X-Files S2E15: Picking at dem bones

Sestra Amateur: 

You can consider "Fresh Bones" to be The X-Files' voodoo episode. This is a bottle ep in which writer Howard Gordon did not wander too far for inspiration. If you’ve seen 1987’s The Believers starring Martin Sheen and/or Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow from 1988 then you know exactly how this episode is going to play out. Years ago, I read Nicholas Conde’s novel The Religion, which led to The Believers movie. Everyone should get to see a nest of spiders coming out of Helen Shaver’s face at least once in their lives. You’ll panic every time you get a pimple. I never read the book by anthropologist Wade Davis that inspired The Serpent and the Rainbow, but his writings fall under non-fiction so true believers should proceed with caution. 

In Folkstone, North Carolina, we’re watching the deterioration of a marriage. Private Jack McAlpin is snapping at his wife, Robin, who is clearly terrified of him. Their young son, Luke, also cowers from Jack’s angry behavior. Maybe some counseling will help this family, but since this is The X-Files, that’s clearly not going to be the proper course of action. McAlpin tries to eat his cereal, but it looks like a bowl of maggots to him. He drives away but sees his face as a bloody, skeletal mess in the rearview mirror. Whether accidental or intentional, Jack drives into a tree. Unfortunately, this tree has ritualistic markings painted on one side. Either that or it’s just really creative gang tags. 

One week later, Sculder arrive in Folkstone. Robin doesn’t buy the military's claim that her husband committed suicide. Another soldier, Private Manuel Guttierez, also died there. Both soldiers were assigned to the INS processing center, a refugee camp housing Haitian citizens. Robin found a conch shell in Luke’s sandbox and the shell contained ritualistic symbols written in blood. (OK, it could have been red Sharpie for all we know, but blood has more of an impact.) A 10-year-old boy recently died during a riot at the refugee camp. Is this payback?

Sculder proceed to the processing center. A kid hits on Scully and sells Mulder a talisman to shield them from harm. Not surprised to find Scully a skeptic and Mulder a believer when it comes to voodoo. Colonel Wharton, played by Daniel Benzali, is the man in charge of the processing center. He claims the refugees hate the soldiers and that voodoo beliefs caused the riot which killed the boy. Private Harry Dunham clearly knows something but isn’t say anything … yet. Scully wants to autopsy McAlpin’s supposedly decapitated body, but it’s been replaced with a dead animal. At least we hope it was replaced. If McAlpin turned into a dog then this would be a different type of X-File: "Shapes Part 2" maybe. 

Mulder interviews Haitian refugee Pierre Beauvais, who would be their main suspect if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s been locked in a cell for weeks. Mulder asks Beauvais about the ritualistic symbol. Pierre says it's a mirror which forces some to confront their true selves. He also says the refugees just want to return home but Wharton won’t let them. Beauvais says they agents have been warned and now no magic will save them. After they leave the camp Scully almost hits someone wandering on the dark road. It’s McAlpin and he’s intact. Case closed, end of the episode.

Not quite. Is this Zombie McAlpin? Mulder says Tetrodotoxin can be used to create a death-like state. The next morning Sculder go to the cemetery to exhume Guttierez’s body. The caretaker claims body snatchers got there first and shows Sculder an empty grave. Why was he buried locally in the first place? He didn’t have any family or friends to arrange his burial anywhere else? Bet he didn’t get full military honors even though he was an active soldier. 

While at the cemetery, Sculder encounter Chester Bonaparte, the boy who sold protection to Mulder. He’s collecting frogs around the grave sites to sell to Beauvais. Ever the scientist, Scully says toads contain bufotoxin, which is similar to pufferfish poison and can cause hallucinations. Mulder spies Dunham following them and confronts him. The private says Beauvais threatened to take the souls of Wharton’s men one by one because the colonel authorized beatings of the refugees. Dunham sounds like a true believer, he really should ask for a transfer. 

Meanwhile, Chester makes a run for it. Mulder chases him to the docks, but the kid gets away. At least he’s frogless for now. Sculder confront Wharton whose breakfast also starts bleeding. Maybe his ham was a tad bit too rare. Scully gets cuts from a string of thorns wound around her steering wheel. Too bad Sculder didn’t see the ritualistic markings under their car. She should have let Mulder drive that day. 

Remember Mr. X, who we haven’t seen since Scully was in a coma? He decides to butt into this one to tell Mulder the government is going to shut down Sculder’s investigation. While Steven Williams tries to justify his presence in a stand-alone episode, Scully finds the AWOL Private Dunham dead in Mulder’s hotel room. Fox apprehends Private McAlpin, who just happened to be in the area. Colonel Wharton observes the interrogation and McAlpin signs a confession, but it doesn’t seem that cut and dry. Wharton also claims Pierre Beauvais committed suicide, so Sculder should have no more business there. But Scully’s hand is hurting and she has a headache so apparently there's still work to be done. 

Robin shows Sculder a picture of Wharton and Beauvais in Haiti long before the refugee camp came to pass. They search the colonel’s office and learn McAlpin and Guttierez filed complaints against Wharton. The agents assume Wharton used voodoo as retaliation. Wharton’s guard tells Sculder they can find the colonel at the graveyard, where, it turns out, Wharton is performing a ritual. 

Dana says she has a headache and tells Fox to go after Wharton alone. The Scully we know would never do that so clearly she’s being affected by something more than a headache. She hallucinates blood in her mouth and Bauvais breaking through the small puncture on her hand from the thorn. That’s extreme even for The X-Files, I was expecting spiders or maggots, but a fully grown man? Even more interesting: If the ritualistic markings under Sculder’s car was supposed to be a mirror into their “true selves” then white female Scully’s true self is a black male? She’s the real Mr. X!? Not really sure where Mr. Gordon was going with that. 

Luckily, Mulder left his “protection” in the car. The spirit of Bauvais confronts Wharton, who appears to die. The next day the government makes arrangements for the refugees to return home. McAlpin, who looks and acts normal again, tells Sculder that Chester had died weeks ago during the riot. Wharton is later buried, but of course, he’s not really dead. He was just in a death-like state. But since he’s a U.S. military officer and died on American soil, shouldn’t he have been, I don’t know, autopsied? Embalmed? Memorialized at a large service? Stop borrowing from Wade Davis, Mr. Gordon. We all know you can do (and have done) better.

Sestra Professional:

We do expect a lot of Howard Gordon. We've seen him take inspiration from other material and not quite reach the heights he's capable of with episodes such as this season's "Firewalker," so I'm with you on this, Sestra Am. "Fresh Bones" not a bad concept, it just seems we've seen all this before, this version just has Sculder shoehorned into it.

It's a great teaser, though, the show went all out on Jack's freakout and apparent suicide. We can thank the show's trusty director/producer Rob Bowman for that. I touted the late great Kim Manners last week, and Bowman served as the other go-to guy for long stretches of the original run (and the first feature film).

Mulder picking up a good-luck charm from Chester reminds me that he's probably got quite the assortment of souvenirs picked up on the job. He told us earlier in the run that he has an aversion to salt and pepper shakers, but his bric-a-brac collection already includes this juju and an alleged photo of a UFO.

Again, the show attempts to tackle a topic of the time, and once again, it's rather awkwardly deposited in the scope of the series. Gordon reportedly said news of three servicemen committing suicide in Haiti and the internment of the refugees led him to pen this tale ... with a tail. 

Maybe it's because the soldiers have to belabor the point that the military doesn't have enough resources to house the refugees, but when we bring real-world considerations into the fantasy show, it slows down the action and makes it a little tougher to buy the premise.

Scully does a good job of explaining things away, such as with the "zombie powder" that can slow metabolism to a point in which the patient seems clinically dead. Unfortunately that's usually followed by a quote such as "Power of suggestion is considerable, but this is no more magic than a pair of fuzzy dice." Which, in turn, is usually followed by something that can't be explained quite so easily, such as a previously dead man wandering down the street.
 

The Statue of Liberty is on vacation:  Thank goodness X shows up to point us back in the right direction, although in our current political climate some of this episode really starts hitting a little close to home. As X proclaims, "The new mandate says, if you're not a citizen, you better keep out." 

That was a seriously creepy scene with a body emerging from Dana's hand in the car. Another point for Sestra Am, they did tell us earlier that those allegedly experiencing voodoo were just confronting their true selves. I'm not really sure how that fits into Scully's story either, sort of a plot point that ends up going nowhere beyond having usually sensible Dana reach for the talisman for help. But more kudos to Bowman for the final scene, which might have been predictable but still played really well.

And now some words about the use of animals in "Fresh Bones." The caretaker's dog's name is Wong? Talk about on the nose, named after the co-writer who had just departed for greener pastures. And the toad budget this season must be enormous between the ones hopping around in Chester's sack and the frogs falling from the sky in our previous ep, "Die Hand Die Verletzt." 

Guest star of the week: Sorry, Daniel Benzali (although speaking French in the graveyard denouement was nice work), but Jamil Walker Smith was the one who provided real spark in this episode as the dearly departed Chester. (Maybe he was just using up another of his kitty lives.) As an extra bonus, take a peek at a great moment on the Season 2 gag reel between Smith and David Duchovny.