Case 03, File 19: Hell Money

AKA: Big Trouble in Little San Francisco

Look, The X-Files is a pretty white show. Its leads are white, its creator is white, the vast majority of the writing, directing and producing staff are white, it is a white show. I've mentioned this in the past, as the series has dipped its toe into other people's cultures and it came across as awkwardly white in the way 90s products often are. But this time the series has less dipped its toe in other people's culture and more dived in headfirst.

Our episode kicks off with a Chinese guy wandering around a back alley during a Chinese festival, until he wanders into a house with writing on the door and runs into a mysterious dude in shadow and some other mysterious dudes in masks. A few minutes later, he's in the crematorium and things aren't going super well. When Mulder and Scully are called in, they notice a Chinese letter on the inside of the crematorium that local cop Detective Chao tells them means Ghost. They also find ceremonial money used as an offering for ghosts in the festival of the hungry ghosts called Hell Money, which caused Ron Howard to go "Hey, that's the name of the show."

They track the Hell Money to a local herbal remedy store (which is not called Ancient Chinese Secret) and she gives them the dead guy's name and apartment, where they discover that has carpet has been replaced. That doesn't sound big, but it is. While all this is going on, we meet Mr. Hsin whose daughter is dying of leukemia, which he can't afford to treat, but he is participating in some sort of odd game, in which a man is chosen via one draw and tries to choose something via another draw. Our winner this time, a one eyed guy, doesn't seem super stoked with his draw.

The next night, the same mysterious masked figures as before are seen by an empty grave and when Mulder shows up, he recognizes that the body has been buried in the grave to hide it underneath the coffin. It turns out it's the guy who drew in the game and he is covered with surgical scars, underneath one of which is a frog. Back at the lottery, Hsin's name gets called, but it doesn't look like he won money. They go and confront Chao, believing he's hiding something, but he claims that the community is hiding stuff from him too.

"Suck it doucheb-Okay, who put this in here!?"

Chao leads them to Hsin's apartment as he's the one who installed the new carpet. He's evasive, but Mulder grabs the game piece, which Chao translates as meaning wood. Hsin is visited by one of the guys running the game because he wants to back out, but the guy tells him he can't or he'll get riggity-riggity-wrecked. Back at his apartment, Chao is attacked by the masked figures, but when Mulder and Scully hit the hospital to see him, he's bolted.

They head back to Hsin's apartment to find him gone, but his daughter fills them in on his conversation with the game runner and tells them that the letter on the game piece could also translate to eye, which causes Mulder to realize what the audience already has: They're playing a game betting the chance of money against their organs. After some tracking back and forth, involving the organ procurement center, they track the game to a restaurant, where they follow Chao in and find eyeballs in the freezer (ew).

Hsin is picked and loses his heart, but Chao, who had been on the take the whole time, gets mad and finally upends the table holding all the game pieces, revealing the game is rigged and there's no way to win. He rushes in to save Hsin, but even after capturing the guy running the game, saving Hsin and getting his daughter on the Bone Marrow transplant list, the community has stonewalled and the episode ends with Chao in the crematorium, where things aren't going so well.

Is it bad that I kind of imagine these three ghosts have a Three Stooges kind of relationship?

Hell Money is not a great episode. Its the product of three separate ideas mashed together into one script and at times it really, really shows. The plot is all over the place, with some ideas getting massive amounts of screen time while others trail off into nothing, plus a villain who doesn't really enter the plot until the 3/4th mark and a bunch of characters who never properly pay off. But its also an episode I've always been weirdly fond of and now I'm going to figure out why.

Like many X-Files episodes, the main thing keeping this narrative moving, at least for the first half, is the mystery. The primary idea behind the episode is mostly not supernatural and it's a pretty unique concept, so when it's being mysterious about what's going on, the mystery is pretty damned engaging, especially since it doesn't need to lie to you, just strategically conceal information via lack of subtitles and a very low level of exposition.

Of course the flip side is that once the mystery is gone, the episode is a lot less engaging. The audience more or less figures out the mystery at the halfway point and the episode doesn't so much lose steam as it loses direction. Once we know the basic idea behind what's happening, the episode still has 20 minutes and only one major reveal left, so the episode just wanders around, killing time until we find out that Chao is in on it.

Well I guess there's one more reveal, but it's not one that ever comes, and its the source of one of my favorite and most frustrating elements; the guys in the masks. I like them a lot because they're very visually striking and the mystery behind what they are is one of the better aspects of the episode, but we also never find out what their deal is. It's implied they're ghosts or spirits of some kind, but that just raises further questions: How did James Hong's character get them to do his bidding, or if they're not doing his bidding, why are they protecting an organ harvesting lottery scam? They look cool and are responsible for some of the better sequences, but they're just confusing.

"It's an eyeball."
"Well, we shouldn't judge other culture's cuisine. You know, in Greece-"
"A human eyeball Mulder."

One of the other things that really helps this episode is the acting. One of the more interesting elements is Chao's character, and his speech about how he's just as white as Mulder and Scully to the China-born people he interacts with is one of the more genuine feeling moments in the episode. I honestly wish we'd gotten more of Chao's character, how he fell into working with the lottery and his personal conflict. Another person I wish we had more of is James Hong. He plays the villain in this episode and just radiates presence in every frame he's in, but he's only in the episode for like, 3 minutes. More of him would go a long way to making the episode great.

Honestly, the episode would be a lot better if it took a few more passes at the script to figure out what the core of the episode was. And it might want to drop the extreme exoticising of Chinese culture, which is frustrating but unfortunately in line with the racial politics of the 90s. It has good ideas, but it just messes around too much and they get muddled. A tighter focus on Chao, with more appearances from the villain and maybe a wee bit more exposition about what the hell was up with those ghosts and we might have a genuinely great episode. As it is, I can always see and appreciate its potential, even while I recognize it has its flaws.

Case Notes:

• The opening is appropriately mysterious, and works pretty well, but its kind of all over the place, and is leaning pretty hard on the "Mysterious Culture" angle to make it creepy. So...like the episode as a whole then.
• Guy in the crematory oven scared me half to death the first time I watched it. It still freaks me out to this day.
• The opening bit with Mulder and Scully imply that this is happening all over the country. Is this a national organ running scheme?
• I in no way buy that the guy in the crematory oven was able to write something on the roof of the oven, or that the paint on his finger was still wet enough to paint, but whatever.
• I know precisely dick about any of the Chinese mythology that they're on about in this episode, so I won't comment, but I'd love to know how Chinese Americans feel about this episode. If anyone wants to chime in in the comments, I'd love to hear about it.
• The father/daughter stuff is pretty generic, but it works okay, setting up a lot in a short amount of time, and it's mostly well acted. It kinda drags the pacing down though.
• The first gambling scene is a pretty solid scene, since we have no idea what the hell is going on and they never translate any of it. It builds a sense of mystery without seeming like it's trying too hard.
• My research is pretty limited, but the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts is a real thing, and most of what Detective Chao says about it is pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
• The "Hiding a corpse in a grave" idea is pretty clever, although as Monster of the Week pointed out, there are no cemeteries in San Francisco.
• I want to criticize the episode for making a "Left his heart in San Francisco" joke, but if I was doing a script about organ harvesting in San Francisco, I wouldn't be able to resist either.
• Frog crawling out of the dude's chest? Good scene.
• Detective Chao's character seems pretty interesting and his little rant about being American born is one of the better scenes in the episode. I wish it got more play, it's pretty compelling and BD Wong sells it hard.
• I'm just saying, Mr. Hsin wouldn't need to gamble his life away if we lived in a country with universal healthcare.
• Organ procurement lady: Yeah we've had a pattern of Chinese men offering their organs and then disappearing when they get a match, but we didn't like, report that to anyone.
• I'm surprised it took as long as it did for everyone to realize the game was rigged, they're barely bothering to conceal it. I mean, the guy who wanted out gets drawn immediately and gets a lethal result? Come on.
• Major flaw of this episode? Not enough James Hong. He gets like 2 monologues and they're both fantastic.
• I'm sorry, is the episode pretending that Hong's character is going to walk because they can't get testimony from the guys they arrested? They found a freezer full of eyeballs in the guy's place and caught him mid surgery, this is not hard guys.
• The ending with Chao in the crematorium is pretty great, chilling without being overly showy about it.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Please consider donating if you like what I do and would like to see more of it.

Current Celebrity Watch:

For such a forgettable episode, it has a cavalcade of well known people. First, and perhaps most notably, our villain is played by James Hong, an incredibly veteran actor with a career beginning in 1954 and continuing to this day. He's best known, in my mind, for playing the villain in Big Trouble in Little China, which also included X-Files actor Jerry Hardin. You might also know him from the Seinfeld episode The Chinese Restaurant, as the Maitre D'. I would like to reiterate the episode needs more of him, since he not only oozes screen presence with every word he speaks but he's also just plain an incredible actor.

Also in this episode is BD Wong as Detective Chao. Wong is best known for his run on Law and Order: SVU, which is a few years after this episode, he's almost as well known for his roll as Dr. Wu in Jurassic Park, which was a few years behind him at this point. He's also really good in this episode, and I wish the episode was focused more on him.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Here's one we all know: Our dying cancer girl in this episode is played by Lucy Liu (whose credit is written as Lucy Alexis Liu, which is funny to me for some reason). Her breakout in Ally McBeal is a few years off at this point, and she's in the episode too little to get a read on her acting ability, but it's nice to see her.