Lazarus

38:20 into the episode, Mulder says they have 1000 households to check. They have 100 officers, and each officer can check 30 households per hour. He says they will cover the area in 3 hours.

100 officers x 30 = 3000 households per hour. 3 hours should be 9000 households. They should be able to check the 1000 households in 20 minutes, not 3 hours. It's strange no one of the cast or production team realized this.

Lazarus is a fine, body-switching episode. Although it's difficult to tell who got the better end of the deal. True, Jack Willis' body is still alive, but he has another man's soul in him. Warren Dupre has lost his body, but his soul is very much alive in another man's body. What a perfect disguise for a criminal, as an officer of the law! In Fire, two episodes before, Mulder had a past love interest show up. In Lazarus, it's Scully's turn, as Jack Willis is her former FBI academy instructor whom she dated. But the results are not similar, as Mulder shows no hints of jealousy at all. In Tempus Fugit, Scully comments that in the four years she's known Mulder he's never remembered her birthday. In Lazarus, Mulder gives Scully a birthday card signed by Willis two months early to test him. I wouldn't exactly call that never remembering. Another excellent guest performance given by Christopher Allport as Jack Willis. Plus, this episode has a nice little twist at the end that surprised me.

It's a Gansa/Gordon script so you can expect the inevitable hokey, cheap storytelling and stilted dialogue (oh how much better Gordon ended up being without Gansa). Once you get past some hilariously bad dialogue this isn't a particularly awful episode, if still a bad one. It's got some tense scenes and some effective use of characters, particularly Scully. Once the dilemma is set up the episode gets more interesting, but that's not saying much. It turns into a standard thriller towards the end.

What made "The X-Files" great was how it regularly put a fun and different spin on things every time it slipped into more traditional and predictable territory. You would think that you knew what was happening then they'd put something in there that elevated the script above the standard. What I don't like about a lot of season one episodes is how that special spark is seriously lacking, and how many of them seem like subpar anthology show episodes or, worse, subpar police procedurals with a supernatural twist. "Lazarus" is just more mediocrity.

4/10

Features a great story premise, great guest acting, and we see Mulder and Scully's acting fully develop and mature in this episode - season 1 featured some spotty acting especially on David's part but by this episode, our two main leads fully embrace and mature their characters that later be the foundation for future seasons

The score is also amazing in this episode, and the music perfect synced with the tension. Probably one of the best scores I cna recall in any X Files episode.

The story premise is presented and framed in a engaging and creative way and the tension and story pacing are fantastic and riveting.

I don't get why some critics at the time gave it marginal reviews but I would bet they would change their minds upon a revisit to the episode.

This provides the usual X atmosphere plus a few standard TV thrills. Not a favorite with the fans it seems, but I think it is as deep as X-Files has been.

Which is to say, it is not mind-bending stuff because we have a 'real' super-reality but within those limits, it exemplifies some worthwhile layering much better than usual for the series. Usually, what extralogical forces Mulder and Scully encounter can be understood as inner mental urges of the characters, standard noir rules; Mulder's fear of a fiery love affair from his past as the volatile combustions of Fire, Scully's assertion of feminine independence in Jersey Devil and so on.

The story here is that simultaneously two men die, FBI agent and psychopathic robber, one is resuscitated back to life but in those few minutes of dead time the identities have shifted, the 'evil' consciousness returning in the agent's body.

The robber (as the agent) seeks to be reunited with his girlfriend accomplice, with whom they had a deep, dangerous love affair, this is mirrored in the past love affair Scully had with the colleague she resuscitated. So her ex- is now 'evil' and acting strange, which from Scully's always hesitant pov becomes the reluctance for commitment we know from Jersey Devil.

In the latter stages, we have Scully 'trapped' between the passionate couple, seeing as helpless observer the kind of corrosive passion she has kept from herself, conjuring in the man's mind memories of a past trip together as her attempt to awaken the 'good' person she knew.

Even more tantalizing: in this quasi-magical reality of having survived death, the robber experiences a nightmare of betrayal and heartbreak, with love as a sham.

So this is an attractive episode in narrative terms, again constrained by hard presentation. It is deep, in the sense that you can read a series of altered realities as inter-leavened dreams from opposing pairs of eyes.