X-Files--"Christmas Carol"

All members of Team Scully in good standing, rejoice! “Christmas Carol’ is the first part a Scully-centric effort to tug on the heart strings as last season’s cancer arc. It is a notch below the life and struggle from then, but still poignant. Scully has to come to terms with her inability to have a child as her motherly instincts rise to the surface when she mysteriously gets involved in a woman’s suicide that may have actually been a murder committed by her husband--a case which leaves their daughter, Emily, in limbo.

Mulder has only a brief appearance when Scully calls him from her brother’s home in San Diego, then thinks better of it and hangs up. It is not clear whether she wants to assert herself by sleuthing on her own, or does not want to tell him she wsas prompted to the woman’s suicide/murder scene by a phone call from someone she swears was her murdered sister, Melissa. Whichever the case, I appreciated that scully was on her own in this one. She competently handled the case, especially having it reopened as a murder investigation when the police had closed the books for good. She turns out to be right. The husband drugged his wife, then slit her wrists to make it look like a suicide.

The murder case is almost incidental to what prompts Scully, who is visiting her brother and his wife for Christmas in San Diego, to get involved in the case. It starts with a phone call the moment she arrives in which someone, whom she swears was Melissa, prompts her to go to the home of Roberta Sims. She does, and finds sims has just committed suicide. Scully sees the police interviewing sims’ husband and three year old daughter, Emily. Something about Emily catches her eye.

Later that night, Emily appears in Scully’s dream. The dream is a flashback to an incident when she was a little girl. She accidentally suffocated her pet rabbit while hiding it from her big brother. Emily is in her dream in the place of where Melissa should have been. Scully is awakened by another phone call from ’Melissa,” who tells her to ’go to her.” The dream and phone call bother her so much, she is compelled to find an oldf photo of Melissa just to confirm her suspicion--Emily looks just like melissa at three years old.

Scully forces the reopening of the Sims case. By an autopsy, she discovers a small puncture wound on sims’ foot by which she was drugged. How did scully find it when the coroner missed it? It is her show, darn it. Scully is awesome, too. Her discovery convinces the police to search sims’ house. They find a needle and syringe used to drug his wife . He claims Emily has to have daily injections for anemia, so that is why he has it. A blood test from Emily proves that is a lire.

Scully requests Melissa’s case file from the FBI to compare her DNA with Emily’s blood sample. It is a preliminary report with more comprehensive results coming in a few days, but this early result shows a match between Melissa and Emily. She is melissa’s child. Scully tries to convince her mother of this, but she does not believe it. Hert brother eventually confronts Scully to tell her she is imagining all this because she cannot have a child of her own nmow, but wants one desperately. Nevertheless, scully shows a strong bond with Emily when she goes along with the police to arrest sims for murdering his wife.

Sims commits suicide in jail after confessing to the crime. Scully immediately applies to adopt Emily. As only happens in television, the process takes two days, but she is rejected. And why not? Scully is single, lives out of state, works long hours in a dangerous job, keeps a gun in the house, was once kidnapped for months and experimented on by the government/aliens, and has a fatal cancer now in remission, and appears twice in FBI crime files, the latter of which involves her having been infected with an hallucinogenic tattoo dye which causes murderous psychosis. I am not sure I would give her a kid, either.

All that becomes moot when the full Dna report comes back. Merry Christmas, Scully. Emily is your daughter, not Melissa’s.

There is a deep, running sense of foreboding throughout. The idea that Emily is Melissa’s child never really grabs you as plausible. The key reason is a pharmaceutical company is hovering in the background. It is a different one from the company that manufactured scully’s cancer, but when we learn that Emily was receiving an experimental drug as treatment, and both parents are killed due to apparent, but not actually suicides, the truth Emily is part of the Syndicate conspiracy is already obvious. Still, the revelation Emily is scully’s child comes as a stabbing cliffhanger.

Another point of note is her brother, William. He ripped into Mulder a few episodes back because he fekt like his sister was dedicating her last days of life to him when he did not deserve it. He also thought her trust in him was going too far when she agreed totry the Cigarette smoking Man’s cure solely because Mulder urged her to do so. I excused what a jerk William was being because he was distraught over his sister’s impending death. But now, we learn as a kid, he threatened to kill scully’s rabbit. In the present, he taleked to her like she was a blooming idiot over melissa, then rubbed salt into the wound about her never being able to have a child of her own. Now I am convinced he is just a dick in general. He never gets eaten by alien, but he should have been.

Mulder only has a brief scene in which he picks up the phone in his apartment, only to have scully hang up without saying anything to him. David Duchovny was off in Los Angeles promoting Playing God. if that was his goal, he should have stayed in LA for the next three or four episodes. Not that the extra effort would have saved that stinkeroo. Fifteen year old scully is portayed in a flashback by Gillian Anderson’s real sister, Zoe, in her acting debut.

“Christmas Carol’ is not quite as emotional as some of the other scully-centric episodes regarding her abdsuction and cancer, but there are still some touching moments. Scully has that compelling need to protect those who cannot help themselves along with a quiet Christian faith. Both collide when she meets Emily. The scene in which she gives the little girl her cross necklace before handing her over to Social Serrrvices is one that has strangely stuck out in my mind these nearly fourteen years. Some things just speak to me, I guess.

Rating: *** (out of 5)