These are the bread and butter of the X-Files. Even to die hard fans like me, the Conspiracy episodes are convoluted and stretched out over several seasons. This often requires a quick refresher in previous seasons and episodes before approaching new episodes. They were also hard for new viewers. If every episode was a conspiracy episode then the X-Files would have never become the phenomenon it is. It would have been more like Twin Peaks. Miss an episode because your kid is sick or the power goes out and you are boned. X-Files came about in the pre-Hulu and You Tube days so you hoped that someone had recorded it on VHS.
The monster episodes were great filler. The word filler might describe their purpose, but it does no justice to the adventures. These were the episodes that hooked your girlfriend or cousin that thought sci-fi was just plain weird or the show too scary. X-Files had so many episodes with so many plot points that you could find an episode to fit any interest. Is your friend William Gibson fan? Well, introduce him to X-Files with the solid Season 7 "First Person Shooter" which was co-written by the science fiction legend. Does he like Lucy Liu? Well show him the famous actress in pre anything days in Season 3's "Hell Money," which also featured Law & Order: SVU's B.D. Wong. If you had even the passing interest in voodoo, robots, environmentalism, time travel, artificial intelligence, cults, and even zoo keeping then there was an episode of the X-Files to meet.
My first ever X-Files episode was the strange Monster/Conspiracy hybrid Red Museum from Season 2. Those are quite rare, but the combination of vegatarian religious fanatics, alien DNA experiments and kidnappings convinced me this was a fun show with potential. It was meant to be!
In celebration of whatever beastie will come out of the sequel, here are my five favorite X-Files Monster of the Week Monsters!
5) The Lizard Man/Herman Stites
From Season's 8 "Alone" is the slithering lizard man. This episode is notable for a bunch of reasons. It is David Duchovny's last Monster episode after leaving the series. He returns at the end, but those are mythology episodes. It has pesky agent Leyla Harrison in it. She represents the fans and bugs the newyl assigned Doggett with fan girls observations. We also get teased with the possibility of finding out how Scully and Mulder escape from Antarctica in the first X-Files movie, but then the credits role.
Stites, a reptile specialist separated from academic (Hey, an actual mad scientists!) can become a lizard creature able to spit venom that blinds people and turns them into husks of easy to digest bodily fluids! He traps victims in an abandoned wine cellar below his mansion and stalks them through the maze. Imagine Alien 3 and you can get a sense of the action. He can do this at will and there is a nice shot of reptile Stites scampering across the lawn and up the ivy of his house into an open window. As he climbs the wall, his body transforms back into a pasty naked man.
4) The Devil Doll
Mulder and Scully decide to take a weekend break from the X-Files. Mulder stays in DC and Scully heads off the Maine where she rents a convertible and wears a white t-shirt with the word "Maine" on the chest. However, just like that episode of Scooby Doo wear they head to Puerto Rico, trouble follows Scully and soon she finds a town where people are clawing their eyes out and cutting themselves with broken vinyl records.Co-written by Stephen King, Season 5's "Chinga/Bunghoney*" concerns a possessed doll that latches onto an autistic girl.
Dolls, especially porcelain dolls, t-e-r-r-i-f-y me. I still cannot watch any of those cursed "Child's Play" movies and my sister's room at our old house was filled with them. My mom would ask me to go and fetch the blow dryer from in there and I would let the dog scout out the scene first.
The dolls speaks by opening its eyes and screaming out in a voice you usually only find on three pack a day smokers. "Lets have fun!," says the thing before someone gets their head pulled into an ice cream machine! "Let's play with the hammer!," she orders at the climax where she hopes to kill the girl's mother.
The episode has a nice duality with the agents separated and Mulder feeding Scully information from his apartment. His life is kind of sad without monsters to chase and it strengthens their bond. Particularly awesome is how Scully kills the demon doll...SHE FRIES IT IN THE MICROWAVE! SWEET!
3) Virgil Incanto
Fat-sucking vampire. Imagine the symbolism in all that. Vampires are usually portrayed as suave Euro trash that feed off the beautiful. Stoker's Dracula played off Victorian fears of sexuality and passion. However, here we have a vampire that feeds off the fragile emotions of America's overweight. I used to be really fat and it is heart breaking to know that society considers anyone overweight as stupid, lazy or lacking in any control. We call all laugh at the occasional fat joke, but being fat is anathema in many circles.
Virgil Incanto needs to feed because he body cannot make or store fatty acids. His victims feed off of him because they are so used to rejection. Cruising the online dating sites, he tells his women what they want to hear and they give him what they want.
Season 3's "2Shy" gets my pick because his premise is that unique brand of X-Files high concept. Fat sucking vampire! GO! And it is seat in our new home of Cleveland,OH. This is achieved by a lot of waterfront shots representative of Lake Erie and some people wearing Indians shirts. Vancouver is a dynamic place!
2) The Tulpa
From Season 6's "Arcadia" this has to be a great monster from my favorite episode of the show. Mulder and Scully pose as a happily married couple to investigate disappearances in an exclusive San Diego suburb. A mix of Stepford and Amityville, The Falls at Arcadia is just too perfect. The draconian zoning rules would be even funnier if actual cities did not have such regulations. Everything needs to be in by 6pm. You cannot have more than 13 pounds of pet! You can't have a pool in your front yard, but you can have a reflecting pond!
The Tulpa keeps everything in check. It is the neighborhood busybody and Incredible Hulk in one convenient form. And it is made of the garbage from the landfill underneath the development. If you put up a pink Flamingo in the rose bushes (Which Mulder does because he is pimp) then it will come to kill you for your tackiness. Whatever happened to old fashioned ostracizing and denial of coveted cobbler recipes?
1) Flukeman
From Season 2's "The Host" comes Flukeman. Half man. Half fluke worm. Born out of the slime of the Chernobyl meltdown he is an homage to those old 50's B-movie monsters and an X-Files villain we actually get to interact with. Mulder (with some help from the Newark, New Jersey Department of Sanitation) actually catches the damn thing! Scully sees it in plain daylight and we get some real results from the X-Files. He is one of those rare monsters that became seminal to the series and it is too bad he does not get an encore like Victor Tooms or Pusher.
Considering Flukeman swims up through the sewer pipes, he strikes in a room where we are at our most vulnerable and retreats to the sewers and porta-potties that are too gross to explore! he is like the Jaws of brown water. And he is still out there!
There are many other great Monsters. The Peacock family from the notorious Season 4 "Home" are another quintessential X-Files villain. I also like Leonard from Season 2's "Humbug" in all his killer puppet ways.X-Files sure had a lot of monsters, but I was always disappointed we never got a true Chupacabra episode. 'El Mundo Gira" demonstrated how the show could stretch its creative wings and work with a Spanish soap opera style, but those were not even close to the "real" Chupacabra that orginated PR before stomping off to Mexico and all of Latin America
Peace!
*Speaking of Mexico, if you speak Spanish, particularly Mexican Spanish, you might know that "chinga" is pretty much "fuck." As in, "Chinga tu mama!" Apparently, Stephen King thought it up as a nonsense word and only later learned of its content. The international verions of the episode are titled the truly silly "Bunghoney"
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