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 “Irresistible,” one of the series absolute best episodes despite being very different from every other case Mulder and Scully tackle.
1. The Premise
“Irresistible” opens in St. Paul, Minnesota at a funeral for a young girl. We’re quickly introduced to Donnie Pfaster, an assistant to the mortician, who feels off from the get go. The family of the girl decides to do a service at the grave site the next day so the funeral home will keep the body one more night. Donnie takes the body at night and starts cutting hair off of it and gets caught. He’s fired immediately and leaves in silence but with a weird menacing vibe around him. Mulder and Scully are called to Minnesota because another F.B.I. found a body exhumed in a cemetery. He believes it to be aliens but Mulder takes barely one look and knows that’s not what it is. Meanwhile, Donnie Pfaster has found a new job and has started to escalate things with this death fetish he has. His escalation is why Mulder and Scully end up staying around for much longer than they planned. “Irresistible” is the most conventional case that we’ll see Mulder and Scully tackle despite it being very disturbing. It’s an incredible episode with a scary villain and really great individual arcs for both Mulder and Scully. It’s unconventional for this duo to investigate something so easy and rooted in an actual crime and not in the supernatural but it works so well.
2. Mulder The Profiler
One of the things I love so much about “Irresistible” is that it brings Mulder back into the world he used to work in. Before being consumed by his work on the X-Files, Mulder worked in violent crimes. He’s a really intelligent agent with a great background in profiling, which takes extensive background work in psychology. His whole thing in the F.B.I. is that he was one of the best with a bright future ahead of him and was completely consumed by this work with the paranormal and unexplained. Unlike Scully, his whole background is in actually solving crimes with some of the worst kinds of monsters. This episode gives him a chance to use all those tools and he’s really the driving force behind the case. Scully is dealing with some things and we’ll get into that but as far as Mulder’s arc in this episode goes, it’s fantastic. He feels like Mulder but Mulder if he hadn’t “gone of the deep end” and became “spooky.”
3. Scully’s Trauma
Scully has been back for a while after her abduction but the trauma is still there and this comes up in this case in a big way. From the get go, Scully is really troubled and uncomfortable by the exhumed body. She’s nervous the entire episode and she’s uncomfortable with Donnie Pfaster’s fetish. It all feels very out of character for Scully but it actually isn’t at all. As the episode goes on, Scully is more shaken. She’s getting worse but is still trying to push through. Her background is in medicine. She has been trained to separate herself from the people she’s treated and the bodies she’s done autopsies on. Her job is not to get in the head of a death fetishist who is starting to kill people. Her own trauma starts to bubble to the surface here. She was abducted and things were done to her. She’s faced violence face on against her and this case brings up all those feelings again and what’s great is seeing her confront them. Scully is a medical doctor and so she knows to take care of her physical health as well as her mental health and so, watching her talk to a therapist just makes me love her more. In any other cop show, we’ll watch the lead sit in anguish and torment for weeks on end and then they’ll snap somehow. However, Dr. Dana Scully is not a stereotype. Scully’s arc in this episode is her at her most raw and vulnerable and the way she’s written is so different from any other women in this genre of show. It’s honestly great work and one of Scully’s best episodes.
Continued below4. The Scariest Villain Yet
Donnie Pfaster is horrifying because he’s real. He stalks women, he likes to see them hurt and he thrives on this entitlement he believes he has. He’s a serial killer, an abuser and just downright creepy as hell. He’s not a made up monster or an alien. He doesn’t have powers or anything like that. He’s someone who’s become violent and unhinged. He’s a person who chose to do these things and that’s what makes him scary. Pfaster is the kind of person young girls are constantly told to worry about when out at night. He’s the boogeyman and he’s real and that’s what scared me so much. “Irresistible” is an episode that lets us watch a person devolve in real time and it’s really horrifying and a side of working for the F.B.I. that we don’t see on this show very often. Nick Chinlund fully embraces the darkness of this character and gets really weird with the role. He’s sort of Michael Myers-esque but with this weird charm that makes it pretty obvious why he gets away with the things he’s gotten away with. When I think about the show as a whole, this is a villain I come back to all the time when I think of the very best.
5. A Bond Unlike Any Other
At the very end of the episode, Scully gets abducted by Pfaster. He finds our favorite agents because he was in the cell opposite the guy that turned out to not be who they were looking for and he becomes enamored with Scully and tricks his way into her life. He runs her off the road and abducts her and is ready to do what he’s done to other women to her. Scully will never go down without a fight and she goes right after him and thankfully gets saved at the last minute by Mulder and the police. She cries and falls into his arms and it’s the most tender moment these two have shared yet. During her therapy session, Scully says that she trusts him with her life and it’s clear that he does too. Not once does he try to talk down to Scully during all of this. He tries to make her comfortable and makes her feel like a part of this and be useful. He’s looking out for her and we’re seeing this relationship deepen in a really meaningful way.
