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 we reach one of my absolute favorite “monster of the week” episodes with “Die Hand Die Verletz.” This episode is extremely creepy and dark and I love it to pieces even if the central conflict is a little messy.
1. The Premise
“Die Hand Die Verletz” begins with a meeting of some high school higher ups. They’re talking about the school and what work and decisions need to be made. They veto the school doing a production of Jesus Christ Superstar because they deem it inappropriate and end their conversation with a prayer, but not a prayer to God or Jesus. This is a prayer to the Devil itself. We’re then taken to some teen boys in the woods with their dates doing what teen boys do – trying to get some. They start talking about witchcraft and the occult and stuff starts to happen, stuff they can’t explain. One of the boys ends up being caught by an unseen assailant and is mutilated and killed. Mulder and Scully are called in because the local law enforcement is spooked by this. This town is known for weird things happening and this is just another example of that in their view. Scully is not feeling this at all but Mulder thinks something might be up. Just then, frogs rain down on top of them and the episode really gets going. “Die Hand Die Verletz” is one of my favorite episodes because it’s so not the kind of thing these two come up against. This is real darkness that plays out like a horror movie and works so well for me. The ideas explored here and the big scenes work extremely well and a great example of what the one off episodes can be.
2. Repressed Memories
As the episode goes on, Mulder and Scully are basically getting nowhere with their investigation into who killed this boy. Mulder starts digging around the school and finds that a lot of students have complained about the same things and he puts together the idea that these symptoms could be indicative of repressed memories. As they investigate, the step daughter of Jim Ausbury, one of faculty members and one of the people we saw in the beginning, breaks down during her science class before doing a pig dissection. She ends up talking to Mulder and Scully about things memories she pushed aside and tells them she remembers everything, including the Satanic rituals that her step father was into. She claims that he and his group killed her sister and forced her to have children that they then killed as sacrifices. She backs up the idea that really bizarre and bad things have happened in this town and it forces Mulder and Scully to confront these things. Things go from bad to worse when we really get to know exactly what the substitute teacher Mrs. Paddock is up to as it’s told to us very early on that she killed this boy. We’ll talk more about her later but she uses her power to force poor Shannon to kill herself which sets up a chain of events that leads to a very exciting finale.
3. Worship At Your Own Peril
The thing about this episode is that despite it being about Satanic worshipers, it’s still about faith, religion and playing with things that are too big for you to handle. Their cover is being extremely conservative but this is not separated from their Satanic worshiping. It comes off as kind of a joke by the show which I think is pretty great. It’s also and episode that might not entirely read clearly for anyone of a certain age. There’s a lot of poking fun at the Parents Music Resource Group which was led by Tipper Gore and is basically why you have the explicit warning label on music. These parents got bent out of shape over nothing and went on a crusade against anything they thought was vulgar or inappropriate. They claimed that music was becoming nothing but sex and violence and even claimed that kids were doing bad things because of the music they listened to. The whole thing was completely ridiculous and has done nothing but harm because conservative, white parents still buy into this garbage and shelter their kids from literally everything that doesn’t fit their idea of “pure”. ANYWAY!!! This comes up a ton in this episode and Scully is there at every chance pushing back against it and the episode really feels like its taking a big stance against these kinds of groups but in a really, really dark way. It also features a group of people playing with fire and thinking they’re bigger than something as powerful as the deity they choose to worship. They flew too close to the sun and tried to take on the Devil and lose.
Continued below4. My Anaconda Don’t Want None…Wait No Actually It Does
After Shannon’s death, the group of faculty at the school decide that this is their chance to use her as a scapegoat for the murder and get rid of Mulder and Scully. Jim doesn’t want to go along with this because he just lost his stepdaughter, who he basically raised. He tells Mulder that the rituals are real and she did repress all that but that she did take some of what she saw and sensationalized it a bit based on pop culture. The children she had specifically are made up but the sacrifices and chanting was all real and this is all very much happening in this town. Mulder arrests him but immediately has to run to the school to help Scully. When Mulder leaves Ausbury all alone, Mrs. Paddock’s anaconda shows up and literally devours him and at the school, Mrs. Paddock pretends to be hurt so that she can go on and take out the other three that are left while Mulder and Scully basically run around with no clue what’s actually happening until the end. This entire thing at the end is absolutely amazing. From the moment Mulder and Ausbury talk in the basement to the final message on the chalkboard, this whole thing is paced and shot so well. The storm, the loss of power, the literal darkness, it all works so well. It’s so moody and a bit scary for the less horror inclined. This is like peak The X-Files for me even though Mulder and Scully are kind of helpless.
5. Who Was She?
“Die Hand Die Verletz” has a really incomplete ending that for some people really doesn’t work and for others, it does. This episode never actually address who Mrs. Paddock is but I always assumed it was pretty obvious that she was The Devil itself. The Devil is a trickster and that’s what Mrs. Paddock does to Mulder and Scully the entire time. She only lets them see what they need to and when it’s convenient for her, she vanishes with her little message on the chalkboard. “Goodbye. It’s been nice working with you” reads to me as a message from The Devil who sees things as sort of business transactions. A little give, a little take. She let them see some crazy stuff first hand and punished her followers who had lost faith. I think the powers and the snake really gave all that way with the snake being super literal. I think this ending works and feels like a horror movie ending, which fits the episode. The Mrs. Paddock character is chilling and giving away how bad she was from the beginning was a great choice and she’s one of the most memorable one off villains the show ever saw.
