2.12 - Aubrey
Written by: Sara B. Charno
Directed by: Rob Bowman
Aired on: January 6, 1995
Cold Open: 3:47
Visuals: Intriguing flashbacks of a murder and burial, sepia-toned and thus understandably old-timey. Those are the strongest visuals, but the reason the cold open works is because of the emotional stakes immediately on display between B.J. Morrow (Deborah Strang) and Brian Tillman (Terry O'Quinn playing someone other than Special Agent In Charge Darius Michaud, whom he plays in The X-Files: Fight the Future in 1998). She writes a note and slides it to Tillman: "I'm pregnant."
He tells her to meet him at a motel but instead of talking like they'd planned, she digs up a skeleton related to, you guessed it, the murder of which she was seeing visions.
At the freshly uncovered crime scene, Scully tells Mulder how blind he is to miss that B.J. and Tillman are having an affair. He asks how she knows.
"A woman senses these things," Scully says. It's a great juxtaposition of the normal tennis match of believer and skeptic, although it becomes pretty comical because Mulder and Scully don't immediately guess that the "Slash Killer" would have carved "Brother" into one ribcage since he carved "Sister" into another. B.J. has to make that huge leap of logic for our intrepid FBI Agents.
Don't mistake that for this episode failing, though. It's got strong visuals, great character work, and an interesting premise that balances on Strang's performance as B.J. and O'Quinn's as Tillman.
It definitely has some moments that feel inspired by Silence of the Lambs, which came out four years before it aired.
"That's a pretty extreme hunch," Mulder says.
"I seem to recall you having some pretty extreme hunches," Scully says.
"I never have," he responds.
And they share a laugh. It's fantastic.
Around the second act revelation, toward the beginning of the third act, we find out the serial killer impregnated one of his victims and she gave the baby up for adoption. It's also when we can see the difference between the previous episode 2.11 - Exelsis Dei, written by Paul Brown and, according to Chris Carter in X-Files Confidential, that one was a script that needed a lot of work.
This episode, however, was written by Sara B. Charno, and Chris Carter said the script was "finely honed."
"He's done this to both of us," Linda Thibedeaux (Joy Coghill) says as B.J. raises the razor above her head after having seen Linda's chest scars, the same as her own, the word "Sister."
The theme of generational trauma, of rape culture, of women victimized again and again and especially by repeat offenders is handled much better here, to say the least. B.J. ends up in a padded cell, caressing her now visibly pregnant belly beneath her bright orange jumpsuit. She found herself inheriting more than the trauma, but her inheritance - the psychosis of her father, along with actual visions of his crimes - is about as straightforward as it gets for metaphors regarding rape victims and sexual assault, and particularly of the cycle that seems to develop around those acts when it's not confronted and talked about. Or punished.
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-Austin
