X-Files - ‘Home’

    I must’ve seen a trailer or an advertisement of some sort, or read some kind of breakdown in a TV guide while standing in line at the grocery store, because I was all in on The X-Files before it even premiered. I can’t absolutely swear on the timing but I want to say I had a t-shirt of the show well before the first episode. It didn’t have any characters on it, just a black tee with a picture of some spooky woods and the title. Google images has failed me entirely in tracking it down.

Pretty, uh, obvious why no shots from the episode.

 

     I didn’t have any particular fascination with the occult or conspiracy theories as a kid and in fact hated scary movies and shows in general. I’d absorbed a few Twilight Zone episodes and the like because back in those days you got what TV gave you but I actively avoided anything actually horrific. I did read a lot of weird stuff, though, rummaged through my father’s collection of old Sci Fi and Fantasy books so I wasn’t completely out of my depth, but all of the UFO's and government intrigue was nothing more than interesting background. I was there for the monster of the week episodes, which in the end was a wise investment on my part.

    Aired as the second episode of season four, ‘Home’ is a nasty piece of work, even after all this time. Twenty-fours years after broadcast it’s certainly not as graphically violent and sweary as television is now and the pace is refreshingly glacial but the subject matter is enough that I kept getting surprised by exactly how far it was willing to go and how much was not left ambiguous. I mean, the episode opens with a burying a baby alive and it’s not implied or happening off screen, they straight up murder that baby.

    But that’s not all that’s nasty about it, and some of the sharper critics noticed it at the time. The show very (very) deliberately is set in such a stereotype of small-town middle America that even by the standards of the time it flirts with absurdity. Sure, there’s no real internet in 1997, and widespread cell phone usage is still a few years away, but there’s not even cable? Mulder and Scully are called in by the local law enforcement who are very open about being in over their heads and they have an arch appreciation/disdain for the town that’s apparent from the jump. It only takes about ten minutes into the episode to understand that the inbred killers and the podunk town are meant to be seen as two sides of the same very and very old coin.

    This is likely my age showing but to me the episode both is and isn’t dated, I mean aside from the parts that are obviously deliberately so. I still love the 90’s fashion, the shoulders pads desperately trying to stay relevant, the squarish suits, everyone calling each other on land lines (or as they used to be known, ‘telephones’), there’s even a scene where Mulder is messing with bunny ears trying to get a decent tv signal that just now occurred to me is inexplicable to anyone born in the last twenty years. The most obvious of the obviously dated is the setting: a borderline lawsuit-worthy Mayberry rip off, right down to the name of the sheriff and his musings about the idylls of small-town America. The killers ride around in a classic Chevy boat of a car and listen to classic crooners from the late 50’s. This is not subtle stuff.

    The unobviously dated content resides mostly in the actual mechanics of the show: how it’s shot, how it’s edited, how it treats the main characters. Now we’re obviously three seasons deep into the show by this point so it’s not like we have to reestablish who Mulder and Scully are but by today’s standards they have the most perfunctory inner lives. There’s a very 90’s conversation about Mulder seeing Scully as a possible mom for the first time, Mulder muses about how he’d love to live in a sleepy little town like this (Scully very flatly and rightly calls bullshit on this), and in what is possibly the oddest moment in this entire episode Mulder, watching the killers gather around and celebrate the killing of the town’s deputy, recites back the lines about pack behavior overheard earlier in the episode from an episode of ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.’ Look that one up, kids

    Which leads us nicely to the surprise secondary nastiness of this episode: Mulder and Scully are callous pricks. They and the local deputy have decided they need to raid the killers’ house looking for who they think is a kidnapped woman. The deputy goes in by the front door as Mulder and Scully are sneaking around the side. They watch, helpless, as a booby trap goes off after the deputy opens the door and brains the poor man. This is when Mulder decides he needs to quote that episode of ‘Wild Kingdom.’ They decide they need a distraction so open up the sheep pens and scatter them over the grounds of the farm. This is when, maybe two minutes of screen time after the murder, that Scully makes a ‘Babe’ joke and they bicker adorably. Like I said, pricks.

    But I do like most of the episode, especially that, as I said, the pace is deliberately slow. There’s never any doubt about who the killers are, just why they’re doing what they’re doing, and the process of Mulder and Scully slowly making their way to the final confrontation is built like a creeping inevitability. Everything at night is shot in deep shadow and most of the deformities of the killers are kept off-screen or just out of focus. The actual physical brutality is hidden but not the motives and backstories and they are truly unsettling.

    I suppose I haven’t touched on what’s so horrifying about the subject of the episode and after reflection I don’t think I will. The internet exists and I like the idea of maybe someone going into this episode cold and slowly realizing that yes, they are absolutely going there. After the initial airing this episode was kept out of reruns for the longest time and it’s obvious to see why. I probably haven’t watched it since it first aired and while a lot of the details faded I remembered those opening and closing scenes pretty damn closely. This is not the last time ‘The X-Files’ is going to come up.