Case 09, File 14: Scary Monsters

AKA: And Super Creeps, Yeah I Gotta Name It That, Sorry

There is a tendency, when criticized, for an artist to get defensive, and I have to admit I understand the impulse. You worked hard on something and here comes someone else to give you some feedback, which depending on the critic and fanbase, can often be uh...let's call it less than constructive. But the flipside of that is that the response to criticism often comes across as petulant and even childish, especially if you feel the criticism is warranted or constructive. So there has to be a delicate balance in a response. And there almost never is.

Our episode kicks off with a kid named Tommy, complaining about monsters under the bed, as is a kid's wont. What's different is that when his dad, Jeffery comes in, he sees the monster but pretends he doesn't AND locks Tommy in the bedroom when he starts screaming about the monster. The next day, Scully's lunch gets interrupted by Layla Harrison. L-Layla Harri-the blonde X-Files fan from Alone? Yeah now you remember her, took me a minute too.

Anyway, she has what she thinks is an X-File, a case of a woman who stabbed herself to death, and then her husband took their kid and bolted off to the middle of nowhere and the grandmother is worried. Scully doesn't really care though and she tells Layla to get more info before she deals with it. But Layla decides to instead trick Doggett and Reyes into going to check it out, and by the time they find out she lied, they're already basically there and she can whine enough to get them to go the rest of the way there.

When they get there, the dad is burying something in the yard and he's acting shifty, and also the kid is acting shifty, and everyone immediately picks up on it immediately and Doggett and Reyes want to investigate, but before they can drive off to go get anything done, Tommy obliquely comments that the monsters won't let them leave and immediately their car goes dead and sprays them all with some...stuff. And Jeffery's car is dead, so they're stuck there. Naturally.

Back in DC, a friend of Layla Harrison's brings Scully the evidence she asked for; The family's dead cat. But Scully discovers that the cat had chewed its own stomach open, which strikes her as very odd, so she goes investigating, and asks the sheriff to go up to check out the house, but he can't make it. Back up at the house, the kid is attacked by some...terrible looking bug things? And then the sheriff shows up and attacks Doggett before Doggett punches him right through the stomach. I mean it, all the way through, it's gross.

"And that's why that family should have left a note."

But the sheriff is uh...not really the sheriff, or so Jeffery claims, and the fact that he's just a giant bag of goo in the shape of a man, with no internal organs, bears that out. After a brief check in with Scully and the dude, who have decided to drive up to the house on their own, we stick with our main team for the rest of the episode. Doggett is still trying to get some information out of the dad, including wondering why the hell the dad buried a mirror, but before they can get a solid sense of what's happening, Reyes finds some pictures the kid has drawn that matches what's going on and figures out that his fears are causing this.

That doesn't help when Reyes starts having one of the uh...bug things? Inside her and Doggett tries to stop the kid when he jives what's going on, but falls into an empty void filled with the bugs. As Reyes and Layla try to flee and the dad explains that he can't make Tommy stop since it's just based on his imagination, Doggett reappears, commenting that this stuff can't hurt him cause he doesn't believe it. That's right, Doggett LITERALLY has skeptic armor. That's pretty neat.

Doggett gets Layla, Reyes and Jeffery out of the house and returns, spreading gas everywhere and lighting a match, causing Tommy to pass out with fear as the house catches fire. Which would be pretty hardcore, because PSYCH it was fake, just water, but the kid bought it. And so, with Layla commenting that Doggett and Reyes did just as good a job as Mulder and Scully, the episode ends with Tommy locked in a hospital and a wall of TVs to tamper his imagination.

Scary Monsters is the story of two episodes. The first, the actual main plot of the episode, is a reasonably clever Monster of the Week episode with a decent hook and a fun resolution. The second is the series getting defensive about the fans not being big on Doggett and Reyes. The latter rarely, if ever, strengthens the former, and given where we are in the story and how close we are to the show ending for the first time, it feels more than a little desperate.

Scully doing a cat autopsy on her kitchen table is awesome, I am not taking notes.

I guess if we're gonna talk about the plot of this episode, we gotta discuss Layla Harrison and her part in it. And honestly, it's a pretty thankless part. Her whole role in the episode is to comment how great Doggett and Reyes are in the finale and it frankly just feels a little hollow. The final scene is the most egregious, because it just feels so very petty, but the whole episode feels like a belated attempt to convince the fans that no, in fact, Doggett and Reyes are just as good as Mulder and Scully. I understand the impulse, but it feels forced and awkward and the final scene lands with a thud as a result.

Not that the character work is bad in this episode, I actually think they have a good balance. Having Scully be back at home base dealing with Layla's annoying friend is funny and doesn't break flow, and while Layla's metatextual purpose isn't great, her boundless enthusiasm bouncing off Doggett's disdain (or Scully's exhausted disinterest) is highly entertaining. It may have taken them much too long, but they have figured out basically how to properly juggle the three leads, and giving Scully the comic relief characters works a lot better than trying to foist it off on Doggett.

And the main plot isn't bad. It's not without flaws (we'll get to that in a moment) but the base premise, of being trapped by someone else's nightmares, is a good one. It's admittedly not a super original one (I feel like they used this basic premise once or twice before, notably in X-Cops) but it's one that works, and they're doing a somewhat neat spin on it, since the person who needs to stop being scared is a kid. And I'm not gonna lie, the fact that Doggett is immune to it and how he defeats it are both unique twists, and do more to sell Doggett as a vital part of the cast than Layla shilling for him in the final scene.

Unfortunately the plot of the episode is let down by some execution issues, nothing deal breaking, but annoying. The big one is the kid playing Tommy isn't really projecting that he's afraid. Most of his performance, even in the climax, is giving me "Creepy Kid" vibes, to the point where I thought the reveal was gonna be that he knows what he's doing. It also should be said that the CGI bugs looks like absolute dogshit. Part of me wants to be generous and say that's part of the twist, but none of the other nightmares, like Reyes having one inside her or the fake sheriff, look bad, so I just think the effect didn't work out.

"Help! I'm trapped in a tick guard commercial!"

But that's not really that big of an issue, plenty of X-Files episodes have had dodgy effects, including some all time classics, what's more important is that the central mystery works, and it does. The episode is honestly pretty single minded about it, it just keeps us on one track, 2 secondary characters, one location, just dropping hints without red herrings or subplots, until we get to our climax. And all of those things are good, a lot of recent X-Files episodes have been unfocused, so having an episode that manages to keep itself on one track is pretty nice, it's just a bit of a shame its attached to this defensive stuff with Layla.

With only 6 episodes left in Season 9, the writing had to be on the wall that the series was facing cancellation, hell by the time this episode aired, the decision might have already been already been made. In that context the defensive stuff about Doggett and Reyes comes across less like the series making a case for new characters and more like it desperately begging the fanbase to lighten up and give them a chance. And if your survival is dependent on The X-Files fanbase loving any pair as much as they love Mulder and Scully, odds are you're doomed.

Case Notes:

• The opening scene of this episode, with a kid in bed and a tree scratching at the window is giving me big Poltergeist vibes.
• I like the fakout with the kid looking under the bed and then the camera panning back up, you expect something to be behind him.
• The bit with the dad holding the door shut while the kid screams for help is actually genuinely pretty harrowing.
• Holy shit, they brought back the girl from Alone?
• Big fan of Layla tricking Doggett and Reyes into checking out her case and then whining her way to the rest of the drive to the spot.
• The father really is going out of his way to be mysterious huh? I also like Doggett and Reyes instantly picking up on the fact that they're both hiding stuff.
• I could take or leave the kid revealing that whatever is going on isn't gonna let the team leave, but the actual way the episode goes about it is pretty decent. Always down for a car spraying people with blood.
• The scene with the guy bringing Scully the dead cat is excellent. No notes.
• Having Doggett and Layla basically have a conversation about how he and Reyes aren't Mulder and Scully and they do things different is uh...well it's not a great time to be meta.
• I'm reasonably certain it's gonna turn out the bugs are like, a figment of the kid's imagination or something, but the dad does a good job selling his fear and confusion.
• Scully casually performing an autopsy on a cat on a kitchen table is excellent, Mulder would be proud.
• The scene with the fake-sheriff is decent, very creepy from the get go and Doggett suddenly punching through him is a great cut to ad break.
• I like the detail that Scully has Mulder's badge on her.
• The fact that the fake-Sheriff is basically a bag of meat is our big clue to what's going on, but Doggett and Reyes gotta struggle with it a bit more.
• Doggett's nature as a skeptic being the thing that saves him is actually kinda neat, I dig it. The way Doggett stops Tommy is pretty clever too.
• Scully and the guy showing up right as everything is over is the beat to end the story on.
• I do like Layla straight telling Doggett "It's cause you've got no imagination that we lived."
• The end where Tommy is just watching TV constantly is pretty grim. Is it another callback to DPO too?
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