It's too bad we didn't get to this one next month, when we would be more accepting of a Christmas-themed episode. Halloween is only four days away, so my focus is obviously on that now. Maybe I can find a way to have the best of both worlds, like The Nightmare Before Christmas.Dana and Margaret Scully are visiting Bill and his pregnant wife, Tara, on a San Diego U.S. Naval base for the Christmas holidays. (Bill has a wife? Bill’s about to be a father? Did the writers just throw that out there or did I miss something in previous Bill eps?) Margaret quickly gets lost in memories of her deceased husband.
At the Scully homestead, Dana answers the phone. A woman is requesting her help. Maybe it’s a Halloween prank. Oh yeah, it’s not Halloween. Maybe the call is coming from inside the house!! Okay, it’s not. … Scully uses her FBI connections to try and get the call traced. I don’t know about you, but I started using the *69 feature to call back the last number sometime in that mid '90s, so maybe Agent Scully should have tried that before utilizing costly federal resources.
Bill and Dana go to the address and then learn the occupant, Roberta Sim (nice Christmas Carol homage), committed suicide hours before the phone call. Local police detective John Kresge seems skeptical. I’m really hoping the meaning of his last name is not foreshadowing, but The X-Files writers always seem to have a reason when they use unusual surnames. (Don’t blame me for checking, blame George Lucas and his Vader-means-father nonsense.) Bill catches up to Dana, who claims the voice sounded like their dead sister, Melissa. Detective Kresge confirms Scully’s impossible phone call but assumes it was a computer glitch. Roberta’s husband and young daughter are present, so he’s ready to wrap his the suicide investigation. Back at Bill’s house, Dana calls Mulder, but hangs up without talking. Man, I wish he had *69’d that call! Also, why would she do that to him knowing how paranoid he gets? Speaking of Halloween, even Fox looked like he was in costume. When he ran into the apartment to answer his phone, I thought he was dressed as a pirate. That’s a weird way to wear a scarf. Also, I hope you got your Mulder fix, because that’s all you get in this episode. In San Diego, Dana’s clearly affected by her sister-in-law’s pregnancy and upset about her own infertility issues.
Later that night, she dreams about younger versions of herself, Bill and Melissa. Then “Melissa” calls Scully and directs her back to the Sim house to check on young Emily. Marshall Sim, who now has two unknown men in suits inside the house, reacts badly to Dana’s presence and orders her to leave. Scully asks Det. Kresge to show her the case file and notices a strong resemblance between Emily and a picture of 3-year-old Melissa. Dana continues her investigation and learns Emily was adopted … and born about a year before Melissa’s murder. The detective authorizes an autopsy for Roberta Sim and Scully learns the medication in Roberta’s system was injected, not ingested. The cops return to the Sim residence and find a bloody needle … in the garbage can … in the backyard during a crime scene search. This sure is making San Diego PD look bad. Dana somehow also arranged a DNA test on the girl and learns Emily may be Melissa’s daughter. Scully tells her mother, who is in denial, even after seeing the girls’ pictures and the test results. Dana next dreams about the Christmas when her parents gave and Melissa their gold cross necklaces. Kresge wakes up Dana and updates her on his investigation. They learn Emily is in medical trials for a rare autoimmune condition. The detective finds enough evidence to arrest Marshall for Roberta’s murder. Emily is enthralled by Scully's gold cross necklace, so Dana gives it to her before Child Services takes her away.
Back at the Scully holiday party -- could be a Halloween party since half the guests are dressed as Naval officers -- everyone is enjoying themselves but Dana, who is clearly bringing down the room. Bill confronts his sister and sides with Margaret. Both of them think Dana is turning the Emily situation into something personal. Kresge calls Scully with news of Marshall Sim’s full confession, but now Scully isn’t buying it. She arrives at the jail as the two men in suits leave. They got inside Sim’s cell by claiming to be his lawyers. And now Marshall is dead … another “suicide." Still trying to prove Dana wrong, Bill shows her a photograph of a non-pregnant Melissa taken a month before the day Emily was born. This feels exactly like "Redux Part 2" (Season 5, Episode 2), when we understand Bill’s point of view but don’t sympathize with him at all. Right now, he just comes off as a jealous brother who thinks his infertile sister is stealing his soon-to-be-a-father thunder. Dana has started the paperwork to adopt Emily, but Child Services rejects her application for several reasons. Alien abduction is not one of them -- she’s single, no long-term relationships, long hours, dangerous job. Scully’s down, not out entirely just yet. She goes back to sleep and dreams about adult Melissa in the days before Dana started the FBI Academy.
Are we sure Melissa isn’t haunting this house? It’s really not too late to turn the story into Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror. The next morning, Christmas morning, mind you, an FBI courier arrives at Bill and Tara’s home with the more extensive DNA test results. (Trick or treat? At least offer the guy working on Christmas Day some egg nog.) Turns out Bill and Margaret were right; Emily is not Melissa’s daughter ... she’s Dana’s! (Insert gasps of disbelief here….) Boy, now I’m sorry I wasted my Maury Povich reference in the last episode. We’ll get more answers next week, but for now it’s a Halloween (OK, Christmas) miracle! Sestra Professional:
I don't know about Dana, but I certainly recognized her sister's voice right away. I was kind of surprised she didn't. It would be like me not knowing Sestra Am when she calls me on the phone. Deeming the mystery person a garden-variety woman is pretty bizarre. Of course, Scully has a history of supernatural occurrences with her family. Remember, she had the vision of her father passing on just before her mother called with the bad news in "Beyond the Sea" (S1E13).
But maybe that's why Dana didn't fight it as hard as she usually fights the unexplained things she and the guy who isn't in much of this episode investigate on a regular basis. (Nope, David Duchovny wasn't again working on the summer blockbuster, Fight the Future. This time, he had obligations for another film, Playing God. Remember that one? Didn't think so.)
I've always admired most of the setup and execution of this one by the amazing writing team of Vince Gilligan, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz, puzzling appearance of Bill's pregnant wife aside. But Scully's brother just can't get out of his own way. He doesn't do himself any favors with the fandom by constantly butting heads with Dana and never taking her side. He picked the right wife too, droning on and on about how life is less without a baby. That's not gonna make her barren sister-in-law feel too good, is it?It's a great mystery, hearing the voice of Melissa (still Melinda McGraw, so it resonates with the viewers) urging Dana to try to help the little girl. Even aside the supernatural jingles she's getting on the phone, Scully has great reason to suspect what's going on in the house of the woman who allegedly committed suicide. The way she lays out the facts to get the autopsy -- such as the phone being off the hook -- show how smart Dana is, even in the face of interfacing with an inhabitant from the great beyond.
There's the DNA evidence that skillfully leads Scully (and us) to believe she's on the right track. And that mysterious period of time when Melissa was on the road, finding herself? She very well could have had a baby during that time, it's not one of those ridiculous conjectures Scully often has to come up with in response to the fantastical Mulder suppositions that usually prove to be correct. It's pretty easy to follow along with that reasoning ... and then blammo! John Gilnitz hits us right between the eyes with that little surprise.That startling piece of news fits even better into the framework of the show. We know Scully was appropriated early in Season 2 and that tests were done on her during that time. We can believe it was by aliens or by the government or some unholy alliance between the two. But now it's three years later in Dana's life, in the journeys all of us have taken through the X-Files. What are the ramifications of that? This poor little girl suffering from an autoimmune disease could very well be one of the -- to put it harshly -- byproducts of the abduction machinations.
According to Resist or Serve, Volume 4 of The Official Guide to The X-Files, this particular story came about because Gilligan, Shiban and Spotnitz needed to 1.) do a Scully-centric episode that 2.) would air around the holidays. Rather trot out the old Christmas Carol allegory, the triumvirate decided to go with self-examination of another sort for Dana. With the cancer scare in the rearview mirror but still in mind, Scully again confronts her choices in the wake of fresh remembrances that she'll never be able to have the same kind family unit as Bill and his bride.Another sterling performance from Gillian Anderson really ties the whole episode together. She's strong as an investigator and smart as a physician. Then we get that other look at her outside of the power suits and scrubs when she talks with the representative from Child Services about adopting Emily. And finally ... the big surprise. The most shocking news an infertile woman would never expect to get.
In The Complete X-Files, Gillian Anderson credited the crew for helping her get the job done. "It's great when you get a crew that really respects the work that's being done by the actors," she said. "That makes a world of difference when you feel safe to go where you need to go as an actor, day in and day out. A crew is everything."Guest star of the week: Two young Danas, one young Melissa and one young Bill -- that's a lot of youth actors asked to help move the story along through flashbacks. The 1976 version of Scully getting the trademark cross from her mother stood out. And if the remarkable resemblance to Gillian seemed obvious, that's probably because that young Dana was played by her own sister, Zoe Anderson. Sestras are doing it for themselves.
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