (the X-Files' version starred Tony Shaloub as a man whose shadow would kill anyone who walked into it), and come up with fun, scary, original ideas, FreakyLinks might end up going the way of The X-Files - higher ratings and critical approval. As it is, the younger show is mostly potential, but it’s having a good time.
The X-Files: A; FreakyLinks: B+
Posted on January 14, 2001
FreakyLinks official site
The X-Files official site
