Review: X-Files Knocks It Out of the Park With "Ghouli"

After a lackluster episode last week, I was really hoping the latest chapter of The X-Files would get things back on track with the main storyline for the season and toss a delectable morsel at my sci-fi/conspiracy taste buds.

And, like Domino's, they delivered. Big time.

Synopsis via IMDB:

When a pair of teenage girls attack one another, each believing the other to be a monster, Mulder and Scully find that their investigation could possibly lead back to their long-lost son, William.

What I Liked

At the risk of sounding like a broken record -- which is an ancient object that was flat, round, and capable of playing sounds pleasant to one's ear holes -- one of the highlights of the episode, as always, is the interaction between Mulder and Scully.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have a natural chemistry that just makes every scene they are in together flow beautifully and naturally. These two are so comfortable with each other and their respective characters that their acting comes off as effortless.

The episode as a whole has a lot of great scenes, but one of the best that really makes the acting shine is when Scully is in the medical examiner's room talking to a dead body she believes to be her son William. As she's expressing her regret at not getting to know him, the tears and snot start flying everywhere, and you realize how rare this kind of moment is in the show's history. I can only count a handful of times that the calm, cool, collected Dana Scully has broken down into tears and really let down the walls.

In fact, even when she is sort of letting Mulder past the exterior walls she puts up, like in an episode earlier this season when the pair discussed aging and wanting to have kids, she still manages to keep it all together. Not so here, and understandably so. Her child might be dead. Pretty sure that would get anyone emotional. Anyway, it was a great moment.

Another great element that I thoroughly enjoyed in the episode is the mystery of whether or not Jackson is really William, Scully's son, and how they progressively throughout the episode reveal the extent of the powers he possesses. They pace the reveals evenly so that not too much is given away early on, nor is too much jammed into the second half of the episode. Like baby bear's porridge, it's just right.

There's this great reveal at the end of the episode when this strange Asian character who keeps bumping into Scully and giving her advice turns out to be just an illusion, a sort of mental projection covering the identity of the real character, who I won't give away here. Just watch it.

What I Didn't Like

This is one of the few times this will probably ever happen, but I actually have no real gripes or complaints about this installment of the series. It's solid and entertaining from start to finish. Leaps and bounds better than last week's episode, which was a badly done attempt at political satire.

Thematically Speaking

One of the themes I picked up on in the early minutes of the X-Files was the nature of dreams and whether or not it's possible for someone or something to communicate truth of to us while we are asleep.

In the show, Scully's son William communicates with her through visions that point to his current location in her dreams, putting her in "sleep paralysis," a state between dreaming and being awake. She discovers later on that these dreams she's having are indeed trying to tell her something, which again, raises the question as to whether or not truth can be communicated to us from someone or something in our dreams.

In the Bible there are many instances of the divine communicating to humanity through dreams. Like when Joseph in the Old Testament interprets the dreams of Pharaoh, or when another Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, has a dream about taking the child and Mary to Egypt to escape from the warped and demented King Herod.

Does God still talk this way to people today? Some folks certainly think so. I'm sort of somewhere in the middle. I think He can and does, but it's a rare occasion and not something we should come to think of as the norm.

Anyway, it's great food for thought.

Wrap Up

This episode was well written, well acted, and well paced, providing a solid hour of entertainment and fun that X-Files fans will go nuts for.

Score: 5 out of 5