Case 09, File 03: Daemonicus

AKA: Anyone Seen The Exorcist III?

For the first seven seasons of The X-Files, the team was just Mulder and Scully, and that made for an easy dynamic; Mulder believed in weird shit, Scully would be skeptical, semi-romantic banter, rinse and repeat. Making the dynamic built around a trio, even if Scully feels more like a side character than one of the core group, means they need to work out how this going to function as a unit, and how they're going to bounce off each other.

Our episode kicks off with an elderly couple in West Virginia playing Scrabble. And since that's horror movie shorthand for things being too nice, less than 2 minutes have passed before they're attacked by two dudes in demon masks, and the husband is tricked into shooting his wife. The next morning their bodies have been posed like a Satanic Sacrifice, so Reyes is called in and...you forgot she was a cult expert too, huh? Anyway, she thinks something is weird, but Doggett is skeptical...until a snake pops out of one of the bullet wounds.

So they head off to see Scully, who is working as a professor as Quantico, and who does the autopsy on the couple and doesn't think anything is odd, but Reyes is certain she felt the presence of evil. Before they can rake her over the coals for that, a local insane asylum calls up and says they think they know who the killers are. Specifically, they think that one of their patients who escaped, and a security guard who's missing, are the ones doing it.

So after a brief interlude where one of the two killers (still wearing shitty demon masks) kills the other, they go and talk to the escaped patient's cell neighbor, a guy named Kobold, who claims he's being being told by Satan where to find them. They decide to take his advice cause they liked Silence of the Lambs too. Sure enough, he leads Doggett and Reyes right to where the body of the dead killer is hung upside down, ala the upside down cross. So Kobold was right, and he earns a nice new cell with a window for his trouble.

In that room, Kobold has another vision, this time of the head doctor of the asylum getting attacked, so they rush off to find her, only to discover that she too is already dead. Doggett at this point is pretty suspicious, pointing out that Kobold is a master manipulator and also wrote a monograph on Satanic imagery and he could be the one behind everything. Unfortunately when he goes to confront Kobold about that, Kobold gives him a lecture on how Doggett feels and then starts vomiting all over him, which makes discussion difficult.

"Wait...why are we wearing these?"
"What, you aren't having fun?"

At this point Doggett is pretty much done with this, but then Kobold tells them that the killer is at a marina, one that Scully is right by. She heads there ahead of Doggett and Reyes and is immediately captured. But rather than killing Scully, the dude waits until Doggett and Reyes arrive with Kobold, before killing himself. And then Kobold bolts and gets shot. But, twist, it turns out that Kobold's guard switched clothes with him and got shot for him, and Kobold is gone. And that's just kind of the end of the episode. Go home.

Daemonicus is an episode best defined by a scene towards the end, where Doggett and Kobold have a confrontation, and for the first chunk of it, it's a great scene. Kobold has some genuinely insightful looks into Doggett's psyche and the direction during the shot reverse shot is excellent, with Kobold's shots being locked down while Doggett's has an honest to god dolly zoom. And then Kobold starts vomiting all over him and the entire scene is undercut by a trip straight to goofy town, and the entire episode is like that.

The core mystery is, I think, the root problem, because it's tearing the episode in twain. The base plot, that of a brilliant mastermind talking multiple people to either risk their life or just straight up kill themselves in service of him escaping an insane asylum, is already pretty goofy, but it's the kind of goofy you can navigate with some good acting and directing. But every time they bring in the Satan stuff, it just tips the goofiness scale and makes it impossible to take seriously on its own terms. Is it not enough for him to talk the other prisoner into blowing his own brains out? Must he do it in a goofy demon mask?

This is a neat transition, I like it.

The rest of the plot is more concerned with establishing new norms and that is a very mixed bag. Putting Scully at Quantico makes narrative sense but it's going to mean they have to write around it, so it may come back to bite them. They also feel the need to establish the new group dynamic, with Doggett being the staunch skeptic, Reyes the out-there believer and Scully in the middle, and while that makes a decent amount of sense, it turns a nice simple dynamic more complicated, and makes Scully seem like she's waffling, at least in this episode, which feels off.

And it's a shame, because while the script doesn't really work, the episode looks great. It's never really scary, and it frequently dips into goofy or overly stylized for no real purpose, but at least it looks nice. Dolly zooms, checkerboard dissolves, silhouette shots, the episode is taking some big swings on a visual level, and at least some of them work out. If you can't be particularly scary, you might as well look kind of neat.

Unfortunately, the episode is so focused on its big twist that it doesn't really have time for much of anything else. We get absolutely no sense of the escaped convict, his security guard buddy or the one who dies to help Kobold escape. How did he convince them to join him on this plan? We never learn outside of a line about how he's a master manipulator because he'd tricked a handful of his students into coming to his house where he killed them (which, I'm sorry, that does not make him a master manipulator). Kobold feels like a villain who might as well have Pusher style mind control powers, but the episode can't explore him as a person without giving away its twist, and is too reliant on the actor's (admittedly solid) presence to make up for it.

"Dude? I'm sorry, I was having fun wearing the masks! Come back!"

I can't tell if this was actually the intent, but the episode reads like an attempt to mix two early series episodes, namely Beyond the Sea and Die Hand die Verletzt. And to be clear, both of those episodes are all time classics, they're good in very very different ways. They have different pacing and style and ways of engaging the audience. Either of the plots of Daemonicus could be good, but together they constantly undercut each other and make an episode weaker than the sum of its parts.

Case Notes:

• Is there really a placed called Weston in West Virginia?
• The fact that they're an old married couple playing Scrabble is basically horror movie hard coding that something horrible is about to happen, even before the dog gets killed.
• I feel like if I was his wife and I was duct taped up and knew he had a gun, I wouldn't keep walking forward when he told me to stop, but that's me.
• The demonic faces in the cold open look terrible, like a mid-tier Buffy demon face.
• I dunno why the camera work treats the fact that it's Reyes in the car as a reveal, she's a full fledged member of the cast now.
• The killers setting the victims up playing Scrabble again is goofy but I guess an acceptable kind of goofy. The ceiling fan stopping when she touches the Scrabble tile is the bad kind of goofy. Snakes in the injuries is back to the good kind of goofy though.
• Dunno if I'd open up my class making fun of my teacher, random student.
• The reveal that demon faces were masks makes me feel a lot better.
• Ah, an FBI Agent asking a doctor about demonic possession, that's some classic X-Files stuff.
• I don't hate the totally silent standoff between the two killers.
• The camerawork in this episode is pretty solid, lots of stylish cuts and edits, and some very moody long takes.
• Very solid creepy shot of the body hanging upside down.
• The shots of the stormy sky are kind of atmospheric but they break up the pacing.
• The scene in Kobold's new room is VERY Silence of the Lambs with a light paranormal twist.
• Can everyone hear the whispering voices or are they nondiegetic?
• I am amused by Doggett and Reyes carefully walking over to the doctor and saying her name, like there's even the ghost of a chance she's okay but failed to notice a bunch of people just storming into her house.
• The doctor's body is pretty gnarly, not gonna lie.
• The scene with Doggett and Kobold is actually really really solid, with both actors turning in great work, a nice look at the way Doggett feels and the camera work going off (I saw an honest to god subtle Dolly Zoom) and then Kobold starts projectile vomiting and it takes trip straight to goofy town.
• Hey, the guard is reading American Ronin, the magazine from Pusher.
• The final act of this episode is pretty weak, with Scully getting grabbed and held off screen entirely to reveal that the guy killed himself and then Kobold switching with the guard. They drag that reveal out though.
• As always these reviews are supported by my Patreon. You know I don't have super manipulator powers or I'd be using them to get you to donate.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Kobold is played by James Remar who was a few years out from playing Dexter's father on Dexter. He also more recently played Peter Gambi on Black Lightning. I missed getting into either of those, so I dunno if I'll ever get around to either of them.