The X-Files: Invocation Rewatch

August 11, 2020 8:08 PM - Season 8, Episode 5

Scully and Doggett investigate after a missing seven-year-old boy reappears... ten years after his disappearance at age seven.
posted by orange swan (2 comments total)

Not a bad episode. Kyle and Ryan Pepi turned in amazing performances for a pair of seven-year-olds -- Billy went from being a normal, noisy kid in the cold open to being silent and scary. I also thought Lisa Underwood was very convincingly aged 10 years -- that's not easy to do.

Doggett didn't come across well in this episode. Of course, the idea is that he's overly emotionally involved in the case given that his own son died the way Mulder did with cases involving girls/young women in danger, but he crossed lines in a way that Mulder never did, even if he did ultimately solve the case. And I wish they'd come up with a different back story for him. The story of Mulder's missing sister was very thoroughly mined in the previous seven seasons, and this "haunted by the death of his son" theme feels like more of the same.
posted by orange swan at 2:06 PM on August 13, 2020

Also not a fan of giving Doggett that particular background.

Though he does push back on supernatural/ paranormal, but he does it in a jerk way calling it "lazy." I don't disagree with him (irl), but a little odd after basically accepting that there are X Files aren't totally bogus.

The missing kid feels like a rehash of a previous episode, but turned out to be an interesting take.

The kid was creepy - the not blinking and non-vocalization helps - I hadn't noticed that the character was played by twins, that probably contributes to the creepiness, being just a little bit different between scenes?

Lisa's de-aged and pregnant makeup was good, but Ronald's fake latex eye wrinkles were pretty bogus.
posted by porpoise at 7:21 PM on August 13, 2020