A Special Edition

This episode is basically a parody of the "expose" genre, with an added twist of government suppression and manipulation of the narrative even if the narrative is fundamentally wrong. It has the added interesting twist of casting Bruce Harwood as the informant, a year into his role as Byers in the X Files. In fact, it has a very strong X Files undertone to it.

All of the footage from previous episodes is used here, but used without the whole story. The people putting it all together don't really know what they are looking at, or what story it tells. They tell their own story with it, but it's not true. Those of us who have seen these previous episodes know this. It's fascinating to watch what story is told in an attempt to tie those clips together.

Not knowing the whole story, and therefore getting the story wrong, but also having enough fundamental aspects of truth that the government suppresses it -- that's very X FIles.

It's not an excellent episode by any means, but it's interesting enough.

Another lame attempt to reuse scenes from the previous three seasons. In this one, a reporter played by Alan Thicke is doing a broadcast, attempting to expose the federal government's efforts at genetic engineering, including the use of cloning. The broadcast isn't bad and is handled nicely by Thicke, but to take unrelated episodes and try to fuse them just doesn't work. People who care about this stuff must have been so angry to see how the original plots were ignored so a bit of footage could be taken out of context. It is exciting, certainly, but we are given a dose of what will happen early on. Like so much of the science fiction/fantasy anthology stuff, we know that the characters are constantly swimming uphill. I haven't seen future episodes, but I sincerely hope they can come up with a budget that would allow them to do a new episode, even an exciting one, to conclude the season.