Case 11, File 05: Ghouli

AKA: This Is Probably The Best Slenderman Movie I Guess

What to do with William at this point? While I don't think he's the character who got the most jerked around by the whims of the plot, he's probably the one who spent the greatest percentage of his time in the show getting jerked around by the whims of the plot. And why not, for the first chunk of his time on the show, he was a literal baby, with no agency or personality. But that was back in 2001 and now that we're rounding towards the end of the show the 2nd time, it might be time to turn him into an actual character.

NOTE: Prior to this, even up to and including the paragraph above, referred to Scully's child as William. But, my brother is adopted and I firmly believe that a child's adopted name and parents are their name and their parents. So from here on out, I'm gonna refer to him as Jackson. Sorry if that's confusing, but that's just how it is.

Our episode opens with two girls wandering around an abandoned ferry called the Chimera, looking for something called Ghouli. This barely matters, but it does come up like 3 times later, so I'll tell you, Ghouli is an internet thing, basically a Slenderman knockoff. But despite being made up (even in universe) when the two girls run across each other they see each other as Ghouli and decide to Get Stabby with each other.

Back in DC, Scully has a nightmare where's trapped in a repeating house with a weird dark presence, until she finds a snowglobe with the Chimera (the ferry) inside. She heads back to the office where she finds out about the incident. So they go to check it out, noting that they've been followed, and also Scully sees a weirdo watching them. The cops say that the 911 call was from a panicked man and that both of the girls asked about seeing Ghouli.

Talking with both the girls indicates that they not only had the same dream as Scully but also that they're both dating the same kid named Jackson van de Kamp (which is apparently the name of the family that Scully gave her kid to) so she starts thinking Jackson might be hers. But when they get there, they hear gunshots and upon getting inside they find both the parents and Jackson dead from gunshot wounds. The cops immediately want to dismiss it as a murder suicide but Mulder and Scully are not so sure.

"Why would they name the boat "Chimera" except to be a creepy name in a horror show? It doesn't make sense!"

Back at the hospital, Scully apologizes to Jackson's body but before she can do an autopsy, Jackon's body gets up and walks out. After another sleep paralysis dream, Scully gets told by the dude she saw at the docks to not give up, and after digging through Jackon's computer, they find he did a lot of hacking into the DoD and also wrote all the Ghouli stories. Before they can do any more digging, the two people who've been following them show up and seize all the evidence on behalf of both the DoD and the DoJ. But at least Mulder sabotages them.

Skinner tells them to drop it, but after being told that Jackson's DNA matched Scully's, they keep digging. Jackson pops up at the hospital to apologize to the two girls for his prank (which he used his Mind Powers to do, and to fake his death after the DoD/DoJ guys killed his parents) but when one of the girls sees him with the other, she rats him out. He is, frankly, surprisingly chill about that. Maybe he decided since he nearly made them accidentally kill each other, he can't throw stones.

The DoD/DoJ guys try to grab him, but he again uses his Mind Powers to trick them into shooting each other, and evade Mulder and Scully. On their way out of town, Scully runs into the dude who told her not to give up. If that seems super coincidental it is, because it turns out that that dude is actually Jackson in disguise. And on that, admittedly sweet, note the episode ends.

What do we do with an episode like Ghouli? It seems like such an odd duck of an episode; What seems to be a Monster-of-the-Week turns into a myth arc at the end of the 1s but act, but also there's a Slenderman knockoff? There's horror elements, but also some conspiracy stuff, a running gag about Mulder's fake name at Starbucks, and a LOT of very emotional work from Gillian Anderson. It's quite a hodgepodge of ideas and motifs, and it ends up kind of janky and unbalanced, but it does feel like it works in the moments where it absolutely needs to.

"Well, it finally happened; The stress of my job has made me a full on klepto."

If there's one thing that makes the episode feel more like a coherent whole than it actually is, it's our old standby, Gillian Anderson. As is always the case, she takes the material she's given here and absolutely elevates it. The big shift in focus around the end of the first act (from a Monster-of-the-Week to Jackson's story) is a HARD one to navigate, but her devotion to her character and her performance here makes it feel more like a single coherent narrative, just by giving us that emotional throughline to access.

It's helpful too, because the episode is structured very oddly. The opening bit with the girls and Ghouli takes just a hair too long to just be a fakeout, but it's too unconnected to the main plot to be a major part of the plot; It gets like one name drop in the back half (when it turns out Jackson is the one who wrote the Ghouli stories) but it just feels like a waste of a setup. I dunno if it's a setup I necessarily want them to execute (I feel like an X-Files riff on Slenderman would either be the worst episode of the season or the best, with nothing in between) but just discarding it in the first act feels like a missed opportunity.

The main thread of Jackon's storyline is actually pretty fun, albeit maybe just to me. There's a lot of ways that it could have gone wrong (I was bracing myself for the worst when I found out it was a teenager with mind powers and two girlfriends) but to my surprise, it actually avoids most of them. I like that a lot of what went on isn't because Jackson has an intricate plan or is using his Mind Powers to be a monster, he's just kind of a shitheel teen in a completely normal way, who happens to have mind powers. That's more interesting to me.

"Oh, you're the pickup artist guy! Hands on your head, I WILL shoot you."

As for the effect on the larger plot...look, the reveal that the entirety of My Struggle II was a dream was never going to land well, trying to make it more palatable is a suicide mission. Throwing it under the bus as "Just some kid's fantasy" rather than a genuine vision of things to come is as good a method as any to get it out of the way.

The rest of the Myth Arc stuff is all setup without any payoff. Some of it will be relevant again, but at this point, I'm just tired of Cigarette Smoking Man sitting in offices, mysteriously referring to mysterious projects with mysterious goals. The main thing keeping me going at this point, during my first watch through, was my attachment to the characters rather than any desire for show to reveal another hidden project to do basically the same thing all the other projects did, and I can't believe I was alone in that.

Jackson, and the premise of Mulder and Scully having a kid, is basically the final plot point that The X-Files has left, the only one that they didn't hack off with a machete or resolve so completely it's awkward to even bring it back. And while it might not serve the larger plot well, focusing on Scully's emotional journey and how Jackson plays into and affects that might give the episode just enough of a jolt to drag it the last few yards to the finish line.

And if not we might still get some cool monsters.

Case Notes:

• Is the name Chimera on the boat supposed to mean something to me, or is it just a creepy sounding name?
• Scully would know the technical term for sleep paralysis, wouldn't she?
• The editing is doing a lot of work to make the house Scully is in feel like the House on Ash Tree Lane.
• Oh so the name of the boat is just so Scully could see it in her vision.
• Whoever is following Mulder and Scully is doing a bad job of it.
• Oh god, Ghouli is just a thin Slender Man parody.
• Okay, I like that Mulder has a fake name at Starbucks, it's a good character detail.
• Gillian sells the moment where the girl tells her her dream back to her really well, just very subtle building realization.
• Of course the house is the house from her dream and the parents get shot the instant they arrive.
• I like the cop just going "Eh, murder-suicide, what can ya do?" It really paints a solid picture of police incompetence.
• If the takeaway from this episode is "Pick up artistry is bad" I will give it at minimum a 7/10. Yes I know I don't do scores, shut up.
• I'm not gonna lie to you, the William stuff in the kid's bedroom feels like it comes right the fuck outta nowhere.
• The DoD/DoJ guys following Mulder and Scully are very sure of themselves for people have been noticed 3 times in 2 scenes.
• The scene where Scully talks to the body actually lands, because Gillian Anderson just fucking sells it.
• Body sitting up is cliched but well done.
• Scully is pretty fucking jazzed to think that the kid is back alive. I know you think he's your kid and you want him back, but you've been doing this for 11 seasons now, when has a body coming back to life ever worked out?
• Look Scully, I know you're having a Day, but if someone just tells you "Don't give up on the bigger picture" when you're in the middle of a mystery, you go and grab them.
• Mulder got something off the darkweb and I do not like that sentence.
• Mulder finds out the two dudes work for the DoD and the DoJ and immediately spills a soda on the evidence laptop. I love you Mulder.
• Mulder is back to obstructing Skinner and Skinner is back to working with the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's like it's Season 2 all over again!
• Suddenly admitting it's been a Myth Arc episode all along and throwing us in the deep end with exposition about 70s eugenics programs is not a good call X-Files.
• I thought for a second Dr. Matsumoto might be a call back to 731 but it turns out not.
• Scully is talking about Jackson's vision of a pandemic and I'm just sitting here living it.
• Mulder has been sitting on the fact that there were two shooters for a while.
• Jackson getting caught because one of his girlfriends is mad at him? Very funny. It's like 90210 broke out for 5 minutes on The X-Files.
• The two DoD/DoJ officers are very easily taken down. although I do like how quickly he was able to make them think one of them was a monster.
• The DoD guy was pretty quick to shoot what he thought was an FBI Agent.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can afford to evade the Department of Defense.

Current Celebrity Watch:

Sarah Jeffery who plays...one of the two girls, is primarily known for her main series role in Shades of Blue and in the Descendants series, neither of which I've watched (although I've heard of both). She's currently playing one of the leads in that Charmed reboot I haven't watched either.

Louis Ferreira who plays one of the cops has been in, frankly, a lot of shit, but the biggest role is probably as Colonel Young in Stargate: Universe. Despite like 30 different Celebrity Watches in this project having been in one Stargate show or another, I still have not watched a single one.