The X-Files: Scary Monsters Rewatch

September 10, 2020 7:18 PM - Season 9, Episode 14

Leyla Harrison alerts Scully, Doggett, and Reyes to a case she believes is an X-File and that involves a young boy named Tommy Conlon, whose mother stabbed herself sixteen times, whose cat clawed its own stomach open, and whose father has retreated with Tommy to a remote mountain dwelling.
posted by orange swan (2 comments total)

I was never worried about monsters under the bed, but some nights I'd have to (try to) sleep with my back to the wall.

It's cute that Scully packs sandwiches for lunch, at least some of the time. Quantico is a place of learning, but would they really have bells like in highschool?

The jump scare was pretty funny. But how'd they clean up?

Keeping the kid superstimulated to suppress his imagination is a little clever, but silly and effective only so long as the kid doesn't get bored. Puberty is going to be a doozy.
posted by porpoise at 2:09 PM on September 12, 2020

Not a bad episode. The monsters were freaky and the jokes were fun. It reminded me of an old SNL sketch. I can't find it online at all, and it's been a long time since I saw it, but I remember it had Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin in it. Gilda Radner played a little girl who would see something terrifying in her room at night, such as a man all in black smoking a cigarette in one corner of her room, and scream for her parents to come to her, and then when they did, they'd just say something like, "Oh, that's Vincent. We're billeting him now that he's out on parole. Don't scream like that at someone who's paid his debt to society and is trying to go straight, young lady! We're so sorry you couldn't have a cigarette in peace, Vincent." After three or four times of calling her parents to come to address a scary thing she saw that turned out to be perfectly real each time and being scolded for it, Radner's character ends up deciding to cope with the last one.

That kid is a fucking psychopath. The only way everyone's going to be safe from him is for the psych hospital to lock him in a room 24/7 and tell their staff to never listen to any of his imaginings.

Would Scully really use her kitchen utensils to autopsy the cat? And would she have Mulder's old FBI pass just lying around?

Leyla is a fun character. I bet she's incredibly good at her accounting job, that absolutely no irregularities ever get by her, and that she can make an agent who has been careless or dishonest in their expense report wish they had never been born within five minutes just by being her sweet, polite, earnest, relentless self.

I had to snicker that Leyla's "If Agent Mulder were here, he'd keep going," made Doggett turn the car around and keep going.
posted by orange swan at 6:31 PM on September 13, 2020