Case 05, File 10: Chinga

AKA: Child's Play...God What Number Are They Up To?

So here's a question I was musing upon as I left the theater after seeing A Star Is Born: Is letting your external knowledge of a piece of media's creation affect your opinion a valid avenue of criticism? Would I feel less like A Star Is Born is fawning over the male lead to the detriment of the woman if I didn't know that the actor playing the male lead and the director were the same person? Would I be less generous to Clerks if I didn't know it was made on a shoestring budget by a man who had never directed a movie before? And would this episode feel less like a grab bag of Stephen King cliches if I didn't know Stephen King co-wrote it?

After a cold open in which a single mother and her daughter (and the daughter's obviously evil doll) go to a grocery store and leave after accidentally causing the customers to tear their eyes out (and the butcher to go full stab-his-eye out) we open with Scully on vacation in scenic...Maine. In February. Stephen King wrote this you say? She gets a call from Mulder, but she maintains she's on vacation. In Maine. In February.

Anyway Scully wanders into the grocery store and gets involved with the investigation, learning a lot of not-super-relevant details about the mother (named Melissa) and her daughter (named Polly): Melissa's husband is dead, people in town don't trust her, the butcher was hitting on her. It doesn't matter, but it sure is interesting. Meanwhile the mother is running around catering to her daughter's whims while being afraid of the doll and Scully is trying to extricate herself from the investigation to get back to her vacation. In Maine. In February.

But Scully is still involved and they go see the head of a Day Care center who once hit Polly (and lost her license because of it. The day care lady only has one scene, so she does her absolute best to sell "Psycho" in one scene, ranting about how Melissa is a witch and Polly needs an exorcism. Eventually one of the cops tries to get Melissa to go hang out at his cabin till all this blows over because he's got a crush on her? I dunno, I didn't follow this bit.

"Help, the doll is killing me in a way that's inconsistent with her MO in the rest of this episode!"

After the doll causes a woman's hair to get caught in a ice cream machine (just roll with it) she bolts and heads for the cabin. But the daughter complains, the doll goes kill crazy and the day care lady gets attacked by the doll and cuts her own throat with a piece of record. Ick. So Scully gets dragged back into the investigation and the cop who had a crush on Melissa realizes she's involved and goes to arrest her, only to immediately get Dolled. I might need to get a better verb for that, but whatever, the plot summary is almost over.

Scully and the chief of police go and find out that Melissa's husband pulled the doll from the ocean and then immediately shoved a fishing hook through his head, while the doll was hanging out on deck. So Scully immediately figures out that the doll is responsible and goes to confront Melissa who has grown tired of this whole doll situation and is trying to burn the whole house down, self, daughter and doll included. But the doll is having none of it and seems on the verge of killing Melissa until Scully sticks the doll in the microwave. Which seems like an oddly straightforward way of dealing with it, but the episode ends with Scully and Mulder bantering and a cliffhanger involving a fisherman finding the burned doll.

I may have been musing on whether I can really separate my metatextual knowledge of the writer and his body of work from this review, but that was mostly just musing, I have no intention of even trying to separate them. Chinga is far from a great episode, but it's a fun one and a lot of its greatest strengths and weaknesses are inherent to Stephen King's writing, and failing to address those would be doing the episode a disservice.

"I'm not afraid of you!"
*Ron Howard* "She was."

The first thing that has to be acknowledged is that this episode is steeped in Stephen King cliches. I mean Maine, small town drama, Maine, nutty religious lady, killer inanimate object, did I mention Maine? I keep hammering it home, but Scully is the one wearing a shirt with it so who's really bringing it up too much? This is both a positive and a negative since Stephen King stories are usually pretty solid, but it suffers because cramming all the elements of a Stephen King story into a 40 minute episode kind of keeps them from landing properly. A moment that stands out to me is when the police chief (who hangs around a lot but does nothing except guide Scully around) basically just throws Melissa's backstory at Scully's face in an exposition dump because King wrote it and it's gotta go somewhere.

But King is still a pretty good writer and he's got a good sense of what's scary and the doll is fucking scary. It's a pretty simple concept (the doll is creepy and makes people kill themselves) but the scenes work. The visions are also pretty solid, even if they never get explained and don't actually do anything to the plot, they're scary and sometimes it's okay to just have stuff that's just scary. Not everything needs to add to the plot.

But the plot does need to add up to something, and that's one of the big issues with the episode, that the plot seems to be an afterthought. Scully does precious little to actually stop the events, mostly spending her time wandering from place to place, getting exposition thrown at her about the town until it's time for her to nuke the doll. I get that Scully (and Mulder) cant solve the case too quickly or things will just end, but I like to feel like they're doing something to try and help, and Scully just hangs around on vacation. In Maine. In February.

"Aw, look at this disgusting doll I pulled out of the ocean. I'm gonna give it to my daughter."

But there are other things I do like about the episode. For all that their backstory gets chucked at us in a bucket of exposition, the characters are mostly well rounded and their backstory is interesting enough to keep me paying attention. They're also well acted, even while they're not given a lot to do (Melissa's increasing desperation and Polly's detached demanding anger may not be complex, but they do it well). Oh and while they're mostly redundant, the little asides with Mulder never fail to make me laugh.

I dunno where I end up landing on Chinga. I could be convinced either way and I've gone back and forth thinking it's a good episode and a bad episode several times over my life. I find I'm a little more positively disposed to it right now. It's not a well structured episode but it's a good time, some solid visuals and scares and just enough Stephen King that it doesn't interfere with the episode too much. And maybe sometimes that's enough.

Case Notes:

• The first shot in this episode is a shot of a license plate with "Maine" on it, in case you weren't clear that Stephen King wrote it.
• Say what you will about the cold opening of the episode, it's freaks you the fuck out.
• This score is even more Danny Elfman than the one from Post-Modern Prometheus.
• Scully wearing the Maine t-shirt makes me think that the costumer is making fun of Stephen King.
• On that note, why would Scully go to Maine on vacation? The Jersey shore or New York City are much closer, and if she's going to fly why wouldn't she go some place less...frozen? Or just Boston?
• Mulder is watching porn in the office when he's supposed to be on vacation. I love Mulder.
• The bit where Scully calls Mulder in his office feels like it's the victim of a rewrite because they exchange the same information they'd exchanged literally two minutes earlier.
• Scully listing off the stuff for the occult and Mulder asking her to marry him is always going to be the best.
• I'd forgotten the plot point where Melissa was getting hit on by the dude who died in the grocery store. This episode really is a Stephen King novel compressed into 40 minutes with Scully wandering through it.
• Scully has been there 10 minutes and she's already driving around with the cops to investigate the case, love it.
• Not sure of the logic train of nailing the window shut given that the doll is clearly magic but I admire her attempt.
• The fact that the people blamed Polly for the day care lady losing her license really frustrates me, partially cause it is definitely what would happen.
• The cop hitting on Melissa is such a random thing, I forget if it actually goes anywhere.
• The ice cream scene doesn't land the way I think it should, but whatever.
• The day care lady (Jane?) is so cartoonishly evil that she barely even registers as a person. Telling the FBI and a cop you'd like to burn a woman for witchcraft and exorcise a little girl isn't a great way to endear yourself to them. She actually reminds me a lot of the cartoonishly evil lady from The Mist.
• The forest ranger tells Melissa that winter is "In full force" but Scully is wearing a t-shirt in Maine, which you would definitely not do in winter there. Even I wouldn't.
• The evil day care lady killing herself to the hokey pokey isn't a fantastic scene, but it works.
• I remember seeing a special feature on how they digitally removed Gillian Anderson's tattoo when she kicks the door closed which...really? I promise no one can see it.
• That said, Gillian Anderson in the bath is relevant to my interest.
• The despair in Scully's eyes when she opens the curtains to see the cop there is great. Honestly, why are you even involving her? It is 0% her problem.
• The evil day care lady's day care was called "Wee Lassie and Laddie's Day Care." So her death was justified.
• The scenes where Mulder calls are a delight. I especially love him drinking from the horrifyingly expired jug.
• Cop: "Aren't you on vacation?" Me: Motherfucker, you went and got her at her hotel, fuck off.
• Buddy turns on Melissa really hard. I feel like that part would make more sense if they hadn't had him want to sleep with her.
• I guess the fact that Stephen King managed to jam some Stephen King prose into the narration kind of distracts from the fact that Polly's dad found a seaweed covered doll in the ocean and gave it to his daughter. Gross.
• Melissa cooking popcorn six feet away from the cop's dead body is honestly one of the better visuals in the episode.
• I admire her persistence in sticking with the "Nailing the windows and doors shut" method, but it didn't work the first time, I'm not sure why she thinks it'll work this time.
• It takes till Melissa is trying to burn the whole house down for the kid to show some emotion other than "Demanding anger."
• I honestly wish that the doll hadn't done the "Don't play with matches," bit. The "I don't like you anymore" is much more solid, and it would have hit harder if that had been the first new thing she'd said.
• While the denoucement in the office is kinda out of step, tonally, with the rest of the episode, I do love the idea that Mulder is at a total loose end without Scully.
• The bit with the fisherman finding the burnt doll is just odd though.
• As always these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can continue to make terrible life choices.

Audio Observations:

Uh....they play the Hokey Pokey at several points in the episode? That's a really weak one, sorry.