Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Three Very Different Serial Killers

Season three was when The X-Files really hit its stride. It is the perfect mix of overall mythology and monster of the week episodes that include creature features, paranormal cases, and some surprising humor. After starting off the season by establishing where the mythology and conspiracy would go throughout the rest of the series, they aired six episodes of bona fide X-Files grounded in the paranormal – which was what the show really excelled at. I’ll be discussing three of those episodes today and you won’t believe how many connections to the CSI shows and Nicolas Cage there are.

The List

Written and directed by Chris Carter, this episode follows a death row inmate who proclaims during his execution that he would be reincarnated and would kill the five men who mistreated him in prison. After a prison guard ends up dead in the prisoner’s former cell, Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate.

They get the run-around with each witness sending them in another direction, including the prison warden played by J.T. Walsh who believes someone outside the prison is responsible. A second guard ends up dead with his head found in a paint can. The prison coroner says larvae were present as well as with the previous victim whose lungs were infested with larvae of the green bottle fly. This was five years before CSI: Crime Scene Investigation premiered. I like to believe that this episode, which employed the use of live maggots – much to Gillian Anderson’s dismay – during certain scenes paved the way for CSI to use such tactics in its visuals.

A fellow inmate, Roque (Bokeem Woodbine) wants to give up the final three names on the list of men threatened to die in exchange for transfer to another prison, but the warden denies this when he realizes he is the fifth person on the list. The warden beats Roque to death in the shower before putting the prison on lockdown. Neither Mulder nor Scully believe Roque was on the list.

Later, the agents believe a guard named Parmelly is responsible. The agents leave, but Scully must convince Mulder that they found the right killer for he believes the executed inmate did indeed get reincarnated to murder those people. The warden passes them driving on the road, and the episode ends with the warden seeing the executed inmate in the back seat. The warden was the last person on the list.  

This episode had shades of The Shawshank Redemption as it features an icky warden with ulterior motives. The film was released the year before this episode. J.T. Walsh is memorable as the warden in the episode and also starred in the Nicolas Cage film Red Rock West and the adaptation of Stephen King’s Needful Things. Bokeem Woodbine starred in The Rock with Nicolas Cage, various other films, and an episode of CSI: Miami.

2 Shy

This episode follows Mulder and Scully to Cleveland to investigate a serial killer as he kills overweight women that he meets over the internet. Virgil Incanto (Timothy Carhart) seduces the woman he meets and suffocates her by spitting up a gelatinous substance when he kisses her. When the police find her later, her body has started dissolving as it is covered in the substance. When Scully tries to do an autopsy in the morgue, the corpse has completely dissolved leaving a blood-colored liquid behind. When Scully has the substance coating the body tested, she finds that it is a digestive enzyme lacking body fat.

The second victim is a prostitute whom Incanto had to settle for after an online date stood him up. The prostitute fought back, and he dissolved only part of her body before having to run off. After the autopsy by Scully, they found the same substance in this woman’s throat and skin under her nails contained no fatty acids leading Mulder to believe that the killer was eating the fatty tissue of his victims.

Incanto invites a third victim to his apartment and kills her. He is interrupted by his nosy neighbor. She finds the body in the bathtub, and he kills her. The neighbor’s blind daughter inquires if he has seen her mother, but Incanto denies it. The daughter smells her mother’s perfume and informs the police. When they arrive, Incanto is gone but they find a list of women he has been in contact with online and reach out to them.

Incanto arrives at the home of one of the women he was talking to online and she recognizes him from the photo distributed by the FBI. After a struggle, Incanto is captured. Without access to the fatty tissues he has been eating, his skin is now deformed and peeling. He admits to the murders.

This is one of the gorier episodes, but the creepiness of Incanto’s character isn’t up to par with, say, season one character Tooms. Written by Jeff Vlaming whose credits include the Weird Science series initially wrote Victer Incanto to be more of a Phantom of the Opera type and then later a butcher who would cut fat from his victims before settling on the character who appears in the episode. Part of me wishes it had leaned a little heavier into the pitfalls of online dating as Incanto preys on the loneliness of single women. Watching it now, I don’t believe that online dating is any safer than it was thirty years ago. Would have been nice to see that play out a little more thoughtfulness.

 Actor Timothy Carhart went on to act in an episode of The Twilight Zone as well as four episodes each of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and 24. He also starred in an episode of Tales from the Darkside which is thought to be one of the series that Carter took inspiration from for The X-Files. James Handy who played the detective helping Mulder and Scully in this episode also starred in the Nicolas Cage movie Guarding Tess as well as episodes of CSI: NY, Alias, and Touch. Actress Catherine Paolone may not have a CSI or Nic Cage movie in her resume, but she was in an episode of The Twilight Zone and later she was in Six Feet Under and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, one of the very few movies that scares me each time I watch it.

The Walk

At a VA hospital, a Lieutenant Colonel Victor Stans (Don Thompson) he believes that there is something, or someone, stopping him from dying after three failed suicide attempts. He claims the fire that killed his family was started by the same mysterious person during questioning by Mulder and Scully. Captain Draper (Nancy Sorel) stops the questioning on orders from her superior, General Callahan (Thomas Kopache) who later glimpses this phantom soldier that Stans described. Draper is later found dead in a pool. Fingerprints found at the scene eventually lead the agents through a man named Roach (Willie Garson) to Leonard Trimble (Ian Tracey), a quadruple amputee recovering in the hospital.

Scully does not believe that Trimble is responsible, but Mulder does due to radiation found at each crime scene. He believes that Trimble is astral projecting to commit the murders.

General Callahan confronts Trimble, and Trimble tries to goad the man into killing him but the General fires his weapon above Trimble’s head. Later, Mulder and Scully find Trimble in some sort of trance and Mulder realizes he is astral projecting to kill Callahan. It is Stans who enters the room and stops Trimble.

Since there is no way to prove that Trimble committed the murders, the case remains unsolved, but the military denied allowing Trimble to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, he is buried in Pennsylvania. Mulder’s voice over leads the viewer to believe that the military knows Trimble is guilty even if they cannot prove it.

This was this show’s take on Gulf War PTSD as that was where Trimble was injured and he blamed the people he was killing for his situation. As a 90s kid, the Gulf War was ever present in people’s minds at that time, so this episode resonated much more then than it does now. They constructed a VA hospital specifically for this episode, and it’s probably one of the better sets throughout the show. Beyond that, there really isn’t much that stands out from this episode aside from actor Ian Tracey’s performance.

Ian Tracey also starred in The Outer Limits and Dark Angel which aired largely because of the success of The X-Files. Tracey had a prolific career in film and movies, later appearing in Wayward Pines and Smallville. Thomas Kopache later starred in CSI: NY, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Stargate: SGI, and several of the Star Trek television series. Nancy Sorel also starred in The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Stargate SG1. Don Thompson was also in Stargate SG1, The Outer Limits, and the 2005 anthology series Masters of Horror.

And then there’s Willie Garson best known for his role as the lovable Stanford on Sex and the City. While he starred in dozens of films and television series, his notable connections here were The Rock with Nicolas Cage, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation & Miami, and Stargate: SG1. Garson was in two episodes of The X-Files; this one and an episode later in the series as an unrelated character.

While these three episodes are stand alone episodes, each has supporting members of the cast who appeared in a lot of the same series. It is amazing as I go through these episodes week to week and look up where these actors were before they guest starred on The X-Files and where they went after how many had similar paths. Each week, I mention Stargate or Star Trek or The Outer Limits. I do believe today was the first time that each episode I was watching connected to CSI, and even weirder, a connection to Nicolas Cage films.

Next week’s episode also has a connection to CSI, but I’ll be discussing that episode on its own because it was one of my favorites from the season when it originally aired. Until then, the truth is out there with Nicolas Cage’s crazy grin.