Spender puts Mulder on the track of a hallucinogenic with very unusual provenance and properties…

To me one of the weakest episodes of the X-Files revival for the TV series 10 was Babylon, the hallucination episode; ironically, this story, which also features Mulder taking a trip under the influence of mind-altering drugs, is one of the better tales in the comicbook series 10 – allowing artist Tom Mandrake to go wild with the imagery (and no matter how impressed David Duchovny sounds at the hallucination of Scully, it can’t quite conjure up the image that Mandrake does at the end of the first half of the story). Dirk Maggs’ script uses Harris’ original as a starting point, finding ways to present the many visual elements without it ever feeling as if the dialogue is unnatural (case in point, when Spender gets Mulder to describe the flyer – character points are made in a sequence that in the original is simply a panel showing what Mulder is reading).

Like the Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man and its comic/audio sequel, this is very much a tale told by an unreliable narrator, and we have to take everything within it with a very large pinch of salt – as Mulder himself does as he’s pursuing “Red” through this weird landscape. David Duchovny gets the right level of exuberance, mystification and bloody-mindedness required for the different moods that Mulder goes through in this story, while Gillian Anderson gets a chance to let loose as a weird hybrid of Scully and… well, that would be telling. The soundscape is suitably weird and wonderful ensuring that, like Mulder, the audience is never quite sure what is real and what isn’t. We may not have the visual input of the original, but the audio achieves the same aim in very clever ways.

Verdict: An unusual story that works as well in audio as it does on the printed page by appealing to very different senses. 9/10

Paul Simpson