The X-Files: The End Can’t Come Soon Enough
(Episode 11.05)
Photo: Shane Harvey/FOX
Halfway through this 11th season—and, more importantly, the season in which The X-Files has rebooted and re-evaluated itself to a degree that only now appears to represent Chris Carter and his writers playing the long game—and the pieces seem to be tumbling into place. The pieces of what? Still not entirely sure, though all intuition points to a re-imagining of the series foundationally, of the season premiere’s conceit—that Scully just dreamed up the happenings of the already-rebooted tenth season—facilitated by grander ideas regarding alternate realities, double lives, altered memories and apocryphal history.
I’ve been beating these ideas within an inch of their lives because Carter and co. do the same. This week, with “Ghouli,” written and directed by James Wong, The X-Files pulls its second-riskiest plot device of the season so far, re-connecting Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) with their son, who they once named William (Miles Robbins), second only to the riskiness of thinking the show’s legion of audience members would patiently accept the fact that the cliffhanger to the tenth season was “solved” by a contrivance fanboys once only reserved with the hatingest of hate for shows like Lost.
As is usually the case in mid-season mythology episodes, not much occurs in “Ghouli” besides Scully’s emotional turmoil, and Anderson, undoubtedly, is up to the challenge of running her character through the motions of re-re-experiencing the same trauma she’s been re-experiencing for more than two decades. Thankfully, Wong doesn’t indulge in the facile poeticism of his showrunner, which means that the most awkward voiceover we endure occurs at the beginning of the episode, after the cold open, in which Scully has a vision akin to sleep paralysis, visited by the silhouette of a person she intuits as her biological son, William, and pointed in the direction of a recently opened X-File. With Mulder—who seems pretty neutral about finding the son he fathered with Scully, because Mulder doesn’t know that he really isn’t the father (?); it’s hard to keep these alternate plot points straight, but more on that in a bit—Scully visits the scene of an almost double-homicide, the victims being two teenage girls (Sarah Jeffrey and Madeleine Arthur) nearly murdering each other, claiming they were attacking a District 9-like insectoid monster they refer to as a “ghouli.” Despite the ill-defined interference of a government agency or three, Mulder and Scully trace the attack to a 17-year-old named Jackson Van De Kamp (Robbins), who’s discovered dead alongside his parents, Scully understanding pretty quickly that it’s probably her son whose body she finds on a bedroom floor.
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