The X Files - Excelsis Dei

 

This didn't quite work for me. Scully is really passionate about figuring out who (or what) was responsible for the physical and sexual attack on a nurse (Rothery) at a convalescent home. It seems some elderly patients at the facility/hospital have improved out of deteriorating dementia and are alert, high functioning, and of sound mind. One has returned to his heights of artistic credibility, another (with a supposed deteriorating hip) can move faster than an orderly trying to stop him from going out a window and onto the rooftop, a third who can move her wheelchair like an athlete as she sees the ghosts of former patients seemingly unable to leave and just as miserable as they were in life. Mulder is more skeptical of the nurse's "invisible entity rape story" while Scully believes she was legit harmed by something malicious in the hospital. An orderly from Malaysia grows mushrooms in the basement and smashes them with other herbs into powder to make the patients "feel better". The chief medical doc at the hospital (Wasserman) has been giving the patients a particular drug, also, to test the effects on those with severe dementia. The hospital administrator (Sheila Moore) seems to not take Rothery's claims seriously, even sticking her with an entire wing after a male nurse is dropped from a ledge many floors up by a powerful ghost. The whole treatment of the rape left me rather ill at ease. Rothery was badly injured and yet she seems to have to just white knuckle it and return to work. The resolution of her story (settlement out of court) left much to be desired. When there were serious marks all over her, lots of terrible bruising, and facial abuse, the response to it is more than a bit unsettling. Even Mulder bothered me in the episode with how he casually dismisses her claims as some hoax while a sincere Scully is driven to find answers. The ghosts a "resident" (the great Frances Bay, a frequent Lynch collaborator, and she was in Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" the same year as this episode) sees surround live people (including Scully), but when Bay warns others about them and shoos at them, she's considered a kook with hallucinations. 

So the combination of drugs, mushrooms, paranormal rape, reversal of dementia of Alzheimer's, and ghosts roaming (and killing folks) the halls is quite a cocktail. Despite a fun cast that includes Christmas as a patient abusing the Sab Shimono's mushrooms and Fresco (I read he was in a TZ episode called "The Gift", which has been due a revisit) as a dirty old man with bad equipment (his proving his junk was no longer very good plumbing to Mulder and Scully, who clearly weren't expecting old man dick, certainly is offered as comic fodder), I just wasn't feeling this one. It had a few things already mentioned that rubbed me the wrong way, and I just don't think the mushrooms and experimental drug would be discarded and discontinued when proof of potential healing mental illness were possible. ** / *****