X-Files S04 E10–14
4x10 Paper Hearts*
No mention of oil, back to monster of the week. I hope this is good because we’re 10 episodes into this season with only 2 good ones.
M has a dream about a little girl so they goes to the dream forest to find the body. They find a long decomposed skull. M was having some sort of historical dream? Hopefully this is not like that dull civil war episode. M knows the killer from a cold case he worked and captured. The killer took girls from their houses and cut the little girls hearts out. M’s profile caught him. S is like it’s not a magic dream, more likely that M might have been turning the case over in his mind because he knew there was one more victim and the clues were in his subconscious. For once her SCIENCE view is not totally implausible.
M finds a clue that the killer killed way more girls than they found. The killer is in prison, and the actor playing him is really good. Creepy but over the top comical. Smug and sort of disconcerting weird, playing it all as a game, talking factually about the kids he killed. He wants the hearts he cut out of the girls clothing back before telling them about the undiscovered bodies. Him and M take shots on the basketball court and M drains one from the 3 point line, which apparently Duchovny did in one take & (wiki tells me) he used to play at Princeton so makes sense. That damn Duchovny is good at everything huh.
M starts to have flashbacks that his sister Samantha wasn’t actually abducted by aliens but maybe by this creepy guy instead. The killer pushes M’s buttons saying he sold a vacuum to M’s dad and that was when he saw Samantha. M of course punches him in the face but, fair enough, the guard didn’t see the child molester getting smacked. S is kinda mad about it though saying she saw it and it’s bad. OK narc. M goes to see his mom and confirms his dad DID buy a vacuum cleaner from that company back in the day, it’s in the closet.
The killer is super creepy and is goading M about where his sister is buried and how he’ll never tell. M busts him out of prison on a fake release form and takes him to the house, where the killer takes him through the entire night in 1973. M finally figures out that the guy is lying because of some detail about the house. But that night before M can get him back to prison, the killer escapes via some sort of dream power with M’s badge & gun. Nice one dumbass. Now John Wayne Gacy is on the loose looking for another victim and bingo he immediately kidnaps a girl and M has really done a pretty bad thing here, he will definitely get fired and maybe prison time if the media gets hold of this.
M tracks the killer to this super cool location, a bus graveyard (apparently in Surrey) and the guy is sitting on the back of a bus with a gun on the little girl. M shoots him in the head like a Dirty Harry badass. But now he’ll never know 100% if Samantha really was taken by him — although it seems not likely given the house details he got wrong and S says the evidence shows it wasn’t. But yeah, really good serious episode which I forgot about totally. A good humanizing episode where it’s not all charging around looking for aliens or ghosts or whatever.
4x11 El Mundo Gira
But that serious thoughtfulness doesn’t last long because, El Chupacabra! So a girl is found dead, no eyes, next to a green goat, and some yellow rain is going on, at a Mexican migrant camp. M & S surprisingly differ on what may be responsible for the killing. M & the old ladies believe it’s the work of the satanic goat killer, El Chubacabra, obviously. S is like no, it was a massive fungal infection that ate her insides. Difficult to say which idea is less plausible.
M is kinda mocking the guy they have inside for the crime doing a telenova style impression of him to S. Meanwhile everyone in the migrant camp is getting deported, thanks feds, but they crash the bus and leg it over a field, with the driver inside grossly eaten up by that same fungus! So it turns out the fungus is being spread around by this one unwitting guy and this Mexican border camp is on Borden Street, Vancouver which doesn’t exactly look like the Mexican border although it does look run down. But green and wet not dry and dusty. S is tracking the fungus down, M is still on El Chub. The whole thing is kinda not interesting. It started off fun but it’s one of those in between episodes that are really nothing. Not funny, not scary just M & S debating outlandish theories with serious faces. There’s some sort of alien/illegal alien type stuff grafted on to make it seem heavier, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. M & S don’t care about illegals. Of course, it turns out the fungus/enzyme came from outer space. Cool.
4x12 Leonard Betts
An ambulance speeds down Seymour Street! Hey the nurse is the super surgeon from ER who loses his arm in a helicopter blade accident. Oh no just after he saves someone a truck smashes into the ambulance and he dead. Or is he? Yes, his head is (hilariously) several feet from his body. But err, the headless body walks out of the morgue. Can’t wait to hear S’s scientific no big deal sighing explanation for this one. Corpses can move after death Mulder, that’s called science.
Straight away (I love how she never even bothers for even one second to consider anything weird, despite the absolutely insanely inexplicable shit she encounters on a weekly basis) she says it’s body snatchers, they want the body for research at some sketchy medical school. But nope, that’s not the case as we see Betts REGROW HIS HEAD. Pretty cool.
S & M visit Betts’ mother, and she tells them he died, but 6 years ago. The doctor tells them Betts was super full of cancer. There’s a cool shot where S is about to cut into the decapitated head only for it to creep her out by blinking and opening its mouth. Anyway, Betts is back and he’s fine, head is all fixed and new. Turns out he needs to eat cancer up to survive. He tries to go back to being an EMT but gets captured. However he escapes the cuffs by tearing off his thumb. Then he goes and eats up some other cancer guy. S & M track him down and shoot at him and his car explodes.
S is like OK I saw him, but obviously the first death was staged (and also the head I did the autopsy on, pretty convincing fake she seems to have forgotten about). They look at his corpse and S does some more denying while M pushes the super leap in evolution theory. They don’t fall for the regenerated body in the coffin or whatever it is. And oh shit S is captured in the back of an ambulance by Betts but she fights back and escapes! She uses the defibrillator on his head and blasts him through the doors. But he only eats cancer so why did he target S? Bad news S. She wakes up later coughing with blood. S got the cancer! Decent episode, some fun weirdness.
4x13 Never Again
A dude is out boozing in the rain and gets a tattoo of a sailor looking lady. At the XF office, M is grumping about having to take paid vacation because he’s got eight weeks stored up and they’re forcing him. He’s mumbling like a deranged hobo and S is complaining she doesn’t have a desk which is pretty weird. I mean, sure they’re off in Idaho investigating alien mutant men most weeks, but there has to be some time when they’re just chilling in the office. What does she do then? Stand in the corner? Hot desk upstairs in the agent pool?
Maybe this has got to her, because S is off her nut bailing about how it’s two steps forwards then three steps back with the XF. Which yeah that’s episodic TV. She seems like she’s about to kill herself. M is barely listening, off on something he describes as a serious personal spiritual journey with his days off.
A random drunk guy realizes that his lady tattoo can uh, talk, and the tattoo is mean to him about losing his job and how he can’t get the annoying lady downstairs to turn down her TV because he’s a pussy. He spazzes out and kills the lady downstairs. I mean, her TV was loud and he had already asked nicely.
S is out and about in Gastown, half halfheartedly working a solo XF. She wanders into a tattoo parlor and meets tattoo guy and agrees to get dinner with him, here in ‘Philadelphia.’ M calls her from the special place he’s visiting. It’s Graceland! Ha! But also, huh?? He drove to Memphis on his own? He really is spooky.
M seems pissed that S brushes off this crappy XF as nonsense and instead is heading on a date. Tattoo wants her man to himself and is mad he’s going out with S. S agrees to pick up tattoo man, and is presumably going to wear her best party pant suit. It’s super weird seeing S be Dana and be on a date. She says her last date was to see Glengarry Glen Ross (??) S is literally wearing a black sweater for the big date. I don’t get why she’s all frustrated and bored with her crappy job all of a sudden. She has a batshit insane job and sees things on a weekly basis that literally nobody else on earth does. But OK.
What the hell is going on here, tattoo guy persuades S to get a back tattoo?? I don’t get why she’s being super weird but she’s into the pain of the tattoo then spends the night with the weird guy. Is this whole episode going to be a fever dream? It would make more sense if this was all a reaction to her cancer, but this episode was shot and meant to air before the last one, so it’s not that. Still this is actually kinda a cool fun episode because it’s so far off the normal track.
S wakes up to a couple of detectives who have circumstantial evidence that tattoo guy killed the downstairs lady. S thinks the tattoos might be poisoned ink and making them insane, which, yeah. Tattoo guy nearly kills S but at the last minute instead he shoves his entire arm into the furnace to burn off the tattoo. S still has hers. She gets back to DC and the office all cool, moving on, the dude got arrested and now S is the star of a second actual X-File. M is ragging on S about her poor choices (reminder, he was forced to take a vacation which he never does, and used it to drive to Graceland alone) but she still seems all sad/mad. M does some great selfishness at the end, asking if all this was because he didn’t get her a desk. No jackass, not all things are about you. But yes, get her a goddam desk already, it’s been four years!
OK wiki tells me 1) The tattoo is voice by Jodie Foster. Ha! And 2) this episode was meant to be directed by fucking Tarantino! But he was having a beef with the union and so it didn’t happen. Alas, that would have been dope.
