Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Beyond The Sea

Beyond the Sea was the first episode to revolve around Scully for we only had one other episode show any part of her personal life. It starts with her spending time with her parents. Later, after they leave, she wakes in the night to see her father talking soundlessly from a nearby chair. The phone rings. It’s her mother to inform her that her father has died. When she looks back at the chair, it is empty. At his funeral, they played the song Beyond the Sea.

Pretty strong opening for an episode that is one of the best in the series. Don S. Davis plays her father, a familiar face from the recent Twin Peaks rewatch I did this winter. Brad Dourif guest stars in this episode as Luther Lee Boggs and he too has links to David Lynch’s work. Best known for voicing the Chuck doll in the Child’s Play movies, Dourif also starred in two of Lynch’s earlier films, Blue Velvet and 1984’s Dune. In 1993, he popped up in an episode of Tales From the Crypt and later starred in an episode of Millennium, Chris Carter’s other television show with several links to The X-Files. Dourif also appeared in Fringe and The Lord of the Rings. He even appeared in Rob Zombie’s two Halloween movies as Haddonfield’s sheriff. As both a horror fan and an X-Files junkie, it’s pretty safe to say that Brad Dourif’s prolific career in film and television had a pretty big effect on me personally throughout the years. This episode is certainly a standout largely because of his performance.

Scully and Mulder investigate a kidnapping of a couple by someone impersonating a police officer. Mulder wants to bring in Luther Lee Boggs, a serial killer they had caught years before, in to help with the case because he says he has had psychic revelations about the case. He says he has evidence but Scully won’t believe it until she sees her father sitting where Boggs was singing Beyond the Sea. In a quick role reversal, Scully becomes the believer and Mulder the skeptic.

Eventually, after a lot of manipulation by Boggs, Scully starts believing that he orchestrated the entire event, but part of her truly wanted to believe. She could not see that Boggs manipulated her grief, even when Mulder did not believe he was helpful.

This episode was one of many I owned on VHS back in the 90s. Those VHS tapes contained two episodes and interviews with Chris Carter. For this episode, I remember Carter saying that they were willing to spend more money getting Brad Dourif because he does such stellar work, and it was worth every penny. Dourif gives Boggs depth, making the viewer believe along with Scully that he is helping with the case.

I’m reminded of the second X-Files film where Mulder and Scully are brought in on a serial killer case, and they bring in a psychic to help. I’m always reminded of this episode because Scully isn’t fooled twice. She does not believe the psychic in that movie, not after she believed Boggs and was left disappointed. Boggs is not mentioned in that movie, but Scully was never the kind of character who didn’t learn from her mistakes.

This is one of my favorite episodes for it gives us a deeper look into Scully’s personal life and allows Brad Dourif to really own his character. There isn’t a second of wasted screen time in this episode, and having the dynamic between Scully and Mulder be reversed for an episode reinvigorated my love for the characters when it first aired. It still does with every rewatch.

One last comment on Brad Dourif’s career. One of my favorite horror films, The Exorcist III, stars Dourif as the Gemini Killer. If you haven’t see this sequel, I highly recommend it. As far as sequels go, this one is as good as it gets and rivals the original for how stellar it is. I’d even say that it offers a scarier adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s work. That is saying something because the original Exorcist film is one of my all time faves.

Until next week, the truth is out there.