Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Sanguinarium

I have always considered The X-Files to be a combination of science fiction and horror. The horror genre often includes elements of body horror, creature feature style effects, and bloody violence. Whenever I see that an episode of this series was torn apart by critics for incorporating gore or horrifying violence, I wonder who these critics were and if they ever really understood the show on a meaningful level. For network television, I’ll acknowledge that this show got away with a lot and I love it even more each time I rewatch it.

Episode 6 of season 4 was one of those episodes that critics did not like because it included body horror and graphic effects to accomplish effective visuals. It’s one of my favorites from this season BECAUSE of those things, not in spite of it. Again, who were these critics? Did they ever touch grass? Or were they just upset that the first episode of the series to be written by two women, newcomers Vivian and Valerie Mayhew, was such a horrifying success? Maybe that’s why I love it. It has a female perspective.

Anyway, Sanguinarium follows the agents as they arrive at a hospital that specializes in plastic surgery techniques to investigate mysterious deaths and botched procedures by doctors who seemed to be unaware of their work at the time of the procedure. A nurse at the hospital who was in attendance years previously when mysterious deaths happened becomes the prime suspect. When Mulder and Scully investigate her house, they discover evidence of witchcraft but at the end of the day the evidence was planted there by a coworker.  The nurse is found trying to assault a doctor in an effort to protect the patients, but starts vomiting pins before she can answer any questions.

Later, Mulder realizes that the patients’ birthdays line up with the days of the Witch’s Sabbath and that the nurse was trying to protect them instead of harm them. Again, that female perspective coming into play. A nurse is in a lot of ways like a mother. Caring. Protective. Maternal. The nurse only wanted to help and was stopped before she could tell her side of the story.

Mulder also believes that a doctor who apparently died in the previous line of killings years before might be responsible for the killings now because his birthdate did not align with the Witch’s Sabbath. Mulder uses the hospital’s plastic surgery program that shows what future patients could look like with surgery and discovers that one of the current doctors looks like the previous dead one would look like if he had gotten plastic surgery. When one of the hospital staff confronts this doctor, she uses witchcraft to stab her with medical instruments. She is rushed into surgery while the doctor steals the face of another patient and makes himself look younger using the patient’s skin.

Along the way, there are some pretty gruesome deaths among the patients. One patient has their liposuction procedure go wrong when the doctor ends up sucking out much more than fat. Another has their face destroyed by acid and another by a laser that severs the brainstem in the neck during the procedure. The horror lover in me thoroughly enjoys the effect used to make these things plausible in the network TV environment. Even CSI had a hard time getting away with some of that kind of gore.

Part of me really wanted to see what would happen if they were to make a sequel to this episode but have it be a full length movie. I’d love to see the agents following this doctor’s reign of terror after performing this ritual every ten years at different hospitals under different names. This time, he doesn’t get away with it like he did in this episode. What a movie that would be.

The nurse who is expertly played by O-Lan Jones was named Rebecca Waite in the episode. Her name and profession were a reference to Rebecca Nurse who was falsely accused of witchcraft in Salem and hanged. She is recognizable from playing Esmeralda in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, a character who warned her neighbors of not blindly adoring something just because it was popular. The character also believed Edward was evil. An abomination. Something that shouldn’t exist. The difference between Esmeralda and Rebecca’s characters really show the range O-Lan Jones had when portraying misunderstood women.

Vivian and Valerie Mayhew would go on to write several episodes for the series Charmed, continuing their witchy duties in television. Gillian Anderson supposedly thought it was the most disturbing episode they shot at the time and could not watch it afterwards.

Remember those critics I was talking about? Some of them thought Anderson and Duchovny phoned in their performances between episode 2, Home, and episode 7, Musings of the Cigarette Smoking Man. I disagree. I believe that episodes 2 and 7 were so strong that it made the episodes in between seem like they weren’t as great as they are. Not all of them (3 & 4 aren’t perfect by any means), but I find them each watchable in their own right. Knowing what Scully will endure with cancer later in the season, I’m okay with her character investigating these monster of the week episodes with less attention. Maybe she was feeling sick and not realizing it. She did have cancer without knowing it, after all.

Until next week, the truth is out there.