"I changed it to trust everyone,  I didn't tell you?" ~ Mulder

Well, that wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it would be, but it wasn't exactly a picnic either. It didn't have the old X-Files feel, but it was suspenseful and interesting and thought provoking. I found Scully's email interaction with Mulder sufficiently depressing and, if you take away the flowery language and "Dearest Dana," it was just what I needed to reaffirm my belief that the show has always been and will continue to be about Mulder and Scully, the rest is just an endless cast of minor characters and confusing details.

With that said, the only major complaint I have is that Doggett and Reyes seemed like third wheels. I almost think that this would have been a good episode to give RP and AG the week off and let The Lone Gunmen take over the Dana-sitting, cause you know she can't do it on her own. I stand by my reasons for not understanding Doggett's and Reyes' motivation in the series: they have no personal stake in all of this, so why should they care? And why should I care if they care? It makes me wonder exactly what they do on a week-by-week basis and what their solve rate is... and how long they'll last.

Scully wasn't quite as unbearably tearful as I found her to be in some episodes before this, maybe because I empathized with her tears. It would be nice if she wouldn't cry so much being that she barely did it at all in the past eight years. She probably cried more in the past few months than she has in her whole life. And I don't particularly understand why she is so trusting of anyone after Doggett tells her to be. After all that she's been through, if Doggett told me to trust someone, especially him, I would get extra suspicious.

Mythologically speaking, their are a few things I don't understand, like why is Mulder the only one who can "make the connections" between all this super-soldier stuff? I would think that Scully would be just as capable of "making the connections" being that she knows just about everything that Mulder knows about the mythology. And for that matter, neither of them know much about this super-soldier, so why couldn't Doggett or Reyes do it? And why was their DNA on the clothes that "Shadow Man" gave Scully? For such a paranoid person, that was a really stupid thing for him to do, leaving tell-tale DNA behind...

...oh, right, gotta move that plot along.

The teaser was really, really nice though. I had fun identifying the episodes and I didn't get one: the one after the Paper Hearts scene and before the Milgaro scene.

Anyway, Scully asked a long time ago, "better than you expected or better than you hoped?" Answer: better than I expected, but not better than I'd hoped. Its still not enough to get me interested in the new mythology angle, give how the first angle was ultimately handled, and if had my way, we'd never see 1) William, or 2) Scully cry ever again. Also, Mulder would never EVER call Scully "Dana."

Rating: 1.5 lounge chairs out of 5

As a side note, my sophomore year of high school, I signed my friends' yearbooks with the phrase "trust no 1" and was asked several times what "trust number one" meant.