So Season 11 continues its off-and-on relationship with acknowledging the ghosts of episodes past in a very “off” direction. Chuckleteeth - because it was so very human.
The blunt execution of that sequence was honestly far more horrifying than creepy Mr. Fox broadcast standards might not have been super-strict back then, but showing a man get shot point-blank in the head was still beyond the pale. Chuckleteeth (pictured below) was unpleasant - even before children started to sing about how “if you try to run and hide, we’ll send you straight to hell.”Īlso, no way would “The X-Files” have been able to get away with the episode’s most shocking moment during its original run in the 1990s.
What kind of creepy-ass children’s programming are they watching in Connecticut? Jeez, the knock-off Teletubbies were bad enough, but Mr. Clean and direct in its standalone approach, it wasn’t the most twisty of mysteries, but did deliver the sort of supernatural weirdness we remember fondly from the show’s earliest years. It’s genuinely impressive how much “Familiar” felt like a vintage “X-Files” episode, given that both its writer (newcomer Benjamin Van Allen) and director (veteran Canadian Holly Dale, the second woman hired to direct this season and fourth total across the show’s 218 episodes) have never worked on the show before now. In case you needed a reminder of this important life advice: As Giles once reminded Xander on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “don’t speak Latin in front of the books.” Nostalgia Alert! Mulder and Scully leave town hoping that things are over, at least for now.Ī lot of people died, including two children, because a woman tried to get revenge on her cheating husband by using an ancient book of magic to curse him and his lover and didn’t know what she was doing. Chuckleteeth leads to Eggers’ death, a wolf familiar kills the Chief and Diana, and Anna ends up bursting into flame as she tries to get the spell under control. Unfortunately, the spell has gotten out of control, and right after the creepy Mr. During the mob scene that results, Eggers -blaming Melvin for his son’s death - shoots the man in the head.Ī sympathetic judge doesn’t charge Eggers for the crime (despite another officer coming forward with evidence proving there was no way Melvin could have hurt the boy) but that doesn’t stop the real story from emerging: Chief Strong was cheating on his wife with Eggers’ wife Diana, and it was Strong’s wife Anna who had used an old spellbook to try to punish her husband as well as Diana. However, the grieving father of the first victim, Officer Eggers, takes matters into his own hands and tracks down Melvin Peters, an unregistered sex offender in town with creepy clown suits and a monkey in his closet.
Unfortunately, while they investigate, the police chief’s daughter is also killed in a similar fashion - supporting Mulder’s theory that a witch’s “familiar” is luring those children into the woods using their favorite TV show characters. But Scully suspects that what might seem like an animal attack could actually be the work of an adult in the community, while Mulder’s got his theories about hybrid wolves and, eventually, witchcraft. Mulder and Scully arrive in a small Connecticut town to investigate the strange and violent death of a police officer’s son, who was found mutilated in the woods. Sometimes, those crimes don’t have anything to do with government conspiracies - sometimes, they feature evils both supernatural and all-too-human. Mulder and Scully investigate weird crimes for the FBI.