Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – A Death Fetishist and the Occult

On today’s blog, I’m discussing three episodes affected Agent Scully as she tries to work through her PTSD from her abduction. Up until this point, the series really hadn’t fully dealt with how it affected her personally or on the job, so it was nice to see these episodes deal with in to varying degrees.

Irresistible

This episode is one of the very few where the villain has nothing to do with the paranormal, but instead is a death fetishist intent on killing women. During the investigation as he attacks another young woman, the serial killer sees Agent Scully and decides she will be his next victim. After he kidnaps her, she is forced to deal with her PTSD head on in order to survive. At first it is paralyzing for her, but Scully finds a way to fight back long enough for Mulder to find where she is being held.

The episode is one of the better, more memorable ones of season two which was made better by having such a convincing actor play the villain. Nick Chinlund would come back later in the series as the same character. He also had a prolific career in film and television appearing in Gilmore Girls, Con Air, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Criminal Minds. I only mention Gilmore Girls because I smile whenever I rewatch that series (a winter tradition for me) and see Chinlund appear as one of Lorelei’s suiters in season one after Rory gets into Chilton. I always want to tell her to run away since I associate him with being a serial killer on The X-Files. It’s also a sideways connection to Twin Peaks since Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman Paladino is a huge David Lynch fan and peppered her show with references to his work.

The episode also stars Deanna Milligan who would also star in two episodes of Millennium and The Outer Limits.  When this episode originally aired, I remember recognizing her from a made for TV film starring Michael Gross entitled Avalanche where her family was trapped in their home by an avalanche of snow with a killer.

Die Hand Die Verletzt

Mulder and Scully are brought in to investigate the death of a teenager who seems to have died during an occult ritual. A group of locals, teachers who also are part of a Satanic cult, try to cover up their activities by making to look like another teenager is at fault. The show utilizes real animals during the episode dropping a plague of frogs and a giant anaconda which one of the guest actors was reportedly terrified of.

Series writers Glen Morgan and James Wong were about to leave the series to work on Space Above and Beyond, so this was their last episode of the season. I believe this is why the episode almost feels like intentional parody of all the satanic ritualistic rumors from the 1980s. When the teachers are confronted with proof of what they have done, they seem more concerned with actually having to go all in on their religious choices than they are about harming anyone. It was like they did not take it seriously, and it is the first episode since Scully’s abduction where she and Mulder seem to find some irony in it.

Chris Carter wanted the episode to be a cautionary tale of what happens when you play with fire. About what happens when you dabble in things you don’t understand. And I think it is mostly successful in that regard.

Fresh Bones

Leaning into the occult themes from the previous episode, Fresh Bones follows Mulder and Scully as the find a voodoo symbol on the tree of a soldier who crashed his car into it. It leads them to a Haitian refugee processing center where they are drawn into a world of voodoo where one can project hallucinations onto someone else and Haitian zombification rituals where a chemical called tetrodotoxin is used to make someone appear dead. Toward the end of the episode, Scully becomes the latest person to see the hallucinations as she thinks she sees someone climbing out of a cut in her hand. She manages to find her way into the graveyard where the person projecting the images is already being stopped by Mulder.

This episode gets a bonus point or two for having the final shot be a person alive in a casket as they are being buried because the zombification ritual was used on them. It’s pretty frightening, but beyond that, the episode is more bark than bite.

When I was rewatching this episode, I found myself thinking about how much Scully has to go through. Why is she always the person who is abducted or has such imagery projected up her? Why does it always have to be Mulder who saves her and not the other way around? It really seems as I go through season two that she is really run through the ringer and because of the nature of their investigations, it isn’t just getting shot in the line of duty. Scully is constantly subjected to awful things and she handles it with strength even in her most vulnerable moments.

At the end of Irresistible, she finally breaks down and lets Mulder be her strength, something she was unwilling to do previously. She never wanted him to feel as if he needed to protect her, but he is going to feel that way anyway. It is just who he is, especially after losing his sister which will be the subject of my next blog.

Until next week, the truth is out there.