Reception
"Unrequited" premiered on the Fox network on February 23, 1997. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 10.9, with a 16 share, meaning that roughly 10.9 percent of all television-equipped households, and 16 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. "Unrequited" was seen by 16.56 million viewers on first broadcast. The episode first aired in the United Kingdom on January 7, 1998 on BBC One.
Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club gave the episode a "B–". He wrote that "Unrequited" "isn't a very good episode" of the series, but that it is "a potent one all the same" due to its "great ideas" that are unfortunately never expand upon. VanDerWerff felt that the episode's biggest problem was that it started in media res and revealed the episode's conclusion, writing "it's a pretty great starting point for an episode. Instead, it's actually the endpoint". Despite the negativity towards the plot, he wrote that the entry was "a good episode for Skinner" in that it gives him a mission and alludes to his past in a realistic way. Furthermore, VanDerWerff also applauded the way the show used the Vietnam War in a way that felt "fresh". Independent reviewer Sarah Stegall awarded the episode a two out of five and derided it as a "pseudo-political story". She was negative towards the "lack of emotional investment", which she felt was what damaged the episode; she called Teager a cipher who was portrayed as a "Twitchy Vet" rather than a "Tragic Hero".
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 two stars out of five. They heavily criticized the episode for taking place before the events of "Kaddish" and "Memento Mori" in an attempt to not deal with Scully's cancer. Furthermore, the two criticized the episode for being "thin stuff" and heavily padded; Shearman and Pearson note that the long teaser is replayed in the episode "to no new dramatic effect" and that Covarrubias's appearance offers no new information. Paula Vitaris, writing for Cinefantastique, rated "Unrequited" one star out of four, writing that it "collapses under the weight of its message" and that it "fails to bring to life any of its guest characters". Furthermore, she criticized the reusing of the teaser, noting that it "just comes off as a writer's device".
Read more about this topic: Unrequited (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“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)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)