Case 08, File 10: Badlaa

AKA: I Couldn't Think Of A Safe AKA Title

The X-Files is consistently weird, often spooky, occasionally scary but rarely gross. I don't really know how to write down that distinction in terms of violence and content, it's mostly just a judgement call that makes Machete silly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre disturbing and Saw III gross; I may not be able to define gross in a horror context, but I know it when I see it. And more importantly, it's hard to nail down when exactly being gross is a bug and when it's a feature.

Badlaa kicks off in a very unconvincing recreation of India (seriously, the Seinfeld episode The Betrayal felt more authentic) where an extremely heavy businessman is trying to catch a plane and is being kind of a jerk about it. He's followed around by a little person with no legs on a board and eventually attacked by him, and when he gets to DC, he starts bleeding from the...everywhere. So that's probably not great.

The next day Doggett and Scully are called in to check it out, where they find some weird evidence, like a tiny handprint in uh, blood, which weirds them both out. Meanwhile at a nearby private (I think? It's not super clear) school, the beggar is applying for job as a custodian while somehow appearing as a bland looking white dude. Back at the morgue, Scully notes from her autopsy that the victim had been dead since before he left India and also a lot of trauma to his stomach and uh...large intestine. Don't uh, don't think too hard about that one. She also notes a weight discrepancy and starts to think he might have had a ummmmmm passenger (seriously DO NOT think too hard about this one folks).

After some ditzing about with some kids in school being watched by the beggar, one of them wakes up to find the beggar in his room. His dad comes up to check it out but can't find him and then dies more or less immediately with blood coming out of his eyes. Scully and Doggett come and check it out, but Scully realizes that if her theory about someone uh, hitching a ride inside the person is correct, the attacker is probably still there. Seriously, I had an easier time describing the content of Videodrome than this episode.

Anyhoo, she heads back to the morgue and sure enough finds the beggar inside the dude's stomach, but he gets away and hides in the closet and is also invisible to her. Back at the school, one of the kid's classmates (wikipedia tells me they're named Quinton and Trevor, respectively) sees through the beggar's disguise and starts to hatch a plan. Scully, meanwhile, goes and find Chuck (remember him?) who tells her that Siddhi mystics could have the powers she's talking about but also that they're strictly nonviolent. Doing some digging around, she finds that a chemical plant explosion killed over 100 Siddhi in India, including the son of a holy man.

"We've decided to hire you Mr. Fakename, because uh...you're a generic looking white dude, what can we say?"

Back with the kids, one of them is chased by the beggar, but gets away, only to fall in the pool. But, when his mom goes in to save him, surprise! It's the beggar! I shouldn't joke, she dies. Her kid (Trevor, I think) says that it was a little man who did it, and heads back to the school with Quinton to try and grab him. It goes uh, bad, and Quinton ends up trapped in a room with the beggar advancing on him, until Scully shows up. But since the beggar is disguised as Trevor, she hesitates and nearly doesn't shoot him (she does shoot him though) and discusses with Doggett how hard she finds believing in this stuff. And with that, the episode ends with the beggar back in India...somehow? Oh and Mulder is still on the spaceship.

I don't think it's controversial to say that, as a whole episode, Badlaa does not work, but what makes it odd is that I don't know if it's because it's entirely malformed. There are individual elements that really work, but the whole just never manages to get anywhere. You end up watching it, rooting for it to all come together and click into a whole that works, but it never does. And then you realize, as the end credits roll, that it probably never could have.

Let's start with the good stuff though, because thank god, they finally started giving Doggett and Scully scenes together. Multiple scenes, where they work together and figure out the case and chat about their beliefs. They even have some rudimentary banter, even if Robert Patrick is still not very good at lobbing comic lines. It's getting kind of late to still be feeling this stuff out (10 episodes into a 21 episode season) but at least they're actually trying to get them to work together and not stuffing them into separate rooms. And while it may not have that old magic, I can see them working okay together.

"Hey, do you have Cheetos? All I found is Doritos."

The bigger issue is the villain and more importantly his MO. He has stuff about him that works; The episode wisely realizes that the squeak of his wheels is a solid ominous audio cue, and the actor has some great intensity, but let's be honest with ourselves; The idea of a person who crawls inside someone's ass to pilot them from the inside out is a comedy premise, not a horror one. Even if we were to excise the parts that Americans unfortunately read as comedic no matter what (like the fact that it's a little person, or that he exclusively targets overweight people) the mechanics are just too silly no matter how you dress it up in magic. It sounds like something from a Men in Black sequel, a bad one (but I repeat myself).

Maybe it could have worked if they'd leaned into it a bit more, made it more overtly comedic, but between Robert Patrick's inconsistent ability to lob a punchline and the fact that I think everyone realized they'd overdosed on comedy episodes in Seasons 6 and 7, that wasn't on the table. So they try to solve this issue by leaning into the visceral aspect of it, not a terrible idea in concept but one that just makes it feel icky without solving how silly the premise is. The resulting tonal imbalance is an issue that could sink a much better written episode than this and it's one the episode never recovers from.

And the thing is, they could have had better writing, by trying to dig into the themes the episode raises. The beggar's backstory has a lot of juicy stuff about the effects of colonialism and capitalism on the global south or poorest among us, but as the reveal of his backstory is a last minute one, all of that just gets left on the table; We don't even technically know whether he's seeking revenge or just mad with grief and killing people for no reason since we don't even get a line about how his victims are related to the chemical explosion. Maybe a monologue at some point could fix this, but they seem to be terrified of breaking the spell of the beggar's silent intensity by having him speak (which comes with its own issues).

"Trevor! I'm seeking you! If you're looking for Portugal, it's due south!"

Honestly, if they weren't going to fix the issue that is the central premise, they'd probably have been better off leaning into it, either going overtly comedic or playing up the gore and grossness more. The best scene in the episode (the one where the beggar crawls out of the corpse in front of Scully) is also its grossest. A few more scenes like that could have gone a long way towards bridging the tonal gap, or at least making the episode such a disgusting thrill ride that I wouldn't care so much. Being overtly tasteless is an option that's always on the table.

There's lots of other stuff that could take up multiple paragraphs in their own right (like how media in general and horror in specific uses people with atypical bodies as a visual shorthand for horror, and why that's bad) or the episode's willingness to dive straight into Asian Mysticism Nonsense but overall the episode just doesn't work, even if the villain is one of the more memorable ones in the season. I guess the most we can hope is that the sense that they're actually going to start teaming Scully and Doggett up and seeing how they work together, even if we are only a handful of episodes away from that dynamic getting upended again.

 Case Notes:

• The episode is doing just a little too much to make the American guy a complete asshole.
• Okay, shot of the American guy on the bed with blood everywhere is great.
• The back and forth shot with the principal talking to the maintenance guy and then going back to reveal it's the beggar is pretty solid.
• The autopsy scene is mostly just to get us the info that Potacki had been dead for a while and to get us some gross details, but I like that they're actually trying to give Doggett comedy lines now, it makes the tone feel more X-Files-ie
• I feel like the bully subplot is kind of a dead end.
• Scully hops to the conclusion that the monster this week is crawling inside its victims based on the fact that both the victims they found were big, but a 6 foot man being 205 pounds is not that big, certainly not the 420 pounds the other guy.
• Doggett looks genuinely queasy at Scully's theory.
• The scene in the house is kind of eh (they kind of realized pretty quick they can't put the actual attack on screen) but the dad with the blood filled eyes is solidly freaky.
• The second autopsy with the giant bulge in his stomach is really really freaky as is the Alien-esque sequence where the beggar pulls himself out.
• Hey a Chuck appearance to toss some some Asian Mysticism stuff. Chuck only appears in like, 6 episodes, but I always feel like he's more important than he was.
• The scene in the school and the scene with the bully are basically redundant with each other.
• Wait, is Chuck not aware that Mulder is missing?
• Scully asking Chuck to help her see the crime the way Mulder is a conceptually good scene but it needed to come 4 episodes into the season, not 10.
• I say again, the squeak of the wheels is a good audio calling card, but watching the board try to actually engage in a proper chase is kind of silly.
• Shot in the pool almost works but then really doesn't, no I don't know why.
• The scene with Scully and Doggett snapping at each other about their conflicting opinions is good, and it ties into why Scully and Mulder were a better fit (IE, they both took each other more seriously) but again, it is late in the season to be having this discussion.
• Hey, Chuck gets to actually do something. The shot of the camera moving from the shot of the janitor to nothing on the camera is so nice they do it twice.
• The finale is potentially pretty solid, and it has a couple of nice shots and tension moments, but it moves just a wee bit too fast.
• The episode ending on Scully breaking down about her inability to keep an open mind and how she misses Mulder? Good. The episode instead ending on a weird "He's still out there" shot of the beggar in India? Bad.
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Current Celebrity Watch:

Deep Roy, who plays the Beggar is a well known little person stunt actor who has actually done a fair amount of acting outside of stunt work, most notably as Teeny Weeny in The NeverEnding Story and as the Oompa Loompas in the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Trevor is played by Michael Welch, who was a few years out from a main role in a show called Joan of Arcadia, which I've never watched. He was also apparently in all of the first four Twilight movies, but I have no recollection of his character (Mike? Is he one of the humans?)