The X-Files: Miracle Man Rewatch

March 14, 2020 9:02 PM - Season 1, Episode 18

Scully and Mulder investigate a faith healing ministry in Tennessee after several unexplained sudden deaths occur among its attendants.
posted by orange swan (1 comment total)

It really wasn't a kindness to bring someone as terribly burned as Vance was back to life. What agony he must have suffered during his recovery period. It's pretty twisted of him to start killing innocent people in response, though. I wish he'd just stuck to tricks such as the locust mini-plague, which was actually rather cool.

If Simon really had healing powers as we seem to be meant to think he did, couldn't he also have healed the people Vance had poisoned from the effects of cyanide? And if he'd really come back to life, wouldn't he have turned up eventually?

The law concerning the investigation of the deaths caused by Vance seems hinky to me. I know in Ontario the authorities do autopsies when there is anything unusual about a death. When, for instance, my brother died of a heart attack at the age of 42 in 2011, his body was autopsied because it isn't usual for people to die of heart attacks at that age. Neither my parents nor his not-quite ex-wife nor his common law partner of four years were asked to consent to it -- the authorities simply did it, because that was the law. Does anyone know more than me what the law is in the states, or more specifically what the law might have been in Tennessee in the early 1990s? It seems so bizarre to me that victim's next of kin could refuse to have the victim's death properly investigated -- after all, the murdered might be the next of kin.

Mulder really is so vulnerable to any suggestion involving his sister.
posted by orange swan at 1:13 PM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]