Case 11, File 08: Familiar

AKA: I Can't AKA This Episode, I'm Too Busy Watching For THAT FUCKING FACE

One of the advantages The X-Files has over, say, a horror movie, is that a lot of the basic stuff it needs is already squared away. We know who our leads are, why they're involved, what their goals are, etc. so a lot of the busy work of writing a script is already squared away, and audience investment is guaranteed. What that means in this case is that, when you get down to brass tacks, you can probably get away with just a mediocre script and a damn fine monster.

Our episode opens with a kid playing on the playground with his mom and his...look it's a doll of a character he likes called Mr. Chuckleteeth and honestly, the thing freaks me out even in doll form. So you can imagine my unimaginable horror when that thing shows up, human sized, in the woods. But the mom is on the phone and the kid, for some ungodly reason, decides to follow it out into the woods, where it's attacked by Something and killed.

It turns out he's the son of a cop so Mulder and Scully have jurisdiction so they show up to check it out, even though the cops have already ruled it an animal death. Mulder and Scully aren't so sure, especially since there's apparently a legend of a witch locally and so they begin to investigate. Meanwhile the fact that people think that someone in the town killed the kid means that interpersonal tensions are getting exacerbated.

Mulder eventually goes and talks to the daughter of the Police Chief who was a witness, but she's too distracted watching a nightmarish Teletubbies knockoff, but eventually tells him that Mr. Chuckleteeth was at the playground. Meanwhile, the dad of the killed kid, Rick, does some investigation and discovers there's a sex offender in town who failed to register with the police. So he heads off for some vigilante justice, with Scully and the police chief following to try and stop him, but the guy isn't t here, so instead they get a search warrant. Also Mulder sees a wolf in the woods.

These pictures are going to be 100% a catalogue of my nightmares so, ya know, get ready.

After a quick aside where Mulder comments that the dude is getting convicted in the court of public opinion before he can get a trial, they search his house and find uh...not much frankly? He has a monkey? Anyway, while all that's happening, the girl from earlier is watching TV and one of the nightmare Teletubbies shows up and she winds up in the woods, also dead.

At this point Mulder has started to think it's a shapeshifting demon summed by a witch called a familiar, and remembering seeing a copy of a Witch's grimoire at the Police Chief's house, starts pointing fingers at him. He admits to...having an affair, I guess? This doesn't last very long, because Rick has found the sex offender and rather than like, arrest him, he beats him half to death and then shoots him the head when Mulder and Scully intervene. Of course since he's shooting an unarmed and, it turns out, entirely innocent man, he'll probably see consequences.

I am fully kidding, he's a cop so he gets a 5k bail, and the implication he's just gonna go free. He immediately goes home, yells at his wife for cheating on him, and goes to kill the police chief for sleeping with her, while Rick's wife crashes his car and gets killed by a wolf. But when he gets there, he finds Mr. Chuckleteeth and then gets ambushed by the chief who kills him. So it seems like letting him out of jail was the right decision then.

Hokay, home stretch. The police chief goes out looking for Rick's wife, and then sees and followers her into the woods. If you remember her dying, you're not wrong, cause it turns out it's the familiar, and also that the police chief's wife summoned it and is now trying to undo it. But the police chief gets eaten by the wolf version of the familiar, and then when Mulder and Scully finally show up to stop her, she dismisses the demon but gets lit on fire anyway. And with basically nothing left to do, our heroes go "Well, we didn't really help" and leave.

I knew this shot was coming and I still jumped out of my skin.

Familiar is not an incredible episode on a script level. On a script level, it's a middle tier Season 6 episode (don't ask me to quantify that), to the point where I could believe it's an idea that the writers has had since 1998 that the lightly retrofitted. No, this is an episode that manages to get a huge boost because the design team managed to come together and make some of the most nightmarishly horrifying monsters the series has had for years. And maybe that's not a lot, but hell if it isn't enough this time around.

The monster (or monsters, I suppose, although the the Teletubby knockoff only shows up once) are some of those things that might hit me harder because I'm scared of clowns and theme park mascots, and both of the monsters tap right into that fear. Mr. Chuckleteeth in particular hits very hard, the pale face combined with the dead eyed smile hits extremely hard in the right ways. The other one is a little more flat (literally, when it shows up, it seems to be 2D) but it still's still scary when they use it.

And they do know how to use them. The, for all purposes climactic, sequence in the house where Rick is stalked by Chuckleteeth is genuinely very scary, building tension despite the fact that the monster never interacts with him, and the low angle shot of the Teletubby outside the window hits like a truck. Honestly, I feel like they picked up a few tricks on how to make a clown scary from the 2017 adaptation of It, and I don't think I'm imagining that (the fact that they put the first victim in that specific yellow raincoat to get attacked by a clown feels like an intentional shout out).

One of the things they didn't get from It, 2017, is engaging characters and mystery. The non-Mulder and Scully heroes are pretty flat and uninteresting, and the mystery itself is pretty static. The woman who is being cheated on seems like the obvious choice for the villain, and in order to drop a hint about that, they have to make it so that the Police Chief is keeping an authentic witch's grimoire on his bookshelf in public, which is funny but not on purpose. Honestly, the whole stuff with the witch and history of the town mostly just seem like an excuse to get the monster out there.

This is where the scene is obviously going. Doesn't make it any less scary.

I will say, a much stronger element is the talk about witch hunts and people being convicted, and eventually executed, in the court of public opinion, and how cops will protect each other even when they break the law. Those are relevant themes, especially now, and when they come up they land pretty well. But the episode just kind of drops them in the back half and the finale never really resolves. I dunno how they could have resolved them cleanly, especially since Mulder and Scully don't really seem to accomplish anything in the plot, but I wish it played into the finale in some way.

I worry that I sound like I'm down on the episode when I say I recognize some influence from the 2017 adaptation of It, and I'm not. The X-Files has got a lot of mileage out of doing Mulder and Scully flavored versions of movies or other concepts. And It is a good movie to pull from, it reignited our universal fear of clowns. So I'm definitely not down on this episode, I just kinda wish it was a bit better.

And I wish they'd absorbed that no one knows how to end It.

Case Notes:

• Sorry X-Files, you can't fool me, I know there's no such place as Eastwood, Connecticut.
• How on earth would a kid find that fucking nightmare face comforting?
• You couldn't pay me to go in the woods after that nightmarish thing.
• The cops being annoyed at our heroes showing up makes sense but they're really desperate for it to be an animal when it doesn't seem to be one.
• Mulder and Scully debating whether it's a witch, an animal (possibly evil) or a serial killer is good stuff, but I feel they're spending too much time on the witch possibility for it to not be relevant.
• Scully claims people do not spontaneously combust but like...yes they do. You saw it, back in Season 1!
• Same with Mulder claiming witches exist, you have fought like 20 of them!
• Hey, both Mulder and Scully acknowledge that if the kid was killed by his dad, who is a cop, the other cops would cover it up. Good shit.
• The church scene is mostly just to let us know the death is stirring up in-town tensions, which feels very Stephen King-y.
• The show the kid is watching is a clear Teletubbies parody and it's also terrifying.
• Oh so Mr. Chuckleteeth is from a Blues Clues knockoff. Okay, kill it with fire.
• I like Scully being completely reasonable with the police chief and him still getting totally furious with her.
• The chase after the dead kid's dad is kind of low energy, but it's nice that it doesn't exist entirely in closeup, they actually get some decent wide and helicopter shots.
• Feel like there should be some consequences for just breaking into a dude's house with a gun and then breaking stuff, but the dad is a cop, so there won't be.
• The big wolf Mulder sees is pretty impressive looking, but I also want to give him pets.
• The sex offender they're investigating was a birthday clown, proving my theory that clowns are evil.
• Centering the episode around kid's deaths is making it feel more raw and intense than it might otherwise.
• Mulder finds some salt and immediately jumps on his theory about a familiar, which is pretty vintage Mulder.
• The scene with the mob and Eggers killing the suspect is pretty solidly scary, it's the scene the episode is obviously building that subplot towards, but it's well put together.
• Man, how often do we actually see Mulder and Scully in court?
• The car crash scene is honestly pretty great.
• The chief actually just left an actual real grimoire out on the bookshelf, that's great.
• Cutting from the fake-Diane walking and then sliding down to her dead body is great.
• The killer turning out to be the Chief's wife is an obvious twist but whatever, they had like 5 minutes left.
• Anna ending the spell and then lighting on fire means that Mulder and Scully didn't really accomplish anything, huh?
• Mulder and Scully flipping opinions in the last act is kinda flippant for a dark episode, but I like it, it's a good ending to the episode.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can afford to go out and join a witch coven.

Current Celebrity Watch:

Jason Grey-Stanford, who plays Rick, had a main role on Monk. I said way back in Soft Light that I've never really watched Monk and that remains the case.

Roger Cross, who plays Officer Wentworth (the One Good Cop, who has so little impact on the plot that I omitted him entirely from the plot outline and you didn't notice) had a main-ish role on 24 and is currently a lead on a Canadian TV show called Coroner.