Miracle Man
- Episode aired Mar 18, 1994
- TV-14
- 46m
IMDb RATING
7.1/10
5.3K
YOUR RATING
The agents investigate a ministry led by a man whose son possesses the power to heal, and to kill, with a touch of his hand.The agents investigate a ministry led by a man whose son possesses the power to heal, and to kill, with a touch of his hand.The agents investigate a ministry led by a man whose son possesses the power to heal, and to kill, with a touch of his hand.
Iris Quinn
- Lillian Daniels
- (as Iris Quinn Bernard)
Brianne Benitz
- Young Samantha Mulder
- (uncredited)
Tali Cherniawsky
- Crazy Screaming Girl
- (uncredited)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaProducer R.W. Goodwin felt that the greatest difficulty was finding enough Vancouver-area actors who could portray a convincing Southern US accent, so they hired a dialect coach to prevent the cast from sounding "like they were coming from fifteen different parts of the South".
- Goofs(at around 25 mins) Scully palpates the radial pulse by holding the hand of the girl in the wheelchair, Margaret, and immediately pronounces her dead. A medical doctor, such as herself, would know that one can never pronounce a person dead just by the absence of pulse, that too, just by examining the radial pulse for hardly 3 seconds. Conditions such as ventricular fibrillation (heart attack) might present as pulselessness, but a person can still be revived by appropriate medical procedures. A doctor would ideally perform a full medical exam before declaring someone dead.
- ConnectionsReferenced in Gone Home (2013)
Featured review
I think people are looking hard for miracles...so hard that maybe they make themselves see what they want to see.
The monster-of-the-week episodes from season one were, perhaps more so than any subsequent season, a mixed bag. Their quality was not determined so much by innovation ("Ice" was primarily an update of John Carpenter's The Thing and "Beyond the Sea" an abbreviated version of The Silence of the Lambs), but by the personal stakes the main protagonists had in them. The two aforementioned episodes were integral in the evolution of Mulder and Scully's relationship, and as such succeeded far more than say, "Space" or "Genderbender," which were not.
"Miracle Man" doesn't cleanly fit in either category, but it could be argued that it falls closer to the former. Like the earlier episode "Conduit," the plot dips in to the overarching MacGuffin of the search for Samantha Mulder. The two agents arrive in Tennessee to investigate Samuel Hartley, a faith healer whose touch has recently become a nail-in-the-coffin for his reverend father's congregation members.
The religion-based X-Files are seldom considered to be fan darlings, perhaps due to both religious sensitivity and their higher-level of open-endedness. Carter and Gordon's script does an admirable job of avoiding both of these potential pitfalls. Although the characters themselves are not fully able to piece together the puzzle by the end, it is fairly obvious to the viewer of Hartley's legitimacy. If anything, Mulder and Scully's confusion is too over-played, especially given Mulder's aversion to more pedestrian explanations. Perhaps this is part of his reaction to the visions of his sister, which although appropriate in the context of the episode, tend to throw off the pacing in parts.
I was trying to find a way to score this episode an 8 because it is certainly in the upper echelon of the season one catalog. For some reason I don't find it quite as captivating as several other episodes, but Gordon and Carter's first joint script is still a solid X-File that proved the show could move into more spiritual territories without meandering into ham-handed ones. Some excellent guest acting and a truly creepy villain played by Dennis Lipscomb make this a near-classic. 7 out of 10.
"Miracle Man" doesn't cleanly fit in either category, but it could be argued that it falls closer to the former. Like the earlier episode "Conduit," the plot dips in to the overarching MacGuffin of the search for Samantha Mulder. The two agents arrive in Tennessee to investigate Samuel Hartley, a faith healer whose touch has recently become a nail-in-the-coffin for his reverend father's congregation members.
The religion-based X-Files are seldom considered to be fan darlings, perhaps due to both religious sensitivity and their higher-level of open-endedness. Carter and Gordon's script does an admirable job of avoiding both of these potential pitfalls. Although the characters themselves are not fully able to piece together the puzzle by the end, it is fairly obvious to the viewer of Hartley's legitimacy. If anything, Mulder and Scully's confusion is too over-played, especially given Mulder's aversion to more pedestrian explanations. Perhaps this is part of his reaction to the visions of his sister, which although appropriate in the context of the episode, tend to throw off the pacing in parts.
I was trying to find a way to score this episode an 8 because it is certainly in the upper echelon of the season one catalog. For some reason I don't find it quite as captivating as several other episodes, but Gordon and Carter's first joint script is still a solid X-File that proved the show could move into more spiritual territories without meandering into ham-handed ones. Some excellent guest acting and a truly creepy villain played by Dennis Lipscomb make this a near-classic. 7 out of 10.
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- DWilliams1089
- Sep 27, 2010
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