The X Files - Underneath

* * ½ / * * * *

John Doggett asks Scully and Reyes how to catch a killer hiding in an innocent man’s body. That is what Doggett is up against as he’s discovered from the ADA in New York that an inmate incarcerated 12 years prior is being released as DNA evidence exonerates him of a crime. This crime—the slaughter of a father, wife, and teenage daughter—was when Doggett was a beat cop, arriving with his partner, discovering cable technician, Robert Fassl (W. Earl Brown, who has quite a fascinating and haunted face), in the house, with blood on him. However, Fassl is being tormented by an enigmatic “Hyde”, with long black hair and a beard, always urging him to kill. Scully does follow Doggett (and soon Reyes comes later) to New York to help him try and figure out what is going on, and she tells his that mitochondrial DNA in hair similar to Fassl was found…so who does that hair belong to? Fassl is an only child…so what relative is able to have such similar hair as him? How they get to this is quite a bizarre bit of X-file plot specialty. I did giggle when Doggett mentions that it does appear that the case of Fassl went from “Casper the Friendly Ghost to Jekyll and Hyde”. Fassl is just creepy enough to be considered a solid candidate to have darkness in him just ready to manifest. And yet you sympathize with Fassl because Brown clearly knows how to present his ex-con as truly traumatized, clinging to his rosary, beckoning to find peace, receiving none. The cooked up theory by Reyes (that works in The X-Files) is that Fassl will not accept he’s a sinner so the sinner manifests itself in the form of the long-haired, bearded man who draws a screwdriver and stabs innocent people. Eventually the maid at the innocence project attorney’s mansion where Fassl is allowed to stay until he can get back on his feet is a victim of just being at the wrong place at the wrong time as is the ADA who visits to tell the ex-con he is about to receive a settlement for false imprisonment. He awakens to find dead bodies of the Dark Manifest and sees to chopping them up, carrying the remains (with severed head as trophies) into the underground sewer, leaving them at a special location. The heads are eventually found when Doggett and Reyes follow the Dark Manifest into that sewer underground, shooting him…or so they thought. Doggett pulls from the water Fassl.

Doggett can’t accept the supernatural. When he sees events he cannot explain, it is just too much for him to handle. Reyes and (finally) Scully are more susceptible to the extraordinary, less prone to question what they can’t quite understand. So when Doggett pulls up Fassl from the water in the underground sewer when it should be a guy with long hair and a beard, he just can’t come to grips with it. Patrick has really been a revelation in the ninth season because as it continued his Agent Doggett was witness to events his logical mind just couldn’t always answer with normal detective and investigative reasoning. Scully was similar until she encountered her fair share of cases that left her with answers too astounding to consider with just rational thinking. So now Doggett confronts matters of the supernatural and his mind just can’t wrap around all of them. Despite the season’s ups and downs (more downs for me than ups), Doggett’s emotional roller coasters have been of definite benefit in Mulder’s absence. If you want to blame season nine’s shortcomings on any number of factors, I think Patrick gets the pass for his often terrific work. Patrick was given an unenviable task with Mulder missing but his dogged, rigorous Doggett, who refuses to accept defeat if he sets his scent on a target in cases, has persevered even if he’s often failed by stories in episodes that fail to generate the same start-to-finish dramatic punch (and intellectual, clever, energetic presentation) as seasons past. I have to say that this season is indeed the black sheep of the series. I have noticed, though, there is support for the ninth season. Perhaps some viewers embrace this season because too many of us X-files fanatics just harbor resentment towards Mulder no longer being there. He was gone. Just gone. And those who stuck around when so many fled (leading to cancellation by Fox) never could quite attach themselves to the ninth season. But I blather on and on about this. And I guess I will continue to do so, unfortunately.

The opening of the episode is quite unsettling, seeing the ordinary family letting Hassl in, and then their bloody dead bodies in puddles on the floor. And Hassl's cleanup of his Dark Manifest's handiwork. This definitely has a grisly story. The prison photograph with the Dark Manifest, taken after a prisoner was killed near Fassl's mop during janitorial labor, certainly gives Doggett, Reyes, and Scully a little more to work with and the visual puts a different face on who they should be pursuing. To add to the Jekyll/Hyde narrative, there is the mirror gimmick where Fassl can be seen in the bathroom mirror one moment when his attorney opens the medicine cabinet only to see the Dark Manifest when she closes it.