I’ll admit I was caught a little flat-footed going into this episode. The promos made it look bloody and creepy, and the title led me to what was perhaps a preconceived notion about the subject matter. Based upon the title alone (to say nothing of my compulsive avoidance of spoilers), I was fully prepared to revisit the gnarled, limbless Peacock family tree from season four’s banned-from-network-television episode “Home.” After all, Glen Morgan was half of the Morgan/Wong writing team responsible for that particular episode (which the Fox network refused to ever air again after its initial broadcast save for a special Halloween presentation a couple of years later).
“Home” served as a benchmark in more ways than one. Not only was it one of the most daringly horrific episodes of the show’s two-hundred-plus hours of television, it was the only episode of the run to bear a TV-MA rating. But I digress. This week’s episode had nothing to do with the inbred Pennsylvania hillbillies and the special bond they share with their dear old stump of a mom. I’m probably thankful for that. Instead, we get a creepy monster-of-the-week X-File wrapped around a poignant moment in the shared lives of Scully and Mulder. Or maybe the human drama is wrapped around the monster story. Honestly, the two stories are only tenuously connected. Series regular Sheila Larkin returns for this episode in her (admittedly limited) role as Dana’s mother Margaret Scully. Remember my previously stated aversion to spoilers? I’ll do my best here.
Scully faces a personal tragedy even as the two agents investigate a strange murder of an employee of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) office based in Philadelphia. The creature is pure horrific X-Files fodder, crawling in and out of garbage trucks, leaking maggot-infested slime, dropping gooey Band-aids, and bare-handedly rending limbs from humans wherever he goes. Their investigation leads them to a local graffiti artist with an unusual tie to the creature. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully are forced to grapple with some long-smothered shared regrets even as they begin to find each other again.
The biggest flaw of this episode was that it couldn’t have been produced as two completely separate episodes. The monster-of-the-week parts felt a bit rushed and florid. Don’t get me wrong, the monster itself was creepy and menacing and vile despite a quite silly moniker (“The Band-Aid Nose Man”? Seriously now.), but the mystery’s resolution was all but non-existent. Sure, they got to the bottom of the case, but weren’t able to stop the killer from killing and most likely didn’t even prevent the eventual return of his pus-filled maggot-ridden ass. No arrests were made.
In fact, the figure ostensibly responsible for the creation of the monster ends up running around in what amounts to a failed attempt to help the agents. Only Morgan’s masterfully sharp writing kept this aspect of the story on the rails in his introduction of TrashMan, who stands out to me as one of the more fascinatingly scripted helpful townies in the history of the show. I don’t even know if Mulder and Scully should bother writing up their report about this one. On the other hand, the human drama between the two leads was artfully crafted and performed with intense depths. That famous chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson, while not exactly missing in the first half of this miniseries, well and fully ignited in this episode.
The part of this story revolving around the graffiti artist named TrashMan and his accidental rage-fueled killing machine was tied loosely to the theme of personal responsibility which drives Scully’s character through much of the episode. But really there are two very different levels of responsibility being presented. Certainly, any creative act drawn from anger and frustration stands the distinct possibility of being spiteful and damaging (reference EVERY MESSAGE BOARD EVER).
However, is it truly possible to argue the culpability of an artist when his or her art resonates negatively? Can we blame the Beatles for Charles Manson’s actions because they recorded “Helter Skelter”? Should JD Salinger bear responsibility for John Lennon’s murder because Chapman was carrying a copy of “Catcher in the Rye” during his visit to the Upper West Side? Would it be possible to credit Warhol with a spike in Campbell’s soup sales in the Sixties? While I can accept that an artist bears responsibility with regards to intent in a work of art, the audience’s interpretation of that work is entirely out of his or her control. If I want to regard “Starship Troopers” as a laugh-out-loud comedy, Paul Verhoeven can’t say boo to me about it. Conversely, Scully’s borderline ravings about personal responsibility once they get facetime with TrashMan have more to do with her own long-held guilt than any recriminations she might be directing toward their suspect.
Their shared yet distinctly individual guilt over the loss of their child William is forced to the surface for both of them in this episode. While I believe these particular regrets had much to do with their state of estrangement at the beginning of this season, it now seems bring them closer to finding each other again. Mulder’s steadfast companionship throughout Scully’s deep loss in this episode is as much a comfort to her as it is to all of us watching.
Suffering from loss has always been a bonding agent in their lives together, and this episode is no exception. As flaky and unreliable of a human being as Fox Mulder can be, he knows how to play the role of dutiful supporter when it counts. As uncommon as it is for Scully to exhibit a moment of vulnerability, he takes it in stride and offers his strength just as a true partner should. There are some truly beautiful moments between them throughout this episode, but the moment he appears at the door of the ICU is easily my favorite. It is no small thing for him to temporarily forsake his monster hunt to come and offer her comfort. In fact, it’s downright domestic of him, and the gesture does not slip past Scully. Those two words “I’m here” bore such striking resonance. In that moment, I believe they both came home again to each other.