The X-Files S1, E16: “Young at Heart”

The X-Files S1, E16: “Young at Heart”

“Young at Heart” is your average monster-of-the-week episode (how many times have I started a review with that sentence?) that manages to give you some solid freaky moments for the hour and gives you a bit of insight into Mulder and Scully, but without going deep enough or spooky enough to put it in the pantheon. There are a lot of ideas floating around in “Young at Heart,” which makes it seem kind of crowded. It still works well enough for me to give it a pass though.

In the cold open, we see a prisoner stumble upon something he probably shouldn’t. A doctor is amputating a fellow inmate named Barnett, and pushes a scapel against the prisoner’s neck, telling him Barnett is dead. But the prisoner sees him blink. In present day, an old boss of Mulder’s, Agent Reggie Purdue (Dick Anthony Williams), calls him and Scully in on a bank robbery with a murder that at first seems routine. Mulder and Purdue both see the similarities to Mulder’s first case on the job, in which a bank robber kills bystanders and hostages just for spite. The spooky thing is, the robber has already been caught years ago and died in prison: Barnett.