This episode is not an homage to "The Thing," it's a copy. I'm just not sure I buy that something as unimaginative a carbon copy of the original as this episode should be lauded quite so much as it is. It's not a bad episode by any means. I actually thought Duchovny and Anderson showed a greater emotional and tonal range in this episode than in most of the rest of Season 1, and the execution of the episode from a production side is fairly strong. But a bottle episode duplicating another creative work (which itself borrows substantially from Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's 1951 film "The Thing from Another World" but also reinvents that story in innumerable, riveting ways) is somewhat less impressive to me than it seems to be for others. If a stand-up comedian tells a joke that lands really well and the next comedian to take the stage tells the exact same joke in the exact same way, the joke objectively will be just as good, but I imagine one's perception of the two tellings would not be the same. The first requires (at least perceived) ingenuity, the second only mimicry. "Ice" is mimicry, relatively well-executed mimicry but lacking the creative spark.
Review of Ice
