Case 11, File 06: Kitten

AKA: Not One Cat In This Episode, Come On

What are we to make of Walter Skinner? He is, unquestionably, the most important heroic character outside of the core duo (sorry Reyes and Doggett) but he's also a very thinly sketched character. His backstory, his broader motivations, his inner world, for a character who first appeared in Season 1, they're all pretty opaque. With the series moving towards it final ending, doesn't it seem like a good opportunity to fill in those gaps?

Our episode begins with a Vietnam Flashback (they do manage to avoid playing Fortunate Son so that's something) where a bunch of soldiers are assigned to protect a crate...which more or less immediately gets shot up, causing green gas to leak out, causing one of the soldiers to see everyone around him as monsters and end up killing a bunch of civilians and point his gun at a fellow soldier. And that fellow soldier's name? Albert Einstein. No, it's Skinner.

Back in the present, Kersh calls our heroes to his office to yell at them about the fact that Skinner is AWOL, and they don't know why. So Mulder and Scully, knowing that they've got an episode on their hands, decide to go looking themselves, and break into Skinner's apartment. There they find it very sparse and also find a uh, ear in a package. They think that's weird so they track it to a town in Kentucky.

They also find it odd that the package included Skinner's military rank, so they try to look up some stuff related to his unit, and find it all classified. So once they get to the town (which is called Mud Lick, incidentally) they go and check out a dead body in the morgue and find out that he died to a hunter's trap. And they've not been there 20 more minutes before another hunter in the woods falls into a spike trap in the woods and dies. But his dog is okay, so we've got that going for us.

"Damn, my deception has been revealed. Dunno why I label all those photos so meticulously."

They find a deer finder camera in the woods and discover that Skinner saw the body, at which point the Sheriff of the town groks that our heroes knew more than they told him and gets pissed. This gets a LOT of buildup, but doesn't actually come to anything. Our heroes also see a person dressed in a creepy fucking costume, and realize that Skinner is probably investigating the same thing as them and gotta find him first. And they get a lead from a homeless guy in town who was also a Vietnam vet.

After a quick flashback to Nam, in which the guy who got gassed in the cold open (whose callsign is Kitten, hence the episode title) has become a real full on psycho, Skinner arrives at that dude's cabin, only to get confronted by his son, Davey. His son is uh...not super sympathetic to Skinner, telling Skinner that he (Skinner that is) testified against him at his court martial despite knowing that he went nutso due to the gas, and thus has been in a nearby nuthouse for the last like, 30 years. Skinner counters that he wasn't allowed to mention it and now he just wants to help Kitten stop uh, murdering people.

So Davey takes Skinner to see his dad, only to reveal that Kitten killed himself basically as soon as he left the nuthouse, so it's actually Davey who's been killing people. He shoves Skinner in a pit but before he can do more, our heroes arrive, so he has to hide the . They chat with him a bit, but pretty quickly figure out he's full of shit, so Mulder sends Scully off to get the police, while he pops in to save Skinner.

"Honestly, I dunno where I'm going with this. I expected you to pick up on the fact that I'm sinister 15 minutes ago."

Mulder ends up in the trap too, but Scully returns just in time to shoot Davey, albeit non-fatally (guess she's getting softer as she gets older). Skinner and Mulder get pulled out of the trap, and our heroes go to pursue a fleeing Davey. They nearly end up in a trap, but Skinner pops in to save them and Davey dies to one of his own traps. And thus, after a quick wrapup where Skinner indicates that he helped Mulder and Scully because he believes in them (and also that he's infected with the same gas that drove Kitten crazy) the episode ends.

I really dunno if I like this episode, but I'm not certain if I can identify why. There's nothing exceptionally wrong with it, it just doesn't work for me. But despite not really digging it, I can't say I'm unhappy it exists. I've made a running joke out of the fact that it feels like Skinner has been more absent since his promotion to lead credits, but as the character with the third most appearances in the series (more than double 4th place finisher, Cigarette Smoking Man), I feel like he's deserved better, and it's nice that he gets one last chance to shine.

I think the core issue I take with the episode is I'm not certain how I'm supposed to feel about the villain. There is the germ of a sympathetic backstory in him, but the problem is that his crimes in Vietnam are too visceral and real to feel forgivable. Maybe it would land better if he was the one doing the killings, but the twist that his son is doing them kills any sympathy he might have too. I also will admit, I am extremely tired of "Doing war crimes against other people made our soldiers sad" stories. Maybe we should focus on how the victims of those war crimes feel.

On the flip side, Skinner's half of the story is very strong. Skinner may not have much in the way of backstory, but he is very strongly characterized, and I do find it easy to understand why his beliefs would cause him to testify against Kitten, but hate himself for it, and why that might inform his decision to stand behind Mulder and Scully all these years. It's storytelling in reverse, but it works in the context of Skinner's lack of backstory to make him for comprehensible.

"Yes Agent Mulder, I know you once got trapped in a pit with Scully but I will not sing Joy to the World."

So it's a decent backstory episode for Skinner, but the rest of it is a little anemic. A lot of stuff gets a lot of setup; The asylum that's experimenting on prisoners gets set up and then left completely dangling. The episode makes a big deal out of the fact that the Sheriff is super pissed at them, but then it never comes up again. I'd be willing to forgive these as red herrings, but they're not really, they're just plot threads the episode just kinda drops. It's sloppily written, is my point.

As for the rest of the stuff that you expect from an X-Files episode, it's a pretty mixed bag. The fact that both Mulder and Scully immediately grok that the monster is a dude in a suit is pretty funny, but it doesn't make up for the fact that the monster is pretty lame; We may have a famous actor in the monster role, but he's not exactly given the space to give a Brad Dourif level performance, and it cuts into his ability to really give off any screen presence.

I dunno, I guess there's stuff that works. The Vietnam sequences are mostly well shot, and the premise, of using the way vets are often screwed over by the government as the basis for a horror story, is a good one. Of course it was a good one way back in Season 2's Sleepless, but you know, it's been long enough that they could use it again. And I'll admit, I do like Mulder and Scully fretting over if they fucked up Skinner's career, it's small and human and I dig it. I don't know if there's anything wrong with it, but it just doesn't have any good to counteract the stuff that just doesn't work for me.

Skinner based episodes are pretty rare, and frankly they usually revolve around Myth Arc stuff more than they do Skinner. This one doesn't actually feature Skinner much, (much like most of the last few seasons) but spending a moment, to talk about him, to acknowledge that his life and character have revolved around our heroes this close to the end of the series does feel somewhat fitting. Skinner is and was important to the series and it's nice that we can say that.

Case Notes:

• I feel like there's gotta be a better way to transport something important through a warzone than "Three random soldiers."
• X-Files is big into stuff making people hallucinate monsters right now huh?
• I'm like 90% certain this flashback contradicts what we know about Skinner's 'Nam tour, but whatever.
• Kersh just pops back in to lecture Mulder and Scully about how liking them killed Skinner's career. Also wasn't Kersh a good guy now?
• I feel like the talk about how Skinner has been acting weird would land better if he'd had any screen time.
• Sending an ear in the mail is a solid threat, but sending it in the local paper of the town you got it in is just amateur. Go get a New York Times like a sane person.
• I like the scene in the woods, even if it's pretty generic, seeing Skinner on the outside of the trap is neat.
• Scully basically saying "Skinner would be better at murder than this" is a solid bit.
• Mulder makes a solid Mulder-leap to get to talking to the homeless vet to find Skinner.
• The trailer Skinner is scoping out looks WAY more fancier on the inside than on the outside.
• Oh Skinner's buddy was taking ears, he should get murdered.
• John's buddy's kid seems uh a little defensive about his dad killing civilians.
• I really wish this guy would stop calling his parents "Father" and "Mother" it's deeply off putting.
• It was very dumb of Skinner to trust John's son, come on Skin-man, you're better than that.
• I like the mix of real and crazy that Davey throws at Mulder and Scully, it's very reminiscent of real conspiracy theorists.
• The scene in Davey's house is pretty solidly scary, nice long tracking shots and the shot of the costume moving at the end of it is good stuff.
• Skinner does some okay backstory stuff here at the end. It feels VERY late in the game to fill in some backstory on him, but Pileggi does a good job.
• His explanation for why he's stuck by our heroes is also good stuff, and I believe it as a character beat.
• Skinner loosing a tooth is a pretty dark final beat for the episode. Not sure we need the wrapup scene with the poison, especially not with the Davey narration, it honestly weakens it more than it strengthens it.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. We're nearly at the end, so check it out to help me decide what to do next.

Current Celebrity Watch:

The villain this time, both in the flashbacks and the son in the modern day, are both played by Hayley Joel Osment.  Hayley of course originally got famous for his Oscar nominated role in The Sixth Sense as a child and has been intermittently in stuff ever since. I am ashamed to say, I didn't recognize it was him until my partner walked in and said his famous line from Walker: Texas Ranger, "Walker told me I have AIDS."

Audio Observations:

When Davey has Mulder and Scully in his trailer, he plays Fear is a Man's Best Friend by John Cale. They don't really set any action to it, but it's a nice undercurrent I guess.