Big shout-outs to (a) Cindy and her roommate, who sure have a lot of tapes of The X-Files, and who were nice enough to loan me some, and (b) to the forums, just because.
Am I watching The X-Files, or Six Feet Under? Because this here's a funeral home. Mid-funeral, specifically. A small, dark-haired woman is up at the podium, giving a sniffly eulogy for this week's Pre-Credits Victim of the Monster of the Week, a blonde all laid out in her casket like Heather Chandler. If Christian Slater shows up with some dynamite strapped to his chest, I am going to be so stoked. Sniffly says something to the effect that they're all going to keep memories of Heather close to their hearts until they "meet again in God's kingdom." And she loves her dead gay friend! Sniffly stumbles off the podium and people start filing past Heather, making sad faces and biting their fists. Heather's family stares at her dead body, all puffy-faced and shocked-looking. Mark Snow plays the song he wrote on the red-eye from Vancouver to Los Angeles, a minor key piano tune titled "Dead Blonde Girl (Your Nightmare's Just Beginning [Oh, Yeah])," as a tall creepy guy enters the room and stares at the body with an eerie mixture of longing and excitement. I'm not even going to pretend I don't know this character's name, okay? Because he, like, haunts my nightmares and makes me cry hot, wet, gut-wrenching tears into my pillow. As Heather's family stumbles out of the room, the Funeral Home Boss comes up to Donnie Pfaster and quietly tells him that the family is having a graveside ceremony the day, and that they're keeping the body overnight. Donnie Pfaster makes a disturbingly pleased face. Can I just tell you how much Donnie Pfaster freaks me out? When I turned off this episode to go read the forums for a while, who was on Gilmore Girls? Donnie Pfaster. I screamed and screamed. Donnie Pfaster was trying to kill Lorelai! Run, Lorelai, run! Interestingly, though, the actor who plays Donnie Pfaster made his television debut in an episode of Red Shoe Diaries titled "Auto Erotica," an episode which also featured, of course, David Duchovny. And I don't think I need to remind anyone that, according to Clyde Bruckman, Mulder is supposed to die from...autoerotic asphyxiation. Coincidence, surely. Or is it?
Okay, so anyway, back at the Funeral Home, FHB scampers out of the room to attend to some kind of funeral-esque business. Donnie Pfaster surreptitiously looks around and, finding himself alone, begins stroking Heather Chandler's long blonde hair. "Such a beautiful girl," he murmurs, holding up a lock of hair and examining it, as if for split ends. Then he closes the coffin in our faces. Because we're suddenly in the coffin. Because that's a nifty camera angle. Even though it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
FHB is doing some kind of funeral-home stuff in the back room. See? This is what it would be like if I were recapping Six Feet Under: "Some guy does some stuff with some body somewhere. I don't know. Gross." Regular old dead people give me the wig. Somewhere, a door swings open with a squeak. "Hello?" FHB calls out with a quavering voice. You'd think that a guy who ran a freaking funeral home would be a bit tougher, but whatever. "Who's there?" FHB calls. The door to the back room swings open and some kind of creature -- one with sticking-out ears and no hair -- walks in. From my long history of watching Buffy, I can tell you that this is definitely some kind of demon. Probably evil. Maybe the devil. I mean the actual Devil. Beelzebub. The Dark Lord. Satan. The Prince of Darkness. The Anti-Christ. Oh, actually, isn't the Anti-Christ technically the son of Satan, like Jesus is the son of God? Maybe a season-nine episode of this show can feature The NotAlienMiracleBaby and the Anti-Christ, throwing down on the playground, like an Biblical elementary-school version of West Side Story. That would kick ass. Anyway, FHB hits the lights, and the hairless, ear-y interloper is just Donnie. "What the hell are you doing here this late?" FHB asks, his voice catching. "Working," Donnie replies in his creepy crazy crawly serial-killer voice. FHB looks down to find Donnie holding a pair of pinking shears, surrounded by strands of blonde hair. "What is this? What the hell were you doing?" FHB asks, and scampers over to Heather's casket. He flings back the lid. She's been sheared. "You freak!" FHB yells. "Get out of here, and don't come back!" He hustles Donnie, his scissors, and the locks of blonde curls spilling out of Donnie's pockets into the hallway. "I should report you!" FHB blusters. "Just go on! Get out of here!" Donnie Pfaster's expression doesn't change as he walks down the hall and right smack into the camera.
Old credits kick ass/ Chris Carter, please hear my cries/ Bring them back right now.
Scully and Mulder walk through yet another drizzly graveyard, listening to the grave drawl of fellow FBI Agent Moe Bocks, who's telling them that Minneapolis PD recently called the field office, asking for some Federal assistance in what looks like a case of grave desecration. The agents walk past a gravestone reading "Raymond Soames," which is the name of the victim they exhumed in the pilot. It's also the first of many in-jokes in this Chris Carter-penned episode. It's a rather clever gag, but because Ray Soames was buried in Oregon, it's a mistake in continuity. And because what in season two was an amusing meta-reference is, from the vantage point of season eight, an irritating reminder of the way this show has thrown continuity out the window in order to shoehorn in private jests and visually pleasing but nonsensical tableau, I find it retroactively annoying. Agent Bocks is still adenoidally telling his tale. "Anything slightly freakazoid, that's the drill," he says. "Call Moe Bocks. As if I'm tight with all the nutcases in town." Scully wavers the umbrella over her head, thinking that she was under the impression that Mulder was the one who got all the calls about the freakazoids. Bocks tells our heroes that he came into town to "see what's the what" (which...seriously, I'm watching Buffy while I'm proofreading this, and someone just said that exact line. Also, the time code on the tape? Okay, it's only 10:05, but that's close enough to 10:13 to be weird, right?). What Bocks saw, he says, "knocked [him] on [his] butt." Mulder's been listening with uncharacteristic silence. When they get to the open grave, he sort of straddles the hole to get a better look at the contents. Bocks is still talking, telling Mulder that he called his friends over at MUFON (I think that's the Mutual UFO Network, and I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be a bunch of nuts). Bocks namedrops someone at MUFON, and looks at Mulder, who absently remarks that he doesn't know anyone at MUFON. "Well, they know you," Bocks says. Mulder blinks. Scully looks down into the grave. Inside an open coffin is a young girl, all turned and twisted, her hair cut off, her hands bloody. Scully turns green. Bocks yammers that he thought this whole desecration thing was quite possibly UFO-related, because it reminds him of cattle mutilations. Am I doomed to recap every episode of this show that somehow references cattle mutilation? Because it's beginning to feel that way. ["Yeah, but it is The X-Files. It sort of comes with the territory. It's not like you kept coming across cattle mutilations in episodes of, say, Bands on the Run." -- Wing Chun] Scully has to back away from the grave and look at the ground. Mulder tells Bocks that this doesn't look like the work of any little green men. He saw this kind of thing, he says, back when he worked in Violent Crimes. Behind him, Scully looks like she's going to vomit. Mulder goes into full Profiler mode, telling Bocks that their man might work at the cemetery, but that it's more likely that he works in a mortuary. And he's probably been busted before, but they won't find a record of it. Ah, remember back when Mulder seemed really smart and just a little crazy, rather than mostly crazy and just sort of vaguely well-read? Those were the days. "You're saying some human's been doing this?" Bocks gasps. "If you want to call him that," Mulder snarks.