Case 05, File 17: All Souls

AKA: In The Arms Of An Angel

There was this kind of a trend in fantasy circles in the 90s of instead of drawing on stuff like Norse and Greek mythology for their stuff, they would instead draw on Catholic apocrypha and Antediluvian (it's a word, look it up) myth. This was partially for access to some really odd shit (Antediluvian myth is really weird guys) but also to grant it a slight edge. After all these aren't just weird monsters, these are weird monsters that are based on stuff that is kind of technically related to stuff that people actually believe. Some of this stuff was good, a lot of it was bad but all of it was really really weird.

After a cold open involving a crippled girl getting baptized and then walking out into the rain and having her eyes burned out by a mysterious figure while in a praying pose, plus a framing device involving Scully going to confession, our story proper starts with Scully getting asked to look into the death of the girl from the opening. She can't figure out how a crippled girl got outside but she does find out about the mysterious figure (who the girl's father thinks was the Devil) and about how the girl was adopted.

While all this is happening, a Priest is across town at a mental institution is trying to adopt the girl's twin sister. We're told they're twins cause they're both polydactyly (it's a word, look it up) but is stopped at the last minute by the girl's social worker and the Priest storms out. That night the mysterious figure shows up again and the girl also gets her eyes burned out. That seems close enough to the other death that they decide to go check it out and Scully calls in Mulder to hang out in a sexy leather jacket and help out.

Specifically Mulder tells her that the first girl was one of 4 quadruplets. Scully gets a vision of Emily (remember her?) during the autopsy of the most recent dead girl and starts getting convinced that God wants her to protect these girls. They go and check out the Priest who adopted her who turns out to be a big ol' weirdo, ranting about the end of the world and Angels and Satan. He's right of course, big ol' weirdos usually are in The X-Files but we don't know that yet. Anyhoo, they go looking for the third girl who is living on the street but she gets eye blasted before they can get to her and when they find Father Weirdo in the same area they decide to bring him in for questioning.

I'd say this went about as badly as a Baptism ever has.

He says he's trying to protect the girls, but Mulder doesn't believe him, while Scully is more conflicted. Doesn't matter though because the girl's social worker (remember him? No? I don't blame you) enters when our heroes are out of the room and burns Father Weirdo trying to get information on where the last girl is, but Father Weirdo decides to just deal with it. Turns out the Social Worker is the devil looking for the girls, and the guy who is supposed to be taking care of the last girl let Father Weirdo take her, and they don't know where.

Scully has a vision of the mysterious dude, only he has the head of a lion, eagle and bull, and a brief visit to a priest tells her she saw a Seraphim and that in myth he had four children with a mortal who are called Nephilim (it's a word, look it up) who he's bringing back to heaven. Scully goes and finds the last girl at the Church of Father Weirdo but the devil/social worker intercepts her, and tries to convince her to give him the girl when the Seraphim show up. But after one more vision of Emily, Scully lets the girl go to the Seraphim and the episode ends with her in Confession wondering if she did the right thing.

Contrary to our last episode, All Souls is an episode I feel like I should dig, given my interest in weird Catholic Apocrypha and the like, but it's one I've also never been able to get into. It even seems like it's intended to provide some emotional depth for Scully, which I am all for, just let Gillian Anderson do her thing. But it never comes together. Yeah, its got its share of problems, none of which are theoretically crippling, but all of which add up to an episode that, while not a painful experience, generally just leaves me out in the cold.

I have no extra thoughts here, I just wanted to include a picture of Mulder in his cool leather jacket.

Let's start with the big issue: The twist does not land at all. Not the twist that the thing killing them is an Angel, that actually lands pretty well as it's hinted at beforehand and it plays off audience assumptions. No I'm talking about the twist that the Social Worker is Satan. It seems like a neat twist (okay, it's Scooby-Doo twist, but never mind) but it doesn't land because the Social Worker has no real presence in the plot until he Satans it up, so when he jumps into the episode to be the villain, it seems abrupt.

There's also the problem of stakes. Satan is obviously some fairly nice stakes, but he wanders in in the middle of the third act and the angel that's taking the girls is never a threat to anyone else. He shows up to Scully around the time we get the Satan reveal and does nothing to her, so there's no stakes there. I suppose we could get some stakes from the girls, but they're complete non-entities, none of them getting more than a minute of screen time before they're whisked off by the Seraphim.

I think the episode is resting a lot of its stakes on emotional ones, letting the episode act as a third part of the Emily series of episodes from the beginning of the season, which is good conceptually but given those episodes never clicked with me, that's not a great thing to lean on. The episodes takes some major shortcuts to get that theme set up, tossing in Emily flashbacks and hallucinations, some of it works and some of it doesn't, but it overall doesn't land for me because they're playing too hard. A gentler touch with maybe a few hints at how Scully is feeling might have been better than smacking us over the head with it.

This shot is beneath you X-Files.

Which is especially a shame since I think trusting Gillian Anderson to deliver that emotional journey on her own might have panned out better. She is still all the way into this performance, and a more natural feeling climax, where we count on her to relay the emotional weight of her decision to let the last girl go to the Seraphim, rather than a somewhat cheap vision of Emily. Gillian Anderson is one of the things that helped this series hold itself together, even in its darkest hours, and it's a shame they didn't trust her to convey the weight of her conflict here in this episode.

Everything I've read about this episode tells me that the framing device was a last minute addition to the episode, and it certainly feels like it. But what's worse is that it clearly came at the expense of a more self assured episode. Every time they cut back to Scully in that confessional we're losing time that could be spent building up Scully's conflict, or establishing the Social Worker or just letting Father Weirdo rant, he seems fun. Instead the episode as a whole is very compromised, a whole less than the sum of its parts, because those parts aren't allowed to be a natural whole.

Case Notes:

• The opening of this episode is trying really hard to make a baptism sinister. Luckily, I already find it kind of creepy, so it works.
• The cold open doesn't give us a metric ton to work with, but the image of the girl in the praying post with her eyes burned out is a pretty solid visual, so we'll just work with that.
• The X-Files seems to prefer to put it's framing devices after the cold open, which I guess makes sense with an X-Files episode structure.
• I honestly keep forgetting that Emily was a thing that happened, those episodes did not make a big impact on me.
• I really don't think we, as X-Files fans can ever give Gillian Anderson enough credit for making this series work, she acts the shit out of the confessional scene.
• I love the Priest just seems to be asking Scully to handle what is, to literally any other person, a completely batshit case. Does he know Scully works exclusively batshit cases?
• I know the scene with the Priest failing to adopt one of the girls is supposed to be kind of sinister (it's got the upside-down cross and everything) but honestly, I'd be pretty pissed too if I got an adoption court order and the Social Worker stepped in at the last minute.
• Scully asks Mulder to get her some adoption papers and he just agrees to it without being told why. They're so great.
• Wait, is Mulder tailing a suspect to a porno theater or is he just going to a porno theater?
• The dude who's killing the girls' thing is so vague that it's hard for him to feel properly sinister.
• I watch most tv shows/movies with subtitles and I gotta tell you "Eerie voices grow louder" is pretty great as far as funny subtitles go.
• Mulder says the the upside-down cross is a sign against the church, but shouldn't he know better than that? It actually gets called out later.
• I like the scene where they talk to the Priest, but he is working overtime to come across as unhinged.
• Imaginary Emily showing up to talk to Scully during the autopsy scene is cheap, X-Files, we get that she's projecting.
• This episode has a lot of trouble deciding how mobile and independent the girls are. Neither of the first two girls would be capable of living on their own on the street, but the third one is.
• I the man killing the girl's face turning into a lion face is pretty good.
• I'm not totally clear on what the Priest's plan is for saving the girls (especially given that he gets wrecked by Satan more or less instantly), but he's got the spirit alright.
• I like the suggestion that Mulder is more suspicious of religious people because of his time working catching serial killers.
• The reveal that the social worker is Satan might have had more impact if he'd been like, in the episode at all before the reveal. That said, the scene is effective enough in a vacuum.
• The last girls' foster father tells Mulder that he doesn't have the key to the basement and Mulder immediately kicks the door down. What exactly was his plan there?
• I dunno what their original plan was for the angel with the three rotating heads, but it had to have been cooler looking in their heads than what ended up on screen.
• Scully goes back to check in with the priest entirely so that he can tell her the story of the Seraphim and the Nephilim. 
• The episode is building towards the moment where Scully lets the last girl/Emily going, but it has so little time to get there naturally that the ending feels very abrupt, like it shifted from the end of act 2 to climax instantly. They weren't totally on board with doing 2 part Monster of the Week episodes, but this could have used it.
• Hot damn is Gillian Anderson working overtime at the confessional scenes. They still feel pretty tacked on though.
• As always these reviews are supported by my Patreon. Check it out so I can afford to buy myself a cool leather jacket like Mulder has.

Future Celebrity Watch:

The actress who plays all four of the girls is Emily Perkins, who prior to this played Young Beverly in the 1990 miniseries adaptation of It and would go on to play the main character in the underrated Ginger Snaps series.

On a more minor note, the actor who plays the Social Worker, Glenn Morshower, was a semi-main character in 24. Wait is that more or less minor? I dunno, I never watched 24, I have no idea how big his part was.