X-Files S11E5: Coming to the Crossroads

Sestra Amateur: 

I’m sure you’ll be very disappointed to learn this episode is not a prequel to the mid-80s horror movie Ghoulies. Considering that cult flick made seven times its budget, shouldn’t there have been a sequel or two?

A teenage girl wanders around an abandoned ship filled with jump scares. She finds another teen but thinks the girl is a monster known as a Ghouli. The other girl thinks the same thing and they end up stabbing each other nearly to death. Do you know why? Because writer/ director James Wong makes you see what he wants you to see. (Hey, it’s in the teaser, so it must be true, right?) I’m more concerned because Wong is making me hear what I don’t want to hear: a voiceover.

Special Agent Dana Scully is asleep in her bed. She thinks she can’t move but manages to grab her gun and then get up and chase whatever she thinks was in bed with her. The next morning, she tells Special Agent Fox Mulder about her dream. Apparently Scully's getting visions related to an X-file about the abandoned ship Chimera. 

Team Sculder drives to Norfolk, Virginia, where Detective Costa tells our intrepid heroes about the teen girls, Brianna Stapleton and Sarah Turner. Both have been hospitalized and are asking about Ghouli. The agents interview the girls separately and learn they’re dating the same boy, Jackson Van De Kamp. Dana and Fox go to Jackson’s house and hear shots fired. They enter and Scully recognizes the interior of the house from her visions. Sculder find Jackson and his parents dead from gunshot wounds. Dana is tormented by her inexplicable connection to the apparent killer.

Mulder confronts two unidentified government agents outside the crime scene. He doesn’t seem amused by their presence. In the hospital morgue, Scully thinks she’s related to Jackson Van De Kamp and arranges for a DNA test. Then she apologizes for failing William and giving him up for adoption. (We know Gillian Anderson has the acting chops for this kind of scene, but it still felt like the writers were trying too hard to get her an Emmy nom.) Fox arrives and comforts Dana. After they leave, Jackson unzips his body bag and sits up. I guess he heard Scully too. Dana falls asleep on a hospital couch but experiences sleep paralysis again. The doctor wakes Scully to ask where she put Jackson’s body since it's missing. Dana is now convinced Jackson was – is – William.

Scully leaves the hospital and runs into author Peter Wong, who advises her to not give up on the bigger picture. Back in Jackson’s bedroom, Dana reads his journals while Fox searches the kid’s computer and comes up empty-handed. Luckily, Scully finds the real laptop with hundreds of posts to Ghouli.net and some minor activity involving the Department of Defense. (That explains the unidentified government agent involvement.) The DOD arrives to hijack Sculder’s investigation so Fox sabotages the incriminating laptop. They complain to Assistant Director Walter Skinner, which gets us some Mitch Pileggi screen time. Unfortunately, that also means we have to endure the return of Cigarette Smoking Man and his cryptic chatter about “Project Crossroads.”

Mulder and Skinner meet to discuss the case. Walter wants Fox and Dana to drop the investigation and ties it back to Project Crossroads, which involved alien technology and hybrid DNA back in the 1970s. The lead scientist, Dr. Masao Matsumoto, disappeared 15 years earlier after his project was defunded. Mulder says he tested Jackson’s DNA against Dana’s to confirm Jackson was – is – William. Meanwhile, Scully interviews Jackson’s psychiatrist. She isn’t forthcoming herself until she brings up the kid’s vision of the Season 10 finale ("My Struggle II") in which the UFO hovers over Sculder in a pandemic-riddled future.

Mulder catches up with Scully in a coffee shop. He thinks the DOD agents murdered Jackson’s parents and framed the kid, who created an alternate reality to escape from the DOD agents. Meanwhile, Jackson goes to the hospital to make up with Brianna and admits he projected Ghouli into her and Sarah’s heads because he thought it would be a funny prank. He talks about his seizures and sharing visions with his birth mother (Scully) but the cops arrive before he can leave. Turns out, Sarah called them because she caught him kissing Brianna. (I guess he’s truly not Mulder’s son because Fox never had two women interested in him at the same time. But neither did Cancer Man so … disregard.) 

Sculder arrives at the hospital to try save Jackson/William from the DOD agents, but Dana gets into a shootout with one of them and they both go down. Or do they? Jackson used his power of projection and made the DOD agent think he shot Scully, but he really shot his own partner so they killed each other. Cool, huh? Jackson uses the resulting confusion to escape.

The next day, Fox and Dana are driving home. They stop for gas at a station with a windmill similar to the one in a snow globe Scully has been clinging to during the entire episode. She again runs into Peter Wong, who leaves her with words of wisdom that link him to evidence Sculder found in Jackson’s bedroom. Dana tells Mulder and they review the surveillance footage -- finally getting to see “their” son talking to his mother. Apparently, that’s what he wanted her to see.

Sestra Professional:   

However it began and ended, there were promising signs in Season 11, signs the show's concept was not only still valid but could still be intriguing. Black Mirror was all the rage at the time, and The X-Files fit nicely into that paranoid supernatural milieu. And not only that, but it was able to advance the ongoing emotional story as well.

So this one slots perfectly into the framework of the final season. To be sure "Ghouli" can be a little ghoul-ish, with the teaser teens cutting each other to ribbons. But there was a far greater emotional component at work, one that required some voiceover for explanatory purposes. I may not have been previously familiar with hynagogia, but I could understand Scully's paralysis upon thinking someone or something was in her bedroom. Maybe not so much the part in which she gets up and tries to chase the figure. 

Dark figures are usually meant to be avoided: If dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions, my first question would be how did Mulder jump to a lizard brain thing? And what is a lizard brain thing? Oh, nevermind, I don't really want to know. I can, however, get behind his problem with modern-day monsters, there indeed is no opportunity for emotional involvement. 

Throughout the series, we've had evidence of Scully actually being the one not more open to the paranormal, but who the paranormal is more open to. She doesn't particularly want or strive for that, but James Wong's vision shows she has more of a proclivity for it. And that really works for our continuing story. Fox may be more analytically intuitive about the who, what, when, where, why and how, but Dana's the one showing signs of metaphysical insight.

I wish I could have been there to ease your pain: Gillian Anderson just rocks this episode, from Scully's immobilized start to the far more debilitating personal realizations. I didn't realize this was what I was waiting for out of the William story, but it was. The autopsy confession voiced the sentiments we all knew already but wanted to hear from her, even if it did seem contrived for academic recognition.

After that emotionally draining monologue came the rising of Jackson's supposedly lifeless body. Yeah, nothing fishy about Van De Kamp, except that fact he's able to get up and around a lot easier than Dana in hypnagogic states. Hope doesn't need a fact, Mulder, when it comes to Scully's connection to her young 'un.

Fox has come to the crossroads. Project Crossroads, that is. That means deep-fried CSM re-enters the mix, and he's talking to Skinner about Mulder's activities, not realizing that Scully is the actual key. That leads to Walter popping up in the scenic ship environs to tell Fox to back off while recapping scientific activity. Mulder's got the corker, though, with the info that Jackson is long-lost William. 

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything: In my opinion, Wong does the best mythology writing we've seen in some time in "Ghouli" -- commandeering of Malcolm X/John Cougar Mellencamp's quote aside. Fox gets to put things together in an order that makes sense, even though we haven't previously ventured into Project Crossroads terrain. And William/Jackson starts to be fleshed out in a most interesting manner. The dude's clearly messed up and not just because he was adopted. He's toting some serious supernatural ability that helps him stay out of the wrong hands.

All this leads to a really fine final moment in which Dana gets to see that she was, in fact, talking to her son when she thought she was just conversing with a familiar stranger. The open-ended story really could have gotten even better from here. If only we had a snow globe to tell us that was not in the cards.

Guest star of the week: This must have posed quite the challenge for casting, but they happened upon an excellent option. Miles Robbins deftly handles the clutch role as long-lost William/Jackson, giving us empathy for a character who has been through so much off-camera and whose on-camera activities haven't been above board.