Roland

A friend of mine recently said, as we are re-watching "The X-Files" together, that season one was more about people coming back from the dead than about aliens. Considering that this is the fourth or fifth episode this season to deal with this already tired and over-used idea, I'd tend to agree. None of these episodes being particularly good doesn't help either.

"Roland" is not as completely uninteresting as things like "Born Again", and is fractionally better than "Lazarus" thanks to a certain scene I'll discuss later, but it's still pretty bad, with countless errors others have already noticed/noted and a particularly poor and clichéd portrayal of autism. Some have called this guest performance 'brilliant', but it's really quite abysmal and inaccurate, and laughable at times.

The plot is convoluted and on the level, generally, of something you'd find late at night on one of the less prestigious and reputable cable channels, but at least there's one absolutely phenomenal kill, when Roland pushes a scientist's head into liquid nitrogen then throws him to the floor, shattering the head and as he walks away he steps on an ear... *crunch*. It's years ahead of the similar and much more noted and acclaimed scene in "Jason X" (which is similarly the best scene in that movie), and I'd wager a good amount that this was the main inspiration for that.

4/10