This episode gets serious nostalgia points. Along with Squeeze and Ice, it's one of the few I remember from the one/two x-files seasons I watched when the show aired.
There's still a lot I really enjoyed, but I was stunned how bad some things were.
The good:
- fire power awesome. + like that he has to use an accelerent, makes things more difficult.
-Phoebe Green. Entertaining, but defiantly unprofessional to an extent that should get her fired.
- laced cough syrup genuinely disturbing + death.
- says something about M that he's initially interested in Phoebe even though she's clearly a manipulator.
The not so good:
- The Englishness. Oh, man. That gets me right in my stiff-upper-lip.
- confusing motives of killer.
- convenient fire phobia. would be fine with this if it ever came up again (although I can't remember M having to deal with fire at any later point- opportunity).
As for the faces-from-the-past-coming-back thing, I sort of like it. It's the kind of thing that could have added more to the show if it had been done better. If some of the people we saw in season one re-appeared later, we'd get an extra element to M and S the FBI outsiders: how friends think they should behave, cases from unusual sources, cases already considered solved or not considered x-files.
7/10