The X-Files (TV Series) Surekill (2001) User Reviews

Calling Clark Kent...

[Muldernscully · 6/10 · 4 September 2007]

Surekill is a mixed bag for me. I so wanted to like this episode a lot. But it just wasn't happening. It's still a decent episode, but ultimately fails to pull the viewer in.

Surekill starts off with a great teaser. It has a man fleeing for his life, seemingly from an unstoppable assassin. The police place him in the drunk tank where he appears to be safe, but the man knows he is not safe. And then, blam!, right in front of the officer's eyes, the man is shot in a locked room.

I think the concept of x-ray vision is a very interesting concept. However, the writer just turned it into a simple, love triangle story. The story is slow-moving, uninteresting, and not that memorable. It was hard for me to take notes on this episode, because of those qualities.

There were a couple of high points to the episode. Mark Snow, once again, does some great music. I probably made more attention to it, because of the slow-moving story. Also, Michael Bowen gives a fantastic performance as Dwight Cooper. He is very believable as a sleazy jerk.

The concept of x-ray vision could have been dealt with in a better, more interesting fashion, thus making Surekill a little off target.

Great direction!

[aregularjulieandrews · 8/10 · 13 March 2016]

The direction in this episode was outstanding! Big fan of Terrence O'Hara. The teaser through the rain, the phone dangling, the blood on the door- fantastic. Determining the entry point and trajectory of the bullet. The cuts through the walls. All incredible. My favorite shot was the scene in the realtor's office with the bullet holes in the wall and the light shining through. I also really like the way he seemed to focus on close- ups of people's faces.

I love how Scully sounds more like Mulder every episode. X-ray vision? He'd be so proud! As much as I miss his presence on the show, the way Scully has slipped into his role and Doggett into her former skeptical one is interesting and fun to watch.

Standard Fare

[bobjohnson994 · 7/10 · 19 August 2007]

Wooohoo! First commenter!! First I want to thank Muldernscully for all their great reviews. I was ready to hate Robert Patrick, but he is too damn good and too believable. Some of the best actors (Robert Patrick in this case) have an "affected" persona - they are not playing it real, they are caricatures, like DeNiro - nobody really talks like that, the "affected" voice is more interesting than a normal, pragmatic sounding voice. I see he is from Georgia, but he uses the New Yorker accent and style. Scully does an affected voice also, mostly with her vocal pacing. Its gotten much better since season 1.

Anyways, if you have made it this far in the series, you will make it to the bitter end, so lets just say the episode is nothing special, the femme fatale is cute, and the antagonist is intense and menacing. If the acting had been less good, I would have given it a 6.

I also enjoy Scully verrrrrrry cautiously taking on the Mulder role, suggesting the fantastic, although you can see she is loathe to do it. So apparently Doggett is the new Scully. It will be interesting to see if that dynamic changes over the rest of the season, sometimes Doggett takes the leap that Scully will not. If so I will write about it here on IMDb.

Bang!

[Sanpaco13 · 7/10 · 18 November 2009]

Surekill is a pretty decent episode. It starts out obscure with the guy's head seeming to explode as he is in the high security room. But we are soon led onto a story about two brothers who have been using one's special ability of x-ray vision to kill drug dealers and take their money and loot. There is some soap opera type story details here but they aren't very interesting in my personal opinion and so I'll not bore you with those details. The basics behind explaining this guy's ability is that the two brothers are twins, and while one is legally blind and can only make out mere shapes, the other is at the opposite end of the spectrum and is able to see even more than normal people. I love this concept as it creates an interesting dynamic and I also quite enjoy the guest appearances of Michael Bowen and Partick Kilpatrick. Both do an amazing job. I love the scene where they go to the drug deal and the one brother comes out and pretends to shoot them with his hand at the same time his brother is shooting them. Great scene. The episode is not, however, without some flaws, mainly dealing with the storyline. I don't quite understand how the gift of x-ray vision somehow has made this man also a perfect marksman AND an expert lip reader. I'm not saying he couldn't have done so at the behest of his brother so that they could pull off their little scheme, but he doesn't really seem to be all that bright and I would personally think you would have to have some pretty high intelligence in order to accomplish these feats. The other thing I thought was kind of strange was how Mulder and Scully were the only law enforcement on this case. No sheriff or deputy bugging them every once in a while or helping out with APBs and the like. I'm pretty sure this wasn't a federal case, it seemed like there should have been at least someone else around while they did interrogations and stuff. And finally, as I mentioned earlier, the story with the secretary and what not was kind of boring to me. I thought there could have been some other story that could have been used here to make things more interesting. I give the episode a 7 out of 10.

'You know why I said that, don't you...? Because, somehow, you can see through that wall...'

[Kendich89 · 7/10 · 11 November 2017]

There's really not much to be said about this episode. It opens with a man chased by someone who's apparently trying to off him. Fortunately for him he's near a police station, so he takes refuge in there. The cops on duty try to figure out what's distressing him so much, as the man goes on raving about that someone's going to kill him. The cops assure him that he's safe in there in spite of his growing hysteria. After failed reasoning with the man, they throw him in a cell, hoping he'd calm down. Meanwhile one of the cops decides to call social services, probably dismissing the guy's irrational behavior to drugs or a mental illness. That's when his partner becomes witness to something weird.

Aside from the standard what-the-heck opening, this episode doesn't do much afterwards. We have a seemingly logic-defying case and some of the agents is bound to make the far-fetched leap. Since Mulder's disappearance that seems to be Scully's job. That's fine, but what isn't so fine is fact that we have an x-ray vision killer who uses a pistol as the murder weapon.

Basic physics butts in the way and stirs disapproval even to the thinking of the layman. Shooting a gun at a solid (or liquid) will result in bullet deflection. Let's forget the fact that a pistol's penetration's potential isn't great enough to allow for shooting through several layers of solid (walls, pipes, furniture, etc.). This still leaves us with the fact that you can't make an accurate shot if the bullet goes through the obstacle/s.

This minor but crucial detail spoiled the whole thing for me. Mentioning quintessentially common in the light of the whole outlandish theme of the show may come as splitting a hair, but it's not. We're fine with all the unexplained and seemingly impossible cases and occurrences in the show, because, after all, they are unexplained and fallible by nature. We haven't had experience with such things and we have no frame of reference. This is like arguing about what an alien from another galaxy may look like. If we're shown a picture of it and it resembles a toad, we may as well go with it. But when a common sense point comes in the way, it's like a sore tooth that I can't stop touching.

All in all not bad, but it could've been much better. I probably rate it higher than it deserved.

Not bad, a little disappointing.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 6/10 · 28 September 2022]

Two brother, Randall and Dwight Cooper, rat exterminators by day, are suspected of killing a man, a man who managed to get himself into a prison cell.

I can offer no tangible reason as to why, but I just didn't care for this episode, there's nothing wrong with it as such, it's imaginative, it's well acted, it's atmospheric, it has an incredibly good and memorable opening sequence, but ultimately it just lost my attention.

It's been the first Doggett story that I didn't enjoy, perhaps because both he and Scully were largely absent for most of it. The best element was perhaps Michael Bowen, who played Dwight, I thought he was excellent.

Too many unanswered questions, with not enough story framework in place to make it cohesive.

Not bad, just a let down after recent episodes, 6/10.

"You know, Elvis used to do this to his hotel rooms."

[classicsoncall · 8/10 · 17 August 2017]

You could take it as a given that Fox Mulder would have come up with a cultural reference along the lines of my summary above, but actually Agent Doggett came up with it when he and Scully encountered all those bullet holes at the Chase Realty Office. For Doggett, that could have been a one-off, but then he came back with "Call in Clark Kent" when discussion turned to the possibilities of a killer with X-ray vision. It might have been Scully becoming more like Mulder, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep an eye on Doggett as well.

Well there were enough bad guys to go around here, as all three of the Triple A Surekill Exterminators, along with Carlton Chase who got whacked, were involved in some form of dope-dealing and extortion. I never thought about it before, but when Doggett stated he hated twins because they always stuck together, I made a mental note so I'd keep an eye on that dynamic in other stories.

Say, did you notice Tammi Peyton (Kellie Waymire) did her personal banking at Cradock Marine? Branches of that bank were located in two California locations in the X-Files stories 'Monday' and 'The Amazing Maleeni'. It sounded like Cradock was more of a regional bank than a national one, so seeing one in Worcester, Massachusetts didn't seem likely to me. But then you've got Chase and Bank of America all over the place, so Cradock could have had a large presence in the X-Files universe.

After all was said and done, I didn't think Randall Cooper (Patrick Kilpatrick) was going to take Tammi out on his brother Dwight's (Michael Bowen) say so. I thought it was pretty enterprising of her to skim a hundred grand from the brothers with a second set of books. She needed some practice though, to be a much better liar.

Removing the mystery

[Jared-Star · 5/10 · 16 December 2021]

"Surekill" is an okay episode, but it didn't really involve the X Files team. The story is solely centered on a love triangle between 3 rat exterminators, one of them being a murderer that happens to have x-ray vision. Scully and Dogget dip in and out of about 4 scenes in total, and by the end it's treated as if this was another episode that our supernatural-hunting heroes had solved. On the subject of x-ray vision, it is very generic and uninspired. The concept itself is not an idea to totally discount, as it has plenty of unique story potential, but it was completely shoved to the side after an extremely effective opening to make way for the rather underwhelming love-triangle. That was core shortcoming of this story. It could've made for a very climactic finish if the writers decided to stick us with Dogget and Scully's perspective. Alas, the love triangle had to take up the majority of the runtime leaving nothing to the imagination or our own speculation. We were told the story, there was no mystery.

All in all, nothing about this episode really grabs you, especially where our main characters are concerned. It's not terrible by any stretch of the imagination. It just really could've used a little imagination. However, it had some tiny sparks of what could've been. Like when Dogget flips off the lightswitch at a crime scene and we get this beautifully eerie shot of sunlight poking through countless bullet holes in the walls. That image is still burned into my mind! The actors give this one their all, it's a shame they couldn't have gotten a more inventive script.

Wow!

[pmicocci-18908 · 3/10 · 15 July 2021]

Am I ever glad I never ordered those x-ray specs that used to be advertised on the backs of comic books when I was a kid - some powers are just too awful for mortal use!