X-Files S11 E07–09

11x07 Rm9sbG93ZXJz

I feel like I really picked up on the title card being abused this season, this one says VGhlIFRydXRoIGlzIE91dCBUaGVyZQ== and Wiki tells me this means The Truth Is Out There in Base64. Cool!

This week we’re getting into AI. We start off with the 2016 excellent adventure of the chatbot that became Hitler because, humans are the worst. We have to be careful with AI, but what this episode posits is…what if we’re not? Spoiler alert from ten years later. We are not!

M & S sit in a bleak, silent, robot restaurant (both purposely not talking as is the intention in this episode) ordering from a screen and filling out CAPTCHA’s and suffering friend requests from the restaurant. M gets a delicious looking big nosed fish and all the other sushi is described as YUM by the automated restaurant. M pokes around in the kitchen and witnesses all the robots busy at work chopping fish. I don’t know man, seems great to me not having a server continually asking me how the first few bites are tasting as your mouth bulges with said bites. Of course the button joke is the machine asking for a tip & then short-circuiting when M refuses.

They manage to get out of the place and S gets a driverless cab which speeds along wayyy fast but honestly ‘Whipz’ is a great name for an automated car service. We then get jokes about the wrong song being played and voice tech not being great and S’s home alarm not recognizing her password and the overall implication here is: hey ho all these things meant to make life simpler actually makes life harder LOL! Which makes M & S seem more like boomers than ever before.

I’m not clear where M lives now. He has an ‘I Want To Believe’ poster (does he order them in bulk?) on the wall of an open plan living room, but it doesn’t seem to be the cabin from the earlier reboot days. It’s definitely way out of the city (DC, presumably, they do still work at FBI HQ, right?) though. I guess it’s the place they shot the Russian operatives a few episodes back, because it’s definitely not his legendary waterbed pad from the original series. Here he seems to have a front yard, where he is assailed by drones. M smashes one up with a baseball bat. Take that you damn kids and your drones!

It’s pretty great that S has an auto renewal of ‘Rock it like a redhead’ styling cream, but she doesn’t even need more right now!! Computers, amirite! This is like the 2018 version of a 1998 set about airplane food. Don’t you hate it when you have to reset your password? Why do I need a capital letter in it!!

S is being harassed by her Roomba which won’t shut off but all I can notice is how incredibly neat S’s house is. The bed is set up like a five start hotel for real. Her living room is beautiful. Has she been investing well in her time away from the Bureau? One thing S doesn’t yet lose patience with is her ‘personal massager,’ which she retrieves from the floor before the Roomba can eat it. M can’t log into his online banking or even eat his (raw!) poptarts in peace without incessant reminders to tip the robot sushi restaurant and I guess that is at the root of all this.

A swarm of drone bots chase M, and S can’t deal with her smart house which is firing ice cubes at her (I mean, annoying but hardly Demon Seed) while her fridge tells her to eat healthier. M tries to get S out of her house which is now pouring in gas and lighting fires in order to blow her up and the best joke in all this is M being like “why is your house so much nicer than mine??” Indeed!

They escape to some warehouse (?) but bad news, it’s full of more robots and I half expected to see some sort of WestWorld automaton coming at them, but, no worries instead it’s just a machine that makes (and also for some reason, fires??) bullets. Finally the madness is ended when M tips the robot sushi restaurant 10%.

The next day a kindly old lady (wearing a lemon pastel outfit like it’s 1950) serves them at a diner (the kind of place which is sadly getting eradicated from Vancouver by, I guess, robot sushi restaurants) and they pay in cash and hold hands. Take that technology!

I like that XF always tries new & different things and this is a solid episode, visual and compelling and the no dialogue is a fun touch. Although we’ve seen, and continue to see, huge improvements in all our tech since 2018, I’m sure there’s plenty of mileage yet out of ‘but what if computers were against us.’ Especially as every large company signs up for the latest weird religion of AI and attempts to convert or destroy every living thing to the mission.

11x08 Familiar

A park, a child and a scary toy! Nothing says XF like ‘Mr Chuckleteeth’ , a truly terrifying kids doll (?) In fact, the only thing scarier is the lifesized Mr. Chuckleteeth that the kid follows into the forest. Uh no, definitely don’t do that kid! Cut to, yup, the kid’s torn apart body being found by the police search party. Hate to say I told you so kid, but really.

The local cops think it was some sort of super wolf (sure) but M & S are here to tell them nope, could have been a man who did this. M on the other hand doesn’t think it was a wolf per se, more a hellhound. His proof of this is that in the 1600’s this small town had witches spontaneously combusting. S does the (incredibly brief) autopsy and thinks the kid was shaken to death and it was probably the dad. S is not swayed by the bit of salt M finds on the kids heel.

M interviews the woman who was also at the park with her kid and the kid is like ‘hey I saw Mr.Chuckleteeth at the park!’ Added to the fact that her husband has myriad super old books on witchcraft on the shelf and something spooky is afoot in this small town!

The dead kids dad, a cop, has found a sex offender in the database who probably did it and without further ado, drives full speed to the dude’s house, pursued by the police chief and S. The house is full of clown costumes and pictures of the guy with kids and party balloons and the like which, very John Wayne Gacy, not so reassuring. Also not super great, M is wandering in the forest and spots a super scary giant black wolf, who stares back for a bit, then walks off.

I mean, M is always right, we know this. However obvious it might see that S’s idea is correct, it never is, it’s always the 1% thing but I mean yikes, M. Tough hill to die on, saying the convicted sex offender living next door to the park with a house full of creepy shit is meh, probably innocent. Why would you think that? Screw that Occum and his razor eh?

Next up to get taken and sliced up, the kid who saw Mr. Chuckleteeth. She sees one of the (demonic looking) Teletubbies outside her window and follows it to the park. The mum blames the police chief yelling how he did this and it’s all his fault. So the suggestion not so much that he literally did this, but more he did something that opened a portal. M builds off this because, more salt, and this is in a circle. Not just any circle. A magic circle!

M says that when casting spells, the caster would be protected inside a circle of salt, like they found on the ground. It’s a demon summoning graveyard or something. Obviously! The chief is like ‘OK yeah you got me.’ That didn’t take much! The chief opened the gates of hell, he admits it, busted.

Not so much time to build on that idea though because copdad finds the sex offender and starts beating the ever living shit out of him. He’s quickly joined by the rest of the town and it takes M firing his gun in the air to save the sex offender’s life. But that doesn’t last long, the cop-dad pulls his own gun and blows the guy’s brains out in cold blood. I mean, understandable given what he believes but, yikes.

Turns out, the one good cop in town did some digging and the sex offender is on camera performing at a kid’s birthday party far away when the original kid disappeared/was killed. He was innocent just like M thought (of course) and the chief knew about this.

Right away cop-dad is out on $5k bail and heads home to deal with the root of this, that the police chief with the witch books had an affair with his wife! His wife, already kinda (understandably) messed up over the death of their son is like ‘well, whatever I’m leaving you!’ Copdad (still has a gun, nice) pursues her and she crashes her car when she sees her dead kid appear in the road in front of her. The car does an impressive amount of flips and she must be dead, no? Plus it wasn’t even her kid, it was a hellhound/black wolf!

Super great creepy scene, copdad ransacking the chief’s darkened house only to see the horrific Mr. Chuckleeth, first on the TV then actually behind him! All this confusion ends with copdad shot dead by the chief, salt everywhere, and the chief highttailing it into the woods. M spots that a spell book was taken from the house and we’re headed back to the forest/gates of hell for the ending.

Chief finds his wife in the forest, up to no good, with the book and a salt circle, and a million candles. Turns out she’s the one behind all this! She tried to summon something to get back at her husband but turns out, demons from the netherworld, not that easy to control! It all went a bit wrong and now she gets burned up dead. At least the book didn’t burn up though! S sort of has to admit that the wife spontaneously combusted, then they split town. But the roundabout is still turning! Evil is afoot. Always!

This was a very solid episode, a classic throwback to the old, early days. A small town. Mysterious dark events. Mist and cold and rain. Actually scary images. Good stuff. It would definitely have given me nightmares if I’d encountered Mr. Chuckleteeth as a kid. If I never see him again it will be too soon!

11x09 Nothing Lasts Forever

‘I Want To Be Beautiful’ is our new tagline this week. I feel like half of Season 11 has alternate title cards but when I googled this I couldn’t find any official stats for this, just random Reddit pictures. Give me the data!

We’re in some sort of amateur operating theatre that looks like something out of Saw, with docs harvesting organs and on a rooftop a young heroine listens to our pal McHale from the earlier episodes, and observes. One doctor is also licking the organs he takes out, which, I’m no doctor, but seems not super hygienic.

The docs have guns to hand, which is helpful as our heroine busts in and starts slicing up the place, quoting (I guess?) bible verses. One doc gets away with the organs, the others, less successful. I’m sure the hospital that finds the box of dumped random organs outside will be super stoked to start throwing them inside people.

We’re in the one big Vancouver DC church where I once saw Sufjan Stevens, and S is doing the wine and biscuit thing. Not for long though, they’re headed over to the warehouse operating place, where M scares away the two regular detectives, rambling about stakes made from the cross of Christ and the like.

M pulls out some glasses and S gives him some shit about bifocals, although M, of course, looks great in the glasses. They’re getting too old for this shit!

The next part, I’m unclear on what the hell is going on but a dude appears to be surgically joined to a woman who he’s in bed watching TV with and some old soap opera star is around and she’s way younger than she appears and I’m not just talking botox, judging by the blood lined lips.

This is apparently some sort of cult run by those two, their house is full of younger people in raggedy white clothes (a cult staple) and the younger people’s organs and blood appears to be headed for the old actress and the old doc, to the point that the woman attached to him is I think, being drained of her lifeforce directly into him? Very Gross! The old actress, I feel like today that’s a role Emma Stone would destroy in.

M & S have a little chat in church about the choices we make and the life we live. On the way home, M notices three metal bars missing from the church fence, which he immediately links to the murders they’re investigating. That’s why he’s the best!

Turns out that the two old cult leaders are actually in their mid 80’s (!!) but (the woman at least) looks 30. M & S are digging up leads, speaking to the family of someone who disappeared and have managed to track down the woman from the opening who was killing the doctors. Her sister is one of the cult members.

One of the young cult guys kills himself to get eaten by the rest of them and I’m not super understanding why the young people are in the cult. Being that their entire role is to give up their blood/organs/life to feed these weird old people? But then cults are something I’ve always found fascinating/baffling. That aside, the eating of the dude is impressively gross, blood stained teeth and munching noises to match any zombie movie.

I do very much like how their old people’s cult house is decorated to have not changed much since the 70’s, with the TV and framed gold pictures and the like. Too bad for them, M & S are on their trail, tracking organs to the legendary Del Mar Inn or whatever it’s playing in this show, where it’s apparently in the Bronx. That place has been in pretty much every Vancouver show ever, but still location scouts love it.

They get inside the mad doctors cult apartment but bad news, the followers aren’t weak enough to be overpowered by two retirement age FBI agents, even if M is a fan of the old lady/young actress, who he enjoyed on Dragnet back in the day. S gets thrown down, haha, a trash chute? And M gets pinned down and here’s the Avenger-style sister from the opening driving stakes through the old actress and saving M’s old ass.

The old man, surgically attached still to a young female follower, rants about how he’s solved aging and I mean, sure if you just tell me that, I’d be like awesome, let’s do it! But the fact that in order to do this I’d need to be surgically conjoined to another person, uh, hard pass thanks! Avenger sister thinks this too, arriving and slicing them apart in order to save her sister. Phew!

Turns out the trash chute (which is bizarrely huge, less a chute than a giant metal hole) was full of many, many years of trash so S is safe, if probably smells very bad. The Avenger sister is fine with going to prison for what she did, being that she saved her sister and a few other cult members. Huzzah?

A little coda sees M & S back at the church, lighting candles. M is an atheist and kinda making fun of the whole thing, but also supporting S’s choice of having faith. M lights a candle and they talk about wondering how this is all going to end. We’re about to find out folks! One last episode!