With all our favorite shows taking their usual break in the summer months, this opens up an opportunity to watch some of our old favorites. That’s where the Multiversity Summer Binge comes in. Last year, I took a look at the entire first season of my favorite show ever, The X-Files and this summer, I’m back with a vengeance covering season two. The first season of this show was more of a prelude. It teased all the things that were to come and spent a lot of time doing the ground work. In the second season, the show really kicks into gear. Truth be told, of the 11 seasons, this is easily top three for me. I’m really excited to be writing about these episodes, particularly the middle of the season. This week I’m looking at “Fresh Bones,” a serviceable “monster of the week” episode that just never did anything for me despite bringing up some great ideas.
1. The Premise
“Fresh Bones” opens up with us meeting Jack McAlpin, a Marine Corps private who’s going through some stuff. He gets into an argument with his wife and leaves the house angry. When he’s in his car, he gets into an accident where he loses control of the car and someone, or something else, takes over and crashes him into a tree. On the tree that he crashes into is a symbol of some kind and then we cut to the opening theme. The military base that he works at has now seen two suicides and the F.B.I. has been called in. Mulder and Scully begin to investigate this and it leads them to a mystery surrounding voodoo and abuse of refugees. It’s an episode that tries to do a lot and while all the things introduced work, it kind of feels all over the place as a single story.
2. An Early Twist!
Jack McAlpin, it turns out, isn’t dead. When Scully goes to do an autopsy on McAlpin’s body, she’s greeted by a dead dog. It’s pretty gross and as they’re driving, they come across a very alive McAlpin but he doesn’t remember anything. When they test his blood, they find a chemical in his blood that Mulder deduces is from Haitian rituals that deal with zombification. Our favorite agents go to find out about the other soldier who died but that grave is empty. They’re told that this is something that keeps happening in this graveyard and a young boy Chester tells Mulder that he collects frogs and sells them to another refugee at the base – Bauvais. Things start to escalate from here as Mulder and Scully get deeper into the human rights issues at play, the rituals and the cover ups from the government.
3. A Sprawling Mess
A few things happen in kind of quick succession and it makes it hard to write about because this whole episode is a huge mess. Bauvais, the refugee at the camp, end up being beaten to death by Colonel Wharton, who runs this base. It’s written up as a suicide and so this basically concludes Mulder and Scully’s investigation. When the two of them leave the camp, Scully cuts her hand on a branch that was left in the car and the symbol is seen again so she starts having hallucinations. Mulder and Scully go to talk to McAlpin’s wife and she sheds some light on all these ties these people have to each other. Wharton was abusing the refugees (we’ll get to this) and he went to Haiti with Bauvais. Wharton, it’s revealed, has knowledge of these kinds of rituals but he still hates those he’s supposed to be taking care of. Like I said, this is a whole lot of stuff happening at once and it all comes at you in the episode in a really messy way. It’s not some kind of experimental non linear storytelling but the pacing of all of this is so off that none of this stuff really hits you the way it should. The story beats don’t entirely work and it’s really annoying because the pieces aren’t so bad. It just doesn’t all fit together right.
4. Abolish ICE
Okay so this takes place before ICE was a thing but the INS was basically doing garbage things before ICE. This place that these Haitian refugees live in is not based on fantasy. These abuses and holdings of people basically just trying to get to somewhere they can live a better life all went on and still go on. What happens to Bauvais is rooted in reality and I think it’s great the show brings this up but it doesn’t quite do much with it because Mulder and Scully don’t really help anyone in the end. We get a surprise visit from X who tells him that the camp will be closed off to anyone not military soon but Mulder still wants to get justice against Wharton for what’s happening here. I’ve watched this series in full many times and I completely forgot that X shows up here. He’s a character that never really amounts to much for me because you can’t really replicate the magic of Deep Throat in season one. Mulder becomes very invested in what happens with this base and again, the closing it off from anyone not military is not something rooted in the imagination. There are multiple bases like this all over the world that the U.S. runs that we know nothing about. Look at what ICE is doing right now to innocent people. This was always happening.
5. It Was A Graveyard Smash
The end of “Fresh Bones” all takes place at the graveyard that Mulder and Scully visited earlier in the episode. Scully is all messed up from the cut she got. Her mind is being messed with by this magic and she has a hallucination that a man is strangling her so Mulder goes to approach Wharton all on his own. Wharton is over Bauvais’s coffin and is trying to do magic over it but Bauvais appears and kills Wharton with some kind of powder. Wharton is gone, Bauvais is gone and it’s revealed that the kid Chester, died six weeks ago. In a very last second twist, it turns out that Wharton isn’t dead and ends up buried alive. The graveyard sequence plays out so great and is shot incredibly well. It’s moody and exciting but like the rest of this episode, it all just amounts to nothing and it’s a shame.
