Case 09, File 12: Underneath

AKA: I Could Hide Out Under There, I Just Made You Say Underwear

Outside of broad strokes and one or two specific details that come up now and again, The X-Files doesn't really have concrete backstories for its characters. This is a good thing though, it allows them go digging into those broad strokes to find seeds to grow stories from. And from that angle, Doggett's years in the military and the NYPD seem like they would be a fertile ground to go digging into. I may have lost the metaphor a bit there, but I think you get what I'm going for.

Our episode kicks off in 1988, with a guy (who we'll eventually learn is named Fassl) heading into a house supposedly to repair cable. But like 5 seconds after talking to the father, he blinks and BAM whole family is there. And then BAM again, NYPD are there to arrest him. And then BAM a third time, one of the arresting officers is Doggett. That's not a BAM to him, but it is to us. Anyway, then we come back to the present where Fassl is being released because DNA evidence exonerated him.

But while that's normally a very good thing, Doggett is a wee bit peeved about it, and demands to get to look over the evidence. But while all of that is happening, Fassl is indeed released, and gets to stay with his lawyer while he looks for a new job and place to stay (or probably a settlement from the city) and immediately sees "Kill Her" written in blood on the wall. So you know, probably not a good sign. Indeed, that night a random bearded guy shows up, attacks Fassl and stomps off to go murder his lawyer.

But it doesn't work out for Beardo the Bearded Guy, because Fassl's lawyer was out. He did manage to get the housekeeper though, and Fassl has to hide her body. Meanwhile, Doggett is still going a wee bit crazy, and Reyes goes to talk to the prison warden, who says that Fassl is responsible for a murder, but the only footage they have is of Beardo, who doesn't have a name and thus will go by Beardo. Reyes starts to think it's a ghost protecting him, but doesn't really have much more of a theory yet.

But that gets thrown on the backburner when Scully discovers that the DNA evidence that initially convicted Fassl was planted, they learn by Doggett's old partner. Meanwhile, the Assistant DA heads over to see Fassl to offer him and plea bargain and Fassl begs him to send him back to jail. Before that train can go any further, Beardo shows up to kill the DA and Fassl has to hide the body. Again. Big on body hiding that Fassl.

"Aw man, I'm gonna get blamed for that and have to clean it up, aren't I?"

They bring Fassl in for questioning when the DA doesn't come back and Scully and Reyes notices how guilty he acts with his rosary, which leads to their theory; His Catholic guilt has made him unwilling to admit he sins, so it manifested a separate killer personality. They stake out the lawyer's house, and eventually Beardo manifests, attacks the lawyer and flees into the night, causing Reyes and Doggett to give chase. They track Beardo to a sewer, where he holds Doggett at...screwdriver point...anyway, until Reyes talks him into a conflict with Fassl and she shoots him. But when Doggett fishes Beardo's body out of the sewer...it's just Fassl! Dun dun du-oh the episode is over.

Underneath is a weird episode, and I honestly think I could be convinced it's secretly a great episode or secretly a terrible episode, depending on what arguments people use. It's got a good sense of how to use its editing to build scares and a decent enough twist, but it also feels like it doesn't use the themes it brings to the table particularly well and, much like early series dips into Mulder's past, it does seem to make good use of Doggett's backstory.

The big issue there, I think, that the episode takes too long to bring in the stuff from his backstory that would be interesting. The big emotional beat is Doggett learning that his partner planted evidence to get the initial conviction, but that moment comes when the episode is almost over. Not knocking the concept, it's a good idea and Robert Patrick sells the hell out of it, but it comes right at the end of the episode, with only a handful of scenes left, and all of them are needed to move the plot forward, so there's no time to chew on it. Making it an early episode beat, maybe even the thing that gets Fassl out, would have given it more time to linger and eat at Doggett, since I doubt it'll come up later.

"And I'm gonna have to clean that up too! Beardo should do less murdering and more cleaning."

This leaves the bulk of the plot on the shoulders of Fassl, and it's a pretty mixed bag. Fassl is a pretty blank character, almost intentionally so since apparently all of his dark impulses winds up in Beardo, but the hints we get at who he is are actually really interesting. He's clearly aware of and tormented by what Beardo is up to but he also instinctively works to cover it up in a way that suggests he's been doing it the whole time, which is intriguing as a character beat but mostly just gets left on the table. I really dug the beat where he tried to confess and Beardo instantly killed the person, it feels like something that could have happened multiple times.

Of course that does leave our villain (Beardo, the Bearded Man) with very little screentime, which is a bit of a shame, because he's got a good presence, even if I wonder what his casting call was like (Charles Manson type?). He only has like 2 minutes of screentime and says something like 3 lines, but he still definitely leaves an impression. I feel like they might have planned for him to interact with Fassl a bit more at some point in production, but the sequences where that actually happens are a wee bit goofy, so they might have gotten cut, and doing the Jekyll and Hyde thing would probably have wound up exceptionally goofy.

The show also still has a real problem with juggling three characters, but it seems to be getting better, simply by focusing on one person and letting the other two play backup. It's not a perfect solution by any means, it does mean that we're lacking the traditional X-Files back and forth, but both Reyes and Scully get a decent amount of screen time and a few key story beats. And I especially like Scully's beats, she seems calmer and more in control here than either Doggett and Reyes, and positing her as the smarter mentor seems like a good place for her to be right now.

"You know Doggett, at least when Mulder kept me up all night with his obsessions, there was a chance we could make out."

But despite all of its good points, I can't help but feel kind of lukewarm towards the episode, and I'm not sure why. I think, ultimately, the episode is less than the sum of its part, and that goes back to the script issues. The episode only really cooks right at the beginning, and when it looks like it's building steam it's suddenly over. A slightly stronger sense of escalation or just leaning harder into the character stakes for Dogget, would do wonders to make the episode feel like it's more than a collection of pretty good, but not great, scenes.

I said at the top of review that I could be convinced that the episode is either secretly great or secretly terrible, and while I still don't think either of those, I think it would be easer to convince me the latter. I struggle to think of what this episode is actually about, and it discards too many plot points to be considered well written. It feels like a rehash frankly, and not like one of the earlier episodes where they were doing Doggett/Reyes spins on existing plot outlines (not that those worked super great), just a bog standard possession storyline, with its most unique elements backgrounded or muted. And those are the ones they needed to play up to make something great.

Case Notes

• Very sedate cold open for the first bit, but it's got a good eye for mysterious details, like the cross in the car or the mysterious guy in the back. It makes me wonder where it's going.
• Doggett's arrival is pretty sudden but it works, and I like how Robert Patrick disguises his voice on his first line so that we can't tell its him until he turns, solid.
• Doggett does seem like the kind of guy who would keep track of all of his old cases.
• Doggett remembering the sound of the squishing of the blood is a good detail, since it was a notable audio detail in the cold open (even got its own subtitle).
• I also like Doggett's description of the 911 call, since it doesn't match up with our perception of events from the cable guy's POV. It's mysterious.
• Have they been using the same prison set for 9 years?
• Fassl seeing the dude mysteriously in the crowd is a big hint at what's going on, I think.
• I like the conversation between Scully and Doggett in the evidence room, it's good fleshing out of Doggett's motivation and mindset.
• Most of the episode's tension lives in the edit, although I think Fassl's lawyer would be mad to see "Kill Her" written on the wall.
• The scene where the mysterious bearded guy goes to kill Fassl's lawyer is the first hint we get of Fassl as a character, and does seem to indicate he knows what's happening to him.
• I like the shot of the table covered with Doggett's papers, it shows his obsession really well.
• I feel like Doggett and Scully finding out that the hair they were testing belongs to a blood relative when Fassl has none should make them go "Come on, this is an X-File too?"
• "If we can't get a conviction then the truth doesn't matter" is a pretty decent line.
• Discount Manson killing the DA is a pretty dark and well done scene, as is Fassl trying to confess.
• Heh, Doggett is worried that a cop will go to jail over planting evidence. Come on Doggett.
• Scully does some great soft interrogation of Fassl and Anderson handles it very calmly and carefully, it's good work.
• I like that the episode tries to blame Fassl's split personality on his devout faith, instead of making it a straight mental illness. It's not a great workaround, but it's better than Split.
• It's pretty obvious when the lawyer opens the mirror that when she closes it, Fassl is gonna be replaced by Discount Manson, but whatever, it's a classic shot for a reason.
• I typically like sewers as a setting for a big climactic action beat, but this one keeps making me think they're gonna run into Angel going the other way.
• Reyes using the whole "You're a sinner angle" to get Fassl to freak out is pretty good.
• The wrapup is pretty boilerplate and goes on a little long for a show that could have just ended when Fassl's body got pulled up, but Robert Patrick does a nice "Shell shocked" during his final dialogue with Reyes.
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