THE X-FILES Proves You Can Go HOME AGAIN
The first three episodes of the X-Files revival have varied in quality, with the first being dismal, the second being a step up and the third being a delight - but a delight that felt disconnected from the series as a whole. The one-off comedy episodes have always been favorites, but The X-Files needs to be more than just that, and good drama is a major component. That drama hasn't been fully present in this season... until last night.
Home Again, written and directed by Glen Morgan is not a sequel to Morgan's classic episode Home, but it definitely ties in with that episode thematically. In Home Scully confronts issues of motherhood (brought on by confronting a particularly fucked up mother) while in Home Again she deals with her own status as a mother, and with the child she gave up for adoption many years ago. The presence of William, Mulder and Scully's child, has hung over the season, and it is clear that he is the glue that is tying everything together on an emotional level. And Home Again got to that emotional level.
The main mystery was an intriguing monster of the week featuring a creepy slime-ghost that takes bloody, vicious revenge on those who deal with Philadelphia's homeless. In the episode everyone who deals with the homeless is more or less a jerk, more concerned with their own issues than taking the time to help and deal with people who live on the streets. A HUD goon works with a local developer to clean up the homeless from a downtown area where they plan to put in condos; meanwhile a NIMBY activist doesn't want the homeless put in a shelter in her ritzy zip code. Whose responsibility is the homeless problem? Nobody's, it seems, and everybody involved pays for it with their lives.
The stalker ends up being a thoughtform brought to life by a Banksy-like street artist who calls himself Trash Man. Unlike the rich Banksy, Trash Man (Rancid's Tim Armstrong in a reall strong, fun turn) lives in squalor and is possibly on the mentally ill side. The episode's thematics catch up to everyone when Trash Man is revealed - who is responsible? Who is responsible for the homeless? Who is responsible for the murdering thoughtform? And who is responsible for little William? Morgan expertly collides all of these stories, helped by a dramatic turn in which Scully's mom has a fatal heart attack; her last words are to Mulder: "My son is named William too."
Morgan does something really strange and potentially unsatisfying here - he has Mulder flat out shoot down Trash Man's theory about his thoughtform. Following through on the new version of Mulder - disillusioned by years of internet hoaxes and the convoluted deconstruction of the colonization conspiracy - Morgan has our believer refuse to believe. There are no such things as tulpas, he tells Trash Man. That was a mistranslation of true Eastern thought. And yet there the thoughtform, ripping people limb from limb. This week's monster doesn't quite add up, and I like that. I like that it's truly bizarre and sort of unexplainable; too many episodes of The X-Files boil down to 'it's science we don't know yet,' but this monster doesn't fit into any logical box at all. It's all emotion, no logic.
That total inability to know is mirrored in the B-plot. Scully's mother changed her living will and never told Dana. She wore a quarter around her neck, but Scully can't figure out the meaning of it, what it represented to her mother. There are all these small questions that force Scully to face the fact that her mother was, as we all are, unknowable, that she had private facets no one ever knew. So while the mechanism of the monster doesn't make any sense, Mulder and Scully are able to answer one small question about it - where did it come from? And while there is much about Scully's mom that remains infinitely unknowable, she does get one small answer - why did the mother ask for estranged son Charlie before slipping into a coma, and not anyone else?
The themes of the episode were on point, and so was the monster. A classically creepy creature, the slime-ghost left behind puddles of mucous filled with maggots and rode around in a spectral garbage truck. He treats his victims like garbage, shoving their heads in the trash - just as the victims are treating the homeless like garbage. While the mechanics of the monster never make sense, the totality of it works, from creepy look to horrifying actions.
The drama works as well; Scully is forced to wonder if she threw William away like so much trash, especially after seeing that her own mother can not let go of her estranged son. What makes this all a great bit of X-Files drama, though, is the way Mulder and Scully come together. We get a true sense of the depth of their relationship here, watching them interact and seeing how Scully needs to throw herself right into the work in order to cope. They end the episode on a heartbreaking note, sitting alone on a beach, the truth and Scully comes to a conclusion - the truths that Mulder is after are essentially knowable, but the truths that she is looking for, about William and her mom, may be forever hidden, like the distant end of the foggy lake.
The great monster, the thematic cohesion, the relationship between Mulder and Scully - for the first time this season I could see a future for The X-Files. This episode felt right, and it managed to create classical X-Files moments and beats in a modern context. It took the totality of the X-Files emotional journey into consideration, and it found a way to tie every single thread together - while also giving us a message that not everything in the world will be satisfactorily tied up for us. For the first time in season ten I feel not like I'm getting a nice revisit with old friends but rather like I'm seeing a vision for what a continuing version of this show could be.
