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Rush
"It was such a rush... moving fast like that."
Written by David Amann
Directed by Robert Lieberman
Directed by Robert Lieberman
"Speed, Scully. Somehow, Max Harden has found a way to move faster than the eye can see."
— Fox Mulder
Mulder and Scully investigate a bizarre murder and find a group of teenagers with Super-Speed.
Tropes:
- Antagonistic Offspring: Max assaults his sheriff father for uncovering the heavy-duty flashlight he'd killed the deputy with, saying that he no longer needs to be afraid of him.
- Anti-Villain: Chastity, who goes along with her boyfriend more out of fear than devotion.
- Bait-and-Switch: In an inversion of the usual way this sort of plot goes down, Max is the one who wanted a real friend in Tony; Tony quickly gets cold feet and turns on Max while he's indisposed.
- Blessed with Suck: The cave grants adolescents Super-Speed; unfortunately, it also omits the Required Secondary Powers, which leads to the users of the power literally tearing their bodies apart.
- Deconstructed Trope: Max has the ability to move at Super-Speed... but the forces this puts on his body and the lack of any Required Secondary Powers means that he's tearing himself apart every time he does it.
- Driven to Suicide: Chastity after killing Max, stepping into the path of the same bullet she uses to do it.
- Enhance Button: Chuck Burks' experimental technology is used to extract an important clue from blurred security footage.
- Evil Is Petty: Max drives a teacher into a wall with a cafeteria table and then launches a chair at his head just because the teacher failed him on a test for cheating despite no proof...a test which he had perfectly filled out after coming to class in the final minute.
- Like Father, Unlike Son: The delinquent Max's father is the town's sheriff.
- Monster of the Week: An ordinary, albeit delinquent, teenager that found a way to gain Super-Speed powers.
- Motion Blur: A key plot-point where security footage at a high school was found to show a strange blur. Using experimental technology to colorize it, the agents reveal the blur is made up of the school colors, suggesting that it comes from the jacket of one of the (superpowered) students.
- Murder-Suicide: Chastity chooses to stand in the path of the bullet she kills Max with, claiming to Tony that she "can't go back" to what her life was like without Super-Speed.
- One-Hit Polykill: A teen essentially commits murder-suicide in this way, shooting someone in the back, and then using her super speed to step into the path of the bullet as is passes through.
- Pet the Dog: Max sticks up for Tony when the kids in their class ostracize him.
- Required Secondary Powers: Notably averted. To put it in comic book terms, Max and the other teenagers are basically given The Flash's main power of Super-Speed, but at the same time none of his Super-Toughness or Healing Factor. Their very average human bodies therefore takes the full brunt of being subjected to stress that it isn't designed to handle, resulting in appropriate medical issues (exhaustion, muscular and skeletal damage, etc.).
- Super-Speed: What the cave provides to teenagers.
- Teens Are Monsters: Some of them are responsible for the deaths appearing in this episode.
- The End... Or Is It?: The ending implies that Tony either still has his Super-Speed, or is at least going through a form of withdrawal where regular time feels painfully slow in comparison to the Rush.
- The Unreveal: The source of the teens' super-speed is never explained. All that is known is they go into a cave, interact with a strange metal, and emerge with superpowers. Sadly before Mulder or Scully can test their theory about it effecting teenagers the cave is filled up with concrete.
- Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: Max uses his Super-Speed powers for murder, cheating at tests, and playing a prank where he abandons a car mid-drive and then saves Tony right before it crashes.
"What if we're too old? Well, you said that teenagers differ from adults chemically and physiologically."
