El Mundo Gira

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"El Mundo Gira"
The X-Files episode
Episode no.Season 4
Episode 11
Directed byTucker Gates
Written byJohn Shiban
Production code4X11
Original air dateJanuary 12, 1997 (1997-01-12)
Running time44 minutes
Guest appearances
  • Mitch Pileggi as Assistant Director Walter Skinner
  • Rubén Blades as Conrad Lozano
  • Raymond Cruz as Eladio Buente
  • Jose Yenque as Soledad Buente
  • Simi Mehta as Gabrielle Buente
  • Lillian Hurst as Flakita
  • Susan Bain as County Coroner
  • Robert Thurston as Dr. Larry Steen
  • Michael Kopsa as Rick Culver
  • Markus Hondro as The Barber
  • Janeth Munoz as Village Woman
  • Pamela Diaz as Maria Dorantes
  • Fabricio Santin as Migrant Worker
  • Jose Vargas as INS Worker
  • Tito Mata as INS Guard
  • Tony Dean Smith as Store Clerk[1]
Episode chronology
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"Leonard Betts"
The X-Files season 4
List of episodes

"El Mundo Gira" is the eleventh episode of the

Nielsen rating
of 13.3 and was viewed by 22.37 million people in its initial broadcast, and received mixed to negative reviews from television critics.

The show centers on

illegal immigrants
.

Shiban was inspired to write "El Mundo Gira" after noticing the long lines of migrant workers he would often see at his job when working as a computer programmer in the Los Angeles area. He combined it with an idea he had about a contagious fungus. Series creator Chris Carter was attracted to the soap opera-like aspects of the episode, and the title of the episode means "The World Turns" in Spanish. The migrant camp used in the episode was built from scratch in a waste ground near Boundary Bay Airport in Vancouver. This site was later used again in the episode "Tempus Fugit".

Plot

Agents

Mexican-American INS agent Conrad Lozano, is able to track down and interrogate Eladio, who frightens the other migrants. Meanwhile, Scully discovers that Maria was killed by a fungal growth known as Aspergillus
.

Eladio escapes as he is being

mycologist
who discovers that their abnormally rapid growth was caused by an unidentifiable enzyme. This revelation leads Scully to suspect Eladio of being an unwitting carrier of the enzyme, necessitating his immediate capture. Eladio, seeking to return to Mexico, meets with his cousin Gabrielle to ask for money. He works with a construction foreman for the day to make the money. Soledad comes after him, seeking to kill him, but finds the foreman dead. Eladio escapes in the foreman's truck and heads to the grocery store where Gabrielle works, spreading the fungal growth. The agents later confront Soledad at the supermarket, discovering another dead victim of the fungus.

Eladio returns to see Gabrielle, but by now has grown deformed from the fungus. Gabrielle, afraid of him, gives him her money and lies to the agents about his location when they come to see her. In actuality, Eladio has returned to the camp where Maria died, where Lozano tries to spur Soledad on in killing his brother. Soledad finds he can't do it, and Lozano struggles with him, being accidentally killed when the gun goes off. Soledad becomes a carrier of the fungal growth himself and flees with Eladio towards Mexico.[1]

Production

Ruben Blades
, whom Chris Carter had long been wanting to feature in an episode.

"El Mundo Gira" was inspired by writer

Ruben Blades, whom Chris Carter had long been wanting to feature in an episode. Coincidentally, Raymond Cruz and Simi Mehta—the actors who portrayed Eladio and Gabrielle—were in a romantic relationship at the time of filming[2] and later were married.[3]

When developing the script for "El Mundo Gira", Shiban spent "several days" at an

San Pedro, California, where he observed how the immigrants acted and were treated. Shiban noticed that many of the immigrants refused to give the INS agents their real names, which was reflected in the eventual episode. The show's set designers scouted out a barren stretch of land near Boundary Bay Airport, Vancouver and erected a faux-migrant camp for use in the episode. (After the set was torn down, the area was later used during the filming of the episode "Tempus Fugit".) Filming was temporarily set back when it snowed at the camp site the day before production was set to commence, requiring the show's crew to use, among other things, hot water and hair dryers to clear the area.[2]

Reception

"El Mundo Gira" was originally broadcast in the United States on the

Nielsen rating of 13.3, with a 19 share, meaning that roughly 13.3 percent of all television-equipped households, and 19 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode.[5] It was viewed by 22.37 million viewers.[5]

Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club reviewed the episode positively, rating it a B. He considered the episode "entertaining to watch" with "nifty direction from Tucker Gates", despite being formulaic and with the same problems he found in the previous episode penned by John Shiban, season three's "Teso Dos Bichos". Handlen had much praise for the second half, which he noted was filled with dark humor, and featured a "bizarre ending".[6] Author Keith Topping criticized the episode in his book X-Treme Possibilities, calling it an "awful episode with a heavy-handed, clod-hopping attempt at social comment that hardly sits well with the themes on display in the rest of the episode."[7] He called it the worst episode of the fourth season.[7] Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode one star out of five and wrote that it was "trying very hard to be clever", but "if cleverness were only about intent, then we could all be geniuses".[8] Shearman and Pearson derided the episode's use of social criticism, referring to it as "rubbish [because it] only works if it isn't underlined each time it's made."[8] Furthermore, the two criticized the story's "Mexican soap opera" style, noting that it drowned out the themes in "unengaging melodrama".[8] Paula Vitaris from Cinefantastique gave the episode a largely negative review and awarded it one star out of four.[9] She wrote that "'El Mundo Gira' is so overloaded with ideas that it falls over and can't get up".[9]

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Meisler, pp. 115–22.
  2. ^ a b c Meisler, pp. 122–23.
  3. ^ Fontana, Christine (April 30, 2015). "Cruz Control". New Orleands Living. Retrieved August 24, 2018.
  4. Fox. 1996–97.{{cite AV media notes}}: CS1 maint: others in cite AV media (notes) (link
    )
  5. ^ a b Meisler, p. 298.
  6. ^ Handlen, Zack (December 4, 2010). ""El Mundo Gira"/"Weeds" | The X-Files/Millennium | TV Club". The A.V. Club. Retrieved September 15, 2011.
  7. ^ a b Cornell et al, pp. 322–23.
  8. ^ a b c Shearman and Pearson, pp. 91–92.
  9. ^ a b Vitaris, Paula (October 1997). "Episode Guide". Cinefantastique. 29 (4/5): 35–62.

Bibliography

External links

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