Redrum
A man accused of killing his wife claims that time is running
backwards for him.
I’m not a big fan of time travel / temporal anomaly stories. That’s often no fault of the stories themselves, it’s just because I have difficulty getting my head around the whole concept of time, and how it could be disrupted, and what the consequences would be. I usually think too hard about the temporal mechanics (as they might say on Star Trek) and end up ruining a perfectly good story. And I think that’s what I did with Redrum. I kept asking myself questions about how it could be possible, questions like: Why was time going backwards for Martin, but not for anybody else, not even the people involved in the murder investigation? And if it was only affecting him, why did Scully’s watch run backwards in the teaser? In fact, time wasn’t running backwards – Wells was experiencing the days in reverse order, but each day ran chronologically from his waking to his going to bed. The reasons for this were never properly explained (largely because, by the end of the episode, neither Doggett nor Scully had heard anything about it), but in some ways I was glad of this. It would have been difficult to do without descending into unsatisfying technobabble, and the theme of Wells’ redemption was strong enough to stand on its own. At least nobody used the phrase “state of temporal flux,” which, having possibly watched too much Star Trek, is one of the first phrases I associate with temporal anomalies.
I did enjoy the gradual “piecing together” of events that the story-telling method allowed, and the fact that the audience really knew no more than Wells did, at least about the crime itself. It was nice that Wells’ first explanation was that he’d had a premonition – that seemed much more believable than him immediately leaping to the conclusion that he’d been cartwheeling all over the space-time continuum. There were some little things I liked too, like Doggett spotting the sun in the mirror on the nanny-cam, and his interaction with Wells. Although Scully and Doggett had very little screen time, the story was intriguing (although perhaps not as intriguing as the premise suggested) even without them and I didn’t really notice their absence until afterwards.
The story had a moral, and one which didn’t seem forced or like it was hammered home, despite the final scene with the voiceover. That scene did feel a little as though it had been stuck on at the last minute, and I didn’t think the monologue was particularly well-written, although the ideas were interesting. The audience needed to know that Wells was paying for his crime, but this, and the themes of the closing monologue, could have been shown in some more subtle way.
Redrum was an enjoyable episode. It just made my brain hurt.
Wells: I did not kill Vicky.
Scully: If you truly don’t remember, then how can you be certain that you didn’t?
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