Case 07, File 12: X-Cops

AKA: The Only Thing To Fear Is Pro-Police Propaganda

The X-Files exists in an odd space, compared to other law enforcement centered media. Even when discussions of pro-cop media in the 90s media comes up, The X-Files is rarely part of the conversation. Part of that is that our heroes, despite being FBI Agents, are so often positioned as against the government (or at least the vast conspiracy within it) or maybe it's cause what Mulder and Scully do is so unlike what normal law enforcement does. Either way, when they actually do engage with real life law enforcement, it strikes an...odd tone.

Our story opens with an episode of COPS, an old 90s show where the camera followed police officers as they went around arresting people. This particular episode follows a cop named Deputy Wetzel as he investigates a report of a prowler in a bad neighborhood, but immediately freaks out and heads back to his car, which is immediately turned over by an unseen force. The LAPD decides that's a little odd, so they start sending out cops to find out what's going on.

They immediately find two suspicious people wandering around LA. but those people turn out to be heroic FBI Agents, Mulder and Scully, who are there investigating the same thing that happened last month on the full moon. Of course, Mulder being Mulder, he thinks it's werewolf...right up until they ask the lady who called the cop to describe her attacker, and it looks like Freddy Krueger, which freaks the sketch artist right the fuck out.

Mulder doesn't know what to make of this, but when the sketch artist gets killed and has wounds that resemble a Freddy Krueger attack, they figure something is really weird. After consulting with a kind of uncomfortably stereotypical gay couple, they discover that a witness to the crime was a streetwalker named Chantara. They track her down, but she says her boyfriend killed the guy and that he's been planning on killing her too. So they do what the LAPD always does when it hits a dead end: Raid a crack house.

"This episode might get kind of dark. Not like, incest mutants dark, but dark."

Inside they find the boyfriend dead, but Deputy Wetzel (who is still hanging around) freaks out and fires at something only he can see, with the bullets hitting...something? And also Chantara is dead. Mulder, thinking something is odd, decides to finally ask Wetzel what he saw, and Wetzel confesses he saw a scary wasp monster his brother used to tell him about. Mulder finally hits his theory; That whatever this thing is, it changes its form into whatever it's targeting is most afraid of. And he also theorizes it passes to whoever saw it happen, so he heads back out to the gay couple's house.

But after several hours of hanging around and watching them argue and then make up, they realize that nothing is going to happen and Mulder goes to hang out with Deputy Wetzel and muse about what it's like to be in law enforcement when everyone thinks you're nuts, while Scully heads off to do an autopsy on Chantara. But when Scully randomly mentions the Hantavirus while reassuring the morgue attendant that it's not a viral outbreak, the morgue attendant drops dead of...the Hantavirus. Oops.

So Mulder now has his full theory: That this thing is attracted to mortal terror and jumps from person to person as whatever they're afraid of. And then they realize that the only reason Deputy Wetzel wasn't that scared was cause he was hanging with Mulder, a paragon of masculinity. So they run out to where Wetzel is, to find him being attacked by the force and manage to talk him down from being scared enough that he lives through until the sun rises. And thus the episode kind of ends with Mulder and Scully musing on the nature of fear, and that the thing only shows up ever full moon and they're not staying in LA for another 28 days.

X-Cops is a good episode, with a lot to recommend about it, but like Hungry before it, it represents a shift in how The X-Files was making its episodes. It is, on a story level, a pretty standard, above average, Monster of the Week episode, with most of what makes it unique being how its runs that episode through a gimmick. And while I don't mind gimmicky episodes, as our time with Duchovny gets shorter, I can't help but feel like I wish we could just have a regular episode with him. And before you bring up the next episode, a good one.

"How can she be scared of Freddy Krueger, only like 1/3rd of his movies are any good."

But as long as we're mentioning the gimmick, we should talk about it, because it is a hell of a gimmick. It's easy to imagine a lamer, or at least more conventional, "Crossover" between COPS and The X-Files but this episode commits to actually seeing through the aesthetic choice, structuring the episode around it and working hard to keep the effect authentic. And it works, handheld and found footage aesthetics have been around forever, especially in horror, cause they're an easy shortcut to tension, and the episode knows that and uses it to its advantage. It also uses the in-universe camera as an easy excuse to never show its monster, since it appears as different things to different people. I can't imagine what it would be like to watch this episode without being familiar with the COPS aesthetic, you'd probably think that the episode had lost its mind.

Outside of the gimmick, the episode itself is also good enough that I think it could stand on its own without it, so that's good. Sure fear monsters aren't anything super new (I'm pretty sure even Buffy did something similar), but the tweaks to the formula are just unique enough to keep it fresh, and it has some solid twists that work nicely. I like that there's no consistency to what people are afraid of, some people are afraid of very real stuff like Chantara being afraid of her boyfriend, some are afraid of real but absurd things like the hantavirus and some people are scared of Freddy Krueger, even though most of those movies are bad. It's nicely human.

Oddly enough, I'm less interested in the secondary character who shows up the most, Deputy Wetzel (and not just because writing his name makes me want a hot dog wrapped in a pretzel). His fear is theoretically an interesting one, but only visually and since the episode is decidedly not showing anything, we don't get to see it and so we're reliant entirely on the actor to carry his part and...well, meaning no offense to the man, that's a hard thing to ask and he's not quite there. It's especially frustrating, cause he's the stakes meant to make the climax exciting, but it just kind of falls flat.

The only other aspect of the episode I'm extremely iffy about is Steve and Edy, who have...aged poorly, shall we say. The exist in the same kind of nebulous place that Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage exist in, a then-positive portrayal of gay people that was, in hindsight, quite stereotypical and kind dismissive. But the episode at least takes them seriously as people and treats their relationship as valuable to both of them so...I genuinely don't know, it's hard to parse stuff like this when it's so old.

"Look, can you portray us as a normal couple without stereotypes? Not for another 14 years? Okay, I guess I'll take it."

It stands out, because while their reunion is solid stuff, it also slows down the pacing, but maybe that's for the best. I often feel like an X-Files episode is missing something, an extra kill or attack here, but this episode has just enough good ideas to keep the episode moving and then stops when it runs out, with very little in the way of denouemont or epilogue. Maybe it's in keeping with the COPS style or maybe it's just that they ran out of space, but it seems like it makes sense for it to stop when it does. The episode's gimmick gives it the excuse to cut out a lot of stuff (like how they jump right to the cops busting up the crackhouse) so maybe having a scene specifically to slow down the pace isn't the worst idea.

On a smaller note, while I do wish we got more straightforward episodes with our heroes, I do like the side of Mulder and Scully we get to see in front of the in-universe camera. Mulder of course just acts like Mulder, which is in and of itself telling (I feel like he must be a delight at parties, he doesn't seem to waver from his usual behavior no matter what) but Scully spends the entire episode trying to avoid the cameras and get them to leave her alone. It's small, but it's good character work and it doesn't take up a lot of time. And Scully shutting the cameramen in the closet in the finale always get a laugh from me.

X-Cops is a good episode, and I do support stylistic experiments, but it does occasionally feel like the series is grasping at ways to keep audience attention in ways it wasn't back in previous seasons. I've said about other shows that when they begin to lose track of what their audience is there for, the series is ultimately doomed (even if it takes a few seasons to collapse, ala House). The X-Files hasn't quite lost sight of what people are there for, but I do feel like its vision of what people want is beginning to get a little hazy.

Case Notes:

• I completely forgot this episode opens with a cops style "Viewer Discretion is Advised" warning. Cute.
• They do the entire opening theme to COPS that only occasionally features our heroes.
• I'm not going to make this review about politics or my issues with the police, but I am going to say that it's amusing to me that the cop says that he hopes being out there makes people feel safer in 2000. LA Riots were 8 years earlier my dude.
• The cop assuming the massive gashes on the door are a dog is very dumb.
• You'd think you'd want to send a cop to a predominantly Latino part of LA who spoke a little Spanish, come on.
• The sequence of the cop running back to his car and then the car getting flipped over is quite effective.
• I like that the episode has both the COPS theme and The X-Files theme.
• Why does the LAPD assume two random people in the middle of LA are suspects? Because they need to get Mulder and Scully into the group as fast as possible.
• Mulder has been working with the LAPD for about 90 seconds and is already acting like a lunatic. I love him just jumping straight into the werewolf stuff.
• I also love Scully basically telling Mulder "Look, I know you're a nutcase and I still love you, but you can't spout this shit on TV."
• The lady turning out to have seen Freddy Kruger is a great moment, especially given what the solution turns out to be.
• Scully seems so annoyed that they can't kick the cameras out (or get Mulder away from them). I also love her just flat refusing to let the cameraman into the car.
• The COPS style cut to the ads is a nice touch.
• I dunno if the episode knows how dark it is to have a cop say "My favorite part of the job is knocking down crack houses."
• The deputy being named Wetzel is really funny to me and it's making me want a pretzel.
• Honestly, the Wasp Man sounds scarier than a lot of the other stuff people were afraid of.
• Scully's "Oh god, more of you," in response to more cameraman is the moment of the episode.
• The cop talking to Mulder about how hard it is when people think you're nuts is fun, especially given how little the cop knows about Mulder and how much the audience knows.
• The scene with the morgue assistant is great, she's so annoying and Scully is so uninterested in engaging until she suddenly just dies, excellent stuff.
• I love Scully basically trying to talk herself out of it being the Hantavirus that killed the morgue assistant.
• The climax of this episode is Mulder giving the dude a pep talk through a closed door, which is why I think that this episode's ending is kind of lame.
• As always, these episodes are supported by my Patreon. When the fear monster shows up to my door, it'll appear as the specter of me starving under late stage capitalism, so check it out so I can beat that fear.