Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Arcadia

I’m a renter. Buying a home was never in the cards for me and in 2026, I don’t mind all that much. I hear more horror stories about Homeowner’s Associations than I care to remember from dumb rules about lawn ornaments to whether or not you can sell your own home without their permission. Plus, the upkeep, the higher insurance, and having to pay extra for heat in the dead of Minnesota winters sounds sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. For context, heat is generally included in rent for most apartment buildings in Minneapolis.

I know what you’re thinking. Why on Earth is this person discussing the benefits of renting over homeownership on an X-Files blog? The answer lies in episode fifteen of season six. Arcadia takes on a satirical tone as Mulder and Scully masquerade as a married couple buying a new home to investigate multiple disappearances that take place in a new subdivision built on landfill. The episode was written by Daniel Arken who used inspiration from his negative experience with a planned community. And the name they chose for their fake family? The Petries. Yes. Like the dish. For a couple fake buying a house built on landfill. That in and of itself seems like a plot devise out of an episode of The Simpsons, and it is what makes this episode so funny to watch unfold.

The episode begins with a disgruntled homeowner putting a tacky whirligig outside his home. That night, something enters his home and something attacks and kills the man and his wife. As Mulder and Scully arrive to investigate the disappearance of the couple, one of the neighbors moves Mulder’s basketball hoop into the garage saying it’s against the rules. A neighbor named Big Mike warns them against breaking any of the rules but does not really say why. Mike later disappears after being attacked because of a broken lightbulb. Scully later finds one of the neighbor’s dogs covered in what looks like blood. Later, after she has it tested, it turns out to just be garbage.

Meanwhile, Mulder tests the limits of this noncompliance the neighbors are so afraid of. A plastic flamingo. A broken mailbox. He later finds the mailbox fixed with a note inside telling him to just be like everyone else before it gets dark. And what does Mulder do? He drags the basketball hoop out of the garage. After dark. Because of course he does. A neighbor tries to help him put it away but is interrupted by his wife screaming as she is attacked by the creature in question. That’s when Mulder notices that there was a light out at their house. Uh oh.

Scully gets the test results back from the grime found on the dog and it matches what she thought was blood from the ceiling fan within the house. Mulder believes that is because the neighbors buried the couple in the front your and digs up the yard with a backhoe. His excuse? He’s putting in a reflecting pool which, of course, violates the rules. The couple aren’t buried in the yard, but the whirligig that was mysteriously delivered to them at the beginning of the episode is and it was made by the company owned by the HOA leader.

The landfill was just a red herring, though, because the creature wasn’t some monster created by the waste of the human race. No. It was conjured by the head of the HOA. A Tibetan thoughtform called a tulpa. He used it to force compliance on all of his stupid rules. Mulder arrests him and handcuffs him to the mailbox. The creature comes for the man who created him because he’s out of compliance in a very blunt reminder that actions have consequences.

This parody on planned communities – especially one built on literal garbage – is even funnier today because it reminds me of all the complaints I hear from friends and family who pay into Homeowner Associations only to have arbitrary rules set against them. Don’t leave the car out of the garage. Don’t leave your Halloween pumpkin outside. Don’t hang that butterfly flag. Don’t paint your mailbox that color. One of my relatives owns a condo near Lake Michigan and they can’t change their yard at all. They have to keep the seagrass and flowers the yard came with. My grandparents owned one as well and they couldn’t put out a Santa decoration at Christmas. This episode so perfectly hits on how asinine  the rules are that it’s one of the most relevant episodes to today’s society.

I always want to watch the satirical Tom Hanks movie The Burbs when I watch this episode.  While it doesn’t revolve around HOAs, it does give a hilarious story about how neighbors spy on each other and invent narratives about each other based on what they see with no context. In a twist on that, it turns out in the end that the paranoia and assumptions made turned out to be right but only by sheer dumb luck. Hanks’ character observing the reclusive new neighbors using a high-powered furnace and digging holes in their back yard in the middle of the night is so brilliantly shot that I’m laughing just thinking about it.

More recently, I’m reminded of the first season of Beef which shows people’s inability go get along and the underlying rage we all feel dealing with jerks. In feeling like we have no control and wanting to take that control back for our own sanity. I can only imagine dealing with HOAs and neighbors feels very similar. I mean, we all want to feel like a rebel going up against the rules when we feel something is unfair.

Until next week, the truth is out there.