The X-Files: Kaddish Rewatch
May 24, 2020 8:49 PM - Season 4, Episode 15 - Subscribe
A Hasidic Jewish man is beaten and murdered in Brooklyn, New York, by three teenaged boys, almost on the eve of his wedding, and Scully and Mulder are asked to investigate after one of the boys is found strangled, with the dead victim's fingerprints on his body.
There is at least one other time in the show when someone makes some anti-Semitic comment to Mulder. I think the idea is that Mulder, while nominally Christian (i.e., he knows Christian theology very well and does not know the Jewish religion, his father and later Mulder himself receives a Christian burial, early in the show's run he is shown sitting in a chapel for a moment of peace in his distress) has Jewish ancestry, as David Duchovny does himself, and that it's a nose thing. I wonder if Duchovny ever got a little pissed off with the writers about that.
The little girl in the red coat among a group of black clad mourners at Isaac's funeral was a Schindler's List reference.
This exchange made me wince. Bigoted windbags never think their words might actually, you know, have an effect:
Brunjes: What the hell were you thinking? I never told you to kill anyone. I never said to do that.
Derek: No? What did you expect me to do?
I saw a certain symmetry with Ariel crooning over FrankenIsaac in the temple, while Scully rushed over to Mulder and tended to him, as though the writers were underlining the fact that Mulder and Scully's relationship was just as intense as Ariel and Isaac's.
Ariel claims that her scheme to bring Isaac back "was just a wish". Oh honey. You went to a graveyard at midnight in the pouring rain and moulded a replica of your dead fiancé in mud. Then you got all gussied up in your wedding gown to tie the knot with his zombie at the temple. There's wishing, and then there's going to extreme and unhealthy lengths to live out a fantasy.
That communal wedding ring was seriously cool.
posted by orange swan at 8:44 AM on May 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
The little girl in the red coat among a group of black clad mourners at Isaac's funeral was a Schindler's List reference.
This exchange made me wince. Bigoted windbags never think their words might actually, you know, have an effect:
Brunjes: What the hell were you thinking? I never told you to kill anyone. I never said to do that.
Derek: No? What did you expect me to do?
I saw a certain symmetry with Ariel crooning over FrankenIsaac in the temple, while Scully rushed over to Mulder and tended to him, as though the writers were underlining the fact that Mulder and Scully's relationship was just as intense as Ariel and Isaac's.
Ariel claims that her scheme to bring Isaac back "was just a wish". Oh honey. You went to a graveyard at midnight in the pouring rain and moulded a replica of your dead fiancé in mud. Then you got all gussied up in your wedding gown to tie the knot with his zombie at the temple. There's wishing, and then there's going to extreme and unhealthy lengths to live out a fantasy.
That communal wedding ring was seriously cool.
posted by orange swan at 8:44 AM on May 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
IMDB says that the communal wedding ring is authentic.
It also says that the original script was written as African-American anti-Semitism...
posted by porpoise at 9:16 AM on May 26, 2020
It also says that the original script was written as African-American anti-Semitism...
posted by porpoise at 9:16 AM on May 26, 2020
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posted by porpoise at 6:33 PM on May 25, 2020