“He’s some kind of a fat-sucking vampire? ” – Dana Scully.
2SHY [Standalone] Aired November 3, 1995
Episode: 3×06 / 55 Overall
Director: David Nutter • Writer: Chris Carter & Jeff Vlaming
Shy, overweight women are being pursued online by a suitor who courts them with Italian poetry. The women are being found dead, their corpses stripped of flesh.
One of two episodes to be written by Jeff Vlaming, a series writer on Weird Science and Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, among others. 2Shy has been compared to earlier episodes Squeeze and Irresistible in that their lead antagonists are all very unassuming, normal-looking men. Donnie PFaster from Irresistible in particular shares many similarities with Virgil Incanto (Timothy Carhart), both are seemingly shy, withdrawn men who proposition unsuspecting women by luring them in to a false sense of security. On the surface neither appear to pose any threat, concealing their true nature by hiding in plain sight. The obvious parallels notwithstanding, Valming’s script still manages to hold its own as an original story thanks to Carhart’s performance and the perfectly disgusting concept of a man compelled to feed on human body fat.
In 1995 the Internet was still in its infancy, having been launched at a consumer level in 1991. This episode came out the same year as Sandra Bullock’s action thriller, The Net, a film that played on the public’s lack of understanding about the Internet that inevitably lead to fear regarding the free sharing of public information. The online world has developed at an exponential rate in the last 20 years and as such the concept of meeting people online is accepted as common practice, though not so much in 1995. Like The Net this story draws on peoples fear about the ambiguity of online interaction and whether you can ever really know who you’re talking to. Most of the characters don’t openly question the concept of online dating though there is clearly an underlying suggestion of threat. The writer is implying that online interaction may not always be as safe as we’d like to think. This is very gooey episode for the special effects department, which succeeded in its attempt to gross out the audience. The substance Incanto covers his victims in is created well, as aspect that could easily have been comical if done poorly, and I found the extreme decomposition of the almost liquefied bodies to be a gruesome sight.
I like that Incanto isn’t really a villain, or even a monster. Arguably the acts that he perpetrates are ‘monstrous’ in their nature, however he is simply driven by the universal need to survive. There is no pleasure derived from this fat sucking ritual, nor any true malice behind the act, he is feeding on an unwilling living being in much the same way a human feeds on animal flesh. Fundamentally these two acts are the same thing, the latter is simply condoned by society while the former is not. The fate of the women Incanto targets is quite tragic, they are all insecure, lonely women daring to take a chance with an online date, only to end up being quite literally used by a man they trusted. It’s this aspect that Scully confronts him about in the episode’s conclusion, she remarks how Incanto preyed not only on their bodies but their minds as well, abusing their trust. Though he simply sees it as a matter of quid pro quo, he gives them what they want and in return he takes what he needs. Parallels could be drawn between the episode and the reality of men who use women for their body, satiating a base desire that they see as need rather than a want. However I didn’t feel that the writing was attempting to form a correlation as much as draw inspiration from real life.
★★★☆☆
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