2.11 - Excelsis Dei
Written by: Paul Brown
Directed by: Stephen Surjik
Aired on: December 16, 1994
Cold Open: 4:00
Visuals: Nothing noteworthy, really. The inciting incident is, unfortunately, the rape of a nurse at the hands of an invisible attacker. It's fucked up and horrific, made all the more so by the video Scully is watching, one showcasing all the woman's bruises and cuts, when Mulder walks in after the credits.
Yes, Mulder makes a joke about the porn that was in the VCR before Scully put in the tape she's watching. The '90s walked a real different path, my friends.
This is a tough episode, obviously, for a number of reasons. Mulder is pretty quick to dismiss "entity rape" as "unsubstantiated," which is pretty fucking laughable considering all the other shit he's willing to sign off on believing completely thanks to rock solid evidence like a marker drawing of a human with shaggy hair that's supposed to be the Jersey Devil.
Even without the regressive gender politics and misogyny baked in due to the plot revolving around people reporting "fake" rapes (Mulder says the main victim of this episode made it all up to get out of a job she hates), it's an overall forgettable episode. It's pretty tough to build a plot around a) things you can't show on screen at all, due to them being literal rapes, or b) things being done by invisible people.
We do get to see the ghostly projections of the old men but it's too late to salvage much purpose from the story. The genius-level painting and illustrating shown by one of the other patients hints at ways this could have been written to avoid the sexual assaults, but as is, the resulting plot has what Glen Morgan may have accidentally identified last episode as the chief X-Files misstep: not enough mixing.
When episodes don't work, sometimes they're a half-n-half plot, sometimes it's a Neapolitan (maybe with the chocolate already eaten), and other times it's almost like someone mixed their game pieces from Bananagrams and Scrabble and Boggle then tried to write a story with them; there just ain't enough letters.
This one leans half-n-half. It's not as disparate as possible, but it's messy for sure.
Be a ‘90s kid and have a VCR over on the Donate page.
-Austin
