The X Files - Sanguinarium

 Man, this is grisly. I was stunned to silence while watching this. Richard Beymer (being a Twin Peaks fanboy, I marked out that he showed up as a guest star on "The X-Files") as a practitioner of black magic using witchcraft to "make himself beautiful", responsible for causing his plastic surgeon colleagues to mutilate patients while also working as a plastic surgeon. One liposuction brutal stabbing was committed on a patient in the room for surgery on the head. Another elderly woman is lasered completely through her face! A third has acid burned on her face! Each victim had "pentagram marks" as "protection" from a nurse using witchcraft for good, not bad...O'Lan Jones leaves quite an impression, committed to a ritualistic ceremony in her darkened room, eventually arising from a bloody pool in a bathtub in an attempt to kill Beymer. Beymer has the uncanny ability to spellcast metal objects into the bodies of victims, like a colleague (Arlene Mazerolle) and O-Lan, with the former "injected" with surgical knives while the latter coughed up hundreds of pins. Mulder is the one who considers witchcraft weaponized by Beyner and believes O-Lan was using her beliefs for the protection of the patients in their care. Beyner's vanity continues to get rewarded through "blood sacrifices" as Mulder and Scully find a pentagram inverted on the bad doctor's mansion floor. This episode has Mulder spending time in the mirror, seemingly invested in "changes". There is even a scene where Mulder is looking at a nose procedure! And Mulder and Scully get some time to swap plastic surgery and witchcraft jokes. The ending is unsettling because the agents aren't successful even as Mazerolle fortunately makes it out of surgery alive after the team remove lots of scalpels from her intestinal tract!

Beyner commits to a face peel, using a scalpel to start a cut at his forehead, later beginning to remove his face in what has to have come up against a ratings board not particularly cool with such grisliness. I mean I have seen my fair share of face peels and surgical gore, but this was 1996 television...before CSI and its ilk challenged on screen gore. This had to have been a test as to how far X-Files could push it.

Beyner levitates off his bed in a scene while telepathically causing his scalpel set to vanish off a table as his victim reveals the sudden pain of them inside her. So the episode gets more than a bit outlandish. Lots of pentagram activity included in the episode as Scully seems to work each case as best she can while Mulder follows his own expertise wherever that leads. This will remain notable for its violence and boundary pushing. I honestly thought Mulder and Scully were moving from plot point to plot point, kinda insignificant, especially since they fail to catch the killer at the end. The details regarding calendar dates, birthdays, and witches sabbath got a bit convoluted for me personally, but they are just means to an end...Beyner needed to sacrifice folks so he could get younger and younger, his face more handsome, using his magic to make the alterations surgical / medical procedures were incapable of producing. 2.5/5

I did find the episode interesting in regards to the discussions on vanity and beauty considering Mulder and Scully were two of the most attractive people in television at the time. They certainly had nothing to worry about in terms of looks.