First Person Shooter
The Lone Gunmen contact Mulder and Scully when a man is
killed inside a virtual reality game.
This was good, relatively brainless fun - the kind of thing you can sit
back, watch and enjoy without having to concentrate too hard. It looked great,
not to mention expensive, and the plot was improbable and not particularly well
explained, but engaging nonetheless. So I enjoyed First Person Shooter
on a basically shallow level, which was fine. I don't think I really have very
much to say about it, but here goes anyway.
Phoebe's motives seemed odd to say the least. OK, so she created an
"improved" virtual reality version of herself to keep on the computer
- I can see the appeal of doing that. But in what way did this enable her to
"strike back as a woman"? Creating a scantily-clad
"goddess" who pretty much embodied most men's fantasies is hardly
advocating women's rights. I didn't quite understand the link between the
sexism and Matraiya's creation. The gender issues themselves were so-so. I
didn't find them that interesting, but I was glad to see that, while we heard
about Phoebe's problems working in a "haze of rampant testosterone"
and were shown what she meant by this, we also saw Scully stereotyping men as,
well, testosterone-driven fools. And this is what does happen in real life -
we've seen before that Scully has suffered sexism in her job, but in striking
back against any stereotype, a new stereotype is often created. I did find the
way Mulder played off the sexism amusing, for example his mock excitement at
seeing Darryl Musashi (whose demise was filmed in such a way as to show just
enough gore to make the viewer wince without being too gratuitous) and his
response to Scully's question "What kind of moron gets his [note - his]
ya-yas out like that?"
I thought that Matraiya's arrival in the game needed a lot more
explanation than was given - even if it had wandered into technobabble and
jargon, some indication that the plot had been thought out beyond "let's
have a killer version of Lara Croft" would have been nice. But that didn't
really matter when I first watched the episode. As I said, this was a fun,
entertaining show - but it doesn't really stand up to too much analysis, and I
really don't think it was supposed to.
As ever, I enjoyed the Lone Gunmen's enthusiasm tempered with Scully's
lack thereof. Even Byers smiled, yet Scully remained unimpressed. Scully's
statements of the obvious ("this man's been shot" and "what do
you call this?" on picking up the gun), and Ivan's subsequent denial were
also amusing. And Scully's three increasingly frustrated speeches into her Dictaphone
made me smile too.
The panning up shots of Mulder, and later Scully, in game gear were
great. Apparently, Scully looked rather good if you like that sort of thing. So
it's a shame for all the women watching that Mulder looked, well, plain silly really.
J As a Scully fan,
I loved the image of Scully shooting down the multiple Matraiyas as Mulder dived
for cover in front of her. His line "Ask me if I'm humiliated" also
amused me - although being rescued by Scully, who is hardly a wet and flimsy
little girl, is hardly humiliating.
Not everything worked though. Mulder and Scully's brief "violence
in video games is or is not related to violence in real life" debate
seemed a little forced and anyway, this issue was dealt with more effectively
in Wetwired. And the dialogue wasn't always very
well written - I really didn't like Byers' and Langly's lines: "Our
friends are in there" "And we're not going to let them die."
Neither did I like Mulder's closing voiceover. I just didn't think the episode
needed it, and the attempt to change into philosophical mode after such an
action-driven, almost shallow episode didn't work for me. The music was good
throughout, though, particularly in the scene when the Lone Gunmen and Phoebe
entered the eerily empty game space looking for Mulder and Scully. But the
ending left me a little confused. Who was the woman on the computer supposed to
look like - Phoebe or Scully? She had Phoebe's hair colour, but no fringe, more
like Scully. Or maybe it wasn't supposed to be either of them. It didn't really
matter. This was a solid, entertaining episode as long as you didn't look too
closely. Which is partly why this review's pretty short.
Best Lines
Scully: Video games.
Mulder: Digital entertainment.
Langly: Welcome to the land where silicon meets silicone.
Mulder: You have to admit though, Scully, this is a pretty amazing
piece of technology.
Scully: Yeah - wasted on a stupid game.
Phoebe: You don't know what it's like - day in and day out, choking in
a haze of rampant testosterone.
Scully: I wouldn't be so sure.
Mulder: That's entertainment!
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