Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Revisiting the Peacocks at Home

Bucolic towns are often deceptive in both film and television. Under their smalltown perfection, a festering hate for anything considered different or weird. I would know. I grew up in one that I moved out of when I was 18 and never moved back. The second episode of season 4 of The X-Files features one such town. It also happens to be the only episode of the series that received such fierce backlash that it only aired once in its original form before receiving a TVMA rating. For any syndicated airings, it was substantially edited down to remove what was considered gratuitous violence. If you’re a fan of the show you already know I’m talking about Home which featured an incestuous family with a proclivity for violence.

Imagine sixteen-year-old me, lover of all things horror, seeing the opening of this episode as the male characters of the Peacock family take an infant away from its mother, their mother, to bury it. They grieve, yes, but they also bury this baby, this member of their isolated family, with no regard for the body. No coffin. No priest. Like they are hiding a crime instead of burying a family member. Even I wasn’t desensitized enough to not be affected by this.

When the corpse of the deformed infant is discovered buried in a field, Mulder and Scully are brought in to look at it. The episode, for all its violence, also has several hilarious one liners from both Mulder and Scully. When the agents arrive on the scene of the burial, Scully looks at Mulder and states, “Mulder, if you had to go without your cell phone for two minutes, you would lapse into a state of catatonic schizophrenia.” This episode aired in 1996, so it’s even more funny now given how acclimated we have become as a society to having our cell phones in nearly every facet of our lives from paying bills to looking at maps to holding our airline tickets.

Scully’s medical analysis suggests that the infant has every single deformity an infant can have and that the possibility that any infant could be born with so many malformations was basically zero. When she and Mulder suggest that the Peacock family are responsible for this baby, local police want them to leave it alone. The officer believes that his town intentionally ignores the Peacocks so they can pretend their community is perfect. He does not want to upset that balance by reminding people that the Peacock family exists.

In probably the most shockingly violent scene of the series, the Peacocks go to the home of this officer and beat him and his wife to death without any bit of remorse. Even rewatching it now is difficult and I’ve watched the Terrifier films with a desensitized shrug like I’ve seen it all before – probably because I have as a horror junkie. Maybe it’s that the Peacocks kill the wife too. Maybe its that simply beating the cop would have been enough of a point but they murder him anyway. The episode took the show’s violence to a new level. I’m not as bothered by it as many others, but I understand why Fox received so many complaints about it.

As Mulder and Scully go with law enforcement to the Peacock home, they find the house boobytrapped. Mulder quips about being oddly turned on by the pigpen they were hiding in and Scully makes jokes from a popular movie from the era. “Baaa, ram you!” she says humorously. 1995’s light hearted family friendly Babe was famously nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars in a year where Apollo 13 and Braveheart dominated the awards season. The use of this line made the serious undertones of this episode more off putting since the agents would soon find the mother, sans arms and legs, laying under a bed.

Even after Mulder and Scully tell the woman they are there to save her, she demands to be left alone. She spits insults at them and Scully can barely hide her shock and disgust as she rolls the woman back under the bed. You can’t save someone who does not want to be saved. Mrs. Peacock loves her sons who also happen to be the biological fathers to the infants she gives birth too.

The obvious implications of incest within the Peacock family was promised by Chris Carter to be done tastefully when they were working on the episode. Series writers Glen Morgan and James Wong, who took a year off from the series during season 3 to work on Space: Above and Beyond, wanted to make an episode as shocking as possible that meant to satirize the American Dream and explore motherhood from a different perspective. A mother’s love never dies even in the worst of circumstances. Even if your sons are violent killers. Even if your own community has abandoned you. Family is family.

The Johnny Mathis song, “Wonderful, Wonderful” that was used in this episode was a cover version created specifically for this. When Mathis read the script and realized how graphically violent it was, he didn’t want the original version used. Regardless of the version, the song juxtaposed with this family’s twisted version of the American Dream is probably my favorite part of the episode. It gives it that extra bit of memorability.

This episode is often referred to as banned even in the interviews on the DVD set that I own. Banned really isn’t the right word. The original cut of the episode only aired once in the original run of the series. While the edited down version aired in syndication on network TV, the original version can still be viewed on the DVD and Blu ray releases of the show. Banning the episode, or just forcing it to be edited down for audiences, only added to the mystique of this episode. It ranks in my top ten of the series for that reason. It got a reaction out of people on a large scale and that is its greatest success.

I remember back in the years after I graduated college, probably 2008-ish, when I was dating a guy who really wasn’t a fan of the show in the way that I was but remembered this episode and requested that we watch it since I had the series on DVD. We discussed in length how crazy it was that this was the episode they tried to ban when the series also featured Russian Roulette for the first time on network television and every kind of serial killer you could think of. I don’t even need to mention this episode by name for people to start talking about it. Probably the most memorable moment in the series when this one hit.

Until next week, the truth is out there. And so are the Peacocks since they escaped the town without being caught. Wonderful! Wonderful!