I'm somewhat conflicted by the idea that Mulder's mother committed suicide in this episode. The rationale was laid out plausibly enough, but I always gave Teena Mulder (Rebecca Toolan) a lot more credit for being a strong person who survived her daughter Samantha's abduction and marriage to a State Department employee who had his own share of stress, as revealed by the series in prior stories. Scully's autopsy revealing Mrs. Mulder's disfiguring Paget's carcinoma made the suicide somewhat more credible, but I still have a queasy feeling about it.
The other thing that bothered me about the story was the presence of all those burial mounds behind Ed Truelove's Santa Claus/North Pole workshop. As a popular tourist spot, what are the odds that a visitor NEVER walked around back there, even if by accident? That he could have kept up that secret for so long, serial killer that he was, doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Maybe we're not supposed to look at these stories so critically, but in my case I can't help it. Some of these oddities seem just too obvious.
Apart from the story line, the big surprise for me here was the presence of Kim Darby in the role of Kathy Lee Tencate, the woman who lost a son under similar circumstances as the LaPierre's, and was accused of and incarcerated for murder. She beat out the likes of Tuesday Weld, Mia Farrow and Karen Carpenter for the role of Mattie Ross to John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn in the 1969 version of the Western, "True Grit". I didn't really make the connection until I started this review, but the resemblance is there, although the passage of forty years had left it's mark. She was such a royal pain in the side of John Wayne's character in that film, which is why I remember her so well.
With a lot of similarity to the Jon Benet Ramsey case, this episode would have resonated a lot more with followers of the series back when it originally aired. I think someone catching it for the first time today wouldn't make the connection so easily, even with the clip of Jon Benet made part of the story. On the subject of the title of this episode, 'Sein und Zeit' - it was the name of German philosopher Martin Heidegger's treatise on the subject 'Being and Time', written in 1927. He sought to provide a definitive analysis on the concept of 'being', and although heralded as a landmark work, it probably does little to provide an answer on a subject as elusive as God or the soul. A topic, as Mulder would conclude, to be as frustratingly elusive as any truth he ever hoped to discover.
The other thing that bothered me about the story was the presence of all those burial mounds behind Ed Truelove's Santa Claus/North Pole workshop. As a popular tourist spot, what are the odds that a visitor NEVER walked around back there, even if by accident? That he could have kept up that secret for so long, serial killer that he was, doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Maybe we're not supposed to look at these stories so critically, but in my case I can't help it. Some of these oddities seem just too obvious.
Apart from the story line, the big surprise for me here was the presence of Kim Darby in the role of Kathy Lee Tencate, the woman who lost a son under similar circumstances as the LaPierre's, and was accused of and incarcerated for murder. She beat out the likes of Tuesday Weld, Mia Farrow and Karen Carpenter for the role of Mattie Ross to John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn in the 1969 version of the Western, "True Grit". I didn't really make the connection until I started this review, but the resemblance is there, although the passage of forty years had left it's mark. She was such a royal pain in the side of John Wayne's character in that film, which is why I remember her so well.
With a lot of similarity to the Jon Benet Ramsey case, this episode would have resonated a lot more with followers of the series back when it originally aired. I think someone catching it for the first time today wouldn't make the connection so easily, even with the clip of Jon Benet made part of the story. On the subject of the title of this episode, 'Sein und Zeit' - it was the name of German philosopher Martin Heidegger's treatise on the subject 'Being and Time', written in 1927. He sought to provide a definitive analysis on the concept of 'being', and although heralded as a landmark work, it probably does little to provide an answer on a subject as elusive as God or the soul. A topic, as Mulder would conclude, to be as frustratingly elusive as any truth he ever hoped to discover.