Spoilers

“Gender Bender”

The X-Files episode that asks, “What if the Amish were way darker and creepy?”

This was another episode of the X-Files from season one that I do not remember at all. I do believe that I have never seen this episode because I do not think that I would have forgotten this.

I hope Marjorie Taylor Greene never watches this episode.

We start off with a man and a woman enthralled in sexual intercourse. When finished, she stands up, he has a massive coronary and she changes into a man.

Yup. That’s is what I said.

The episode title is Gender Bender and it is about a group of Amish-like people who have pheromone powers. They were called the Kindred. One of their members left their community and has been sexing it up around the east coast, killing his or her sexual partners.

Mulder and Scully wound up inside this Kindred commune and saw some weird things, including some strange ritual where they took a sick man and covered him with some goop and buried him alive, as he gradually turned feminine.

There are so many bizarre images and ideas in this episode that it made it fairly disturbing to watch. I’m sure there is some kind of theme involving sexual identity or sexual proliferation, but that all gets lost among the rest of the weirdness.

Plus, the show implied that the Kindred were aliens and that they escaped in their ship at the end of the episode.

This was anticlimactic and, simply put, a messy episode. Even if some of the ideas are worthwhile exploring, this does not work. Scully is even shown nearly being a victim of these pheromones and is almost raped by one of the Kindred.