Broadcast and Reception
"Teso Dos Bichos" premiered on the Fox network on March 8, 1996. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 10.7, with a 18 share, meaning that roughly 10.7 percent of all television-equipped households, and 18 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 17.38 million viewers.
The episode received negative reviews from critics. A writer from Entertainment Weekly gave "Teso Dos Bichos" a C, and sardonically wrote, "No es bueno!" Reviewer Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a C− and criticized the laziness of the writing, saying, "Maybe I'm missing something here. There could be some subtext in, um, yeah, I got nothing. The dead rats in the toilet were freaky, right? And they did kill that dog off, so that's hardcore. Really, though, I'm just too disappointed to say much else. This is paint-by-numbers at its most tedious, and while it's nice to have evident proof of how far the show has come since it started, that doesn't make it any easier to sit through." Critical Myth's John Keegan gave the episode a scathing review, only awarding it 1/10. He criticized the seriousness of the plot and wrote, "Overall, this has to be one of the worst episodes of the series. In nearly every possible way, the episode fails to live up to the usual expectations. Perhaps aware of how silly the whole thing sounds, the cast and crew seem weary of it all from beginning to end. Even some of the bad ideas in the later seasons don’t fall to this level of inadequacy." Cyriaque Lamar from i09 called the Jaguar Spirit one of "The 10 Most Ridiculous X-Files Monsters" and wrote, "In this fairly ridiculous Season 3 episode, an Ecuadorian artifact possessed by a Jaguar Spirit (or something) causes tabbies to go bonkers and murder people. This scene of Scully fighting a cat deserves the GIF treatment. Make it happen, folks!" 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 stars out of five, calling the premise "achingly unambitious". The two roundly criticized the plot, calling it a "retread of a cursed mummy movie without a mummy", as well as the performances of Trevino, Duchovny, and Anderson. Despite the overall negativity, Shearman and Pearson noted that the "much derided" cat sequence was not "that badly handled."
Read more about this topic: Teso Dos Bichos
Famous quotes containing the words broadcast and/or reception:
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
—Monty Python’s Flying Circus. first broadcast Sept. 22, 1970. Michael Palin, in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC TV comedy series)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)