"Teliko"
"Teliko" is one of The X-Files's most forgettable hours and I don't really want to say much about it. The episode begins with a pretty startling sight, a black guy turned into an albino, but the episode drops from there. It's one of those episodes, you know, the ones where the writers add an "ethnic" flair to the episode, this time showing off African folklore. While the episode has a notion of the government ignoring deaths of black men, it also seems rather anti-immigrant, the immigrant in question,Samuel Aboah, turning out to be a monster and the guy helping him getting hurt.
The teliko itself is pretty forgettable itself, as we don't know its intentions for a long time and we don't really see it in the end when Scully shoots it. There's the usual science vs. supernatural debate which ends with the scientific knowledge that the teliko is a tribe of people that steals hormones from blacks.
Score: 7.8/10
"Unruhe"
Compared to "Teliko," "Unruhe" is a pretty great episode. There are good Mulder and Scully moments, a decent villain, and genuinely tense scenes. But the episode isn't all that interesting. The supernatural hook of the episode is a killer who somehow imprints his visions onto film. Since the killer turns out to be a legitimately crazy person, we never really know why it happens and the episode feels empty in the end.
The photo manipulation in the episode seems like a precursor to the thousands of scenes in the last decade in which the computer basically blows the investigation wide open. It's cool for The X-Files since computers aren't widely used, but it has gotten way overused as a method of plot development.
Score: 8.7/10
