The X-Files Week: "Scary Monsters"

The last two seasons of The X-Files -- while generally not well-beloved by longtime fans -- actually represent a great time of renewal for the long-enduring Fox series.  

Exciting new characters such as Doggett and Monica Reyes offered the writers and directors the opportunity to explore different facets of the paranormal and the supernatural.  And while viewers cannot be blamed for missing Scully and Mulder as the primary characters, I believe there is also much to love and admire in this “next generation” team-up of F.B.I. agents featured in these final seasons. 

One case in point may very well be the ninth season story “Scary Monsters,” which finds Doggett, Reyes, and X-Files “historian” Leyla Harrison  (Jolie Jenkins) investigating a creepy case in Pennsylvania involving a terrifying or monstrous child. 

The child, Tommy Conlon (Gavin Fink) boasts the capacity to bring his imagination to life in murderous and hungry fashion.

Specifically, he creates out of his mind a brand of giant, skittering insects that consume people. In fact, they burrow inside of people…and need to be cut out, surgically.

Together, Reyes, Doggett and Leyla must ferret out the truth of this situation and defeat this child’s night terrors.  They find that his father, Jeffrey (Scott Paulin) can’t really help, and learn that Tommy’s over-active imagination killed his mother, and the family cat, Spanky, too.  But what killed them specifically? 

Could it have been…belief?

In short, “Scary Monsters” works for all the same reasons that The X-Files  has always worked: because the evocative cinematography creates an aura of dread, because the characters resonate as human and likable, and because, finally, there is a social critique (of television, of all things…) embedded in the action.

But ultimately, the quality I enjoy most  about “Scary Monsters” is that it presents an X-File that, simply, Mulder wouldn’t be able to survive, let alone solve, and then has fun with that  intriguing idea.

Allow me to explain: Mulder’s great gift as an investigator is his imagination, his amazing capacity to conceive of connections that others simply can’t comprehend.  His motto is, of course, “I want to believe.”

In this case, however, that imagination would be an albatross around Mulder’s neck.  He shouldn’t believe, and his imagination would surely manifest itself and literally come up to kill him.   Doggett -- who is “dogged” and committed -- but lacking in such imagination -- is thus the perfect agent to walk into the lion’s den and face this particular opponent.  He can’t believe.  He can’t make real in his mind something he knows and feels is patently wrong.  

There are those fans who might think that this episode is belittling of Mulder (by presenting a case that isn’t tailor made for his brand of thinking), or belittling Doggett (for joking about his resolute lack of imagination), but I would argue that this perception is incorrect.  “Scary Monsters” instead shines a light on the differences between the two men, and reveals how there is a place for each in the world of The X-Files. And although Doggett is our likable protagonist here, Mulder is very much present in “Scary Monsters” in spirit, serving as that absent center that Chris Carter frequently discusses. 

If you gaze at the totality of “Scary Monsters,” you can see how the episode studies imagination from more angles than one.

For instance, Leyla is a walking-talking encyclopedia of knowledge regarding Scully and Mulder’s previous cases.  Every time she is presented with a new clue about Tommy’s case, she tries to contextualize it in terms of something that happened before…to Mulder and Scully. 

But strictly speaking, that’s not imagination, that’s movie criticism…or art appreciation; the attempt to organize facts into an order that helps one understand or contextualize life.  Leyla here makes references to several previous episodes including “D.P.O.” and “Field Trip,” but those cases provide no insight about this case, or about the boy, Tommy. 

I’ve written before about how The X-Files succeeds by re-purposing old horror stories and making them seem relevant and new at the turn of the millennium.  I feel that this observation is very much true of “Scary Monsters,” which re-creates the evil child of The Twilight Zone’s “It’s a Good Life” with modern (CGI) effects, but then adds a new coda to that child’s story. 

If you remember the episode, in “It’s a Good Life,” the imaginative but out-of-control Anthony couldn’t be stopped, and his parents were…permissive.  His reign of terror was endless (or at least until the 2003 series produced a sequel).  But here, “Scary Monsters” finds a way to subdue and ‘numb’ the imaginative child: by making him watch television all day long. 

This caustic ending is a perfect capper to the episode, a commentary on television functioning as babysitter in a society where two parents work, and a critique, again, of the culture of the day. It’s a culture in which children were fighting obesity at a heretofore unknown rate because they are not playing outside or running, or riding their books, but instead staying indoors, watching TV, or playing video games.  In other words, “Scary Monsters’ finds the perfect turn-of-the-millennium solution to imagination: numb it with reruns. Kill it with the “boob tube.”

And yes, this commentary might be considered “bite the hand that feeds you” commentary.  But The X-Files is a remarkable TV initiative because it is about ideas, and it follows those ideas – and makes the audience follow them too -- to their logical, if not always pleasant conclusions.

Episodes such as “Scary Monsters” prove that even in its last days on network television, The X-Files was delivering meaningful, worthwhile entertainment (and scares).