"Who are those guys?"
-- Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy, in
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969)
With all the advanced hype that preceded this episode, "Chinga" had one of two possible results. It would either be a monumental episode worthy of enshrinement in the X-Files Hall of Fame, or it would be a major disappointment. Sadly, lived down to my expectations.
"Chinga" was credited (or blamed, as the case may be) as being co-written by noted horror writer Stephen King and series creator Chris Carter. Both have done better work.
The central plot was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise. A child's doll is evil personified and is responsible for causing self-destructive behavior in everyone whom the child doesn't like. This theme has been done to death, and it's been done much better than "Chinga." At least King and Carter are environmentally conscious. They recycled an old plot, populated it with cardboard characters and added the charming touch of playing a 45 RPM version of "The Hokey Pokey" until my ears bled. That was at least different from the multiple scenes where people's eyes were being clawed, scratched and bleeding. I guess we were supposed to interpret this as "see no evil." I saw no goodness in this story, either.
But as bad as the plot was, the real crime here was the character inversion of Mulder and Scully. Or maybe that's character perversion. Not since "Syzygy" have I seen two lead characters act so contrary to what has been constructed over the life of the series. But at least "Syzygy" was supposed to be a comedy, and there was an X-File at the heart of their character deviations. We get no such courtesy from Messers King and Carter in "Chinga." Mulder is depicted as such an empty shell of a man that a weekend without Scully provides him with absolutely no desire to do anything, including such basic survival activities as grocery shopping. What happened to that driven, focused FBI agent whose passion for finding out the truth about his sister's abduction was the focus of his every free waking moment, and let's face it, the very foundation of the series? Did all that desire and dedication leak out of his brains when he had his head drilled in "Demons"? Are we supposed to seriously believe that Mulder has completely bought into Michael Kritschgau's story from "Gethsemane" and "Redux II" and that he has accepted as the truth that his sister is alive and well and doesn't want to see him? "Post-Modern Prometheus" notwithstanding, this just doesn't make sense from anything that resembles logical character development. What we got in "Chinga" was MulderLite: same great package with one third the character depth.
David Duchovny, with extremely limited screen time, played Mulder as the adolescent who's best friend went away to play with someone else for the weekend. His Mulder resembles the clinging friend who can't deal with the fact that his friend doesn't need or miss him while she's away. Left to his own devices, Mulder can do no better than to emulate his missing friend. Thus, it is he who proposes the rational scientific explanations for the strange goings-on from a distance while Scully investigates the strange crimes in Maine. Duchovny got the chance to make some cute facial expressions. While they were mildly amusing at first, by the end of the show, it seemed more that DD was mugging for the camera instead of playing a character we've come to know and love.
This wouldn't have been nearly so bad had Scully not turned into someone I didn't even recognize. She out-Muldered Mulder. Gillian Anderson actually looked like she was having some fun playing the believer of "extreme possibilities." But the dramatic opportunities for Anderson were few and far between in "Chinga." The Scully character was reduced to the role of part-time, unofficial advisor to the police. But instead of looking for her answers in her science, Scully starts looking towards the supernatural almost immediately. Freed from the influence of Mulder for weekend, Scully soon became . . . Mulder! Quick! Somebody check the basement for pods.
Who are those guys?
Susannah Hoffman, as the terrified and terribly inept mother of the child, took some chances and for the most part, they worked. Unfortunately, her role called for a one-note performance. Even the most mellifluous of notes will lose its allure when sung over and over. Poor Hoffman was reduced to being alternately scared, terrified and nervous. That's not exactly what I'd call a challenging role. I think after seven or eight days of filming scenes like that, I might have been tempted to take a hammer to my own head, too.
The familiarity of Ms. Hoffman's visage kept haunting me. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the same actress who played Lisa Ianelli in "Synchrony," except that she was billed as "Susan Hoffman" for that episode. I don't think Screen Actors Guild rules allow two actresses to have the same or two such similar names.
Maybe it's a personal weakness, but I seem to have a soft spot for Larry Musser who played police chief/sheriff Jack Bonsaint here and the wonderfully amusing detective Manners in "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space.'" Musser played the veteran New England law officer so smoothly, I couldn't help but like him. I especially like where he demonstrates that Scully's become so predictable that he says she's on vacation. He knows a busman's holiday when he sees one.
Casey O'Rohrs' editing was once again a fine piece of work. In an episode where there was constant shifting of over-the-shoulder camera shots as characters engaged in dialogue, the camera shifts were spliced together coherently. Cinematographer Joel Ransom captured some nice scenery on film. The exterior shot after Scully and Bonsaint left Jane Froelich's house captured the water, the red sky and the surrounding wooded area in a stunning visual. Ransom also did a nice job using shadows and light in locales such as the police station and inside the Turner house.
Mark Snow's musical score was effective if not remarkable. At least it appeared to my untrained ear that they were actually new compositions this week. But best of all, it wasn't intrusive enough to drown out the dialogue.
This brings us back to the writers and the director. Director Kim Manners did the best he could with what he had to work with. When your script is loaded with one-dimensional characters, when your main characters are turned inside out, and when the boss' and a famous author's names are on the script, your hands are pretty much tied. Manners made the most of his exterior shots, particularly the flashback scene on the boat when the doll was retrieved from the lobster traps and the aforementioned scene outside the Froelich house. But this effort, as noble as it was, is like treating a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid. It's too little, too late.
The script was in trouble from the start. The writers obviously did not collaborate on this episode by sitting in a room and bouncing dialogue and scene ideas off each other. King wrote the original script, submitted it, Carter insisted on a rewrite, King did the rewrite, Carter still didn't like it, so Carter himself did another rewrite. The attempt to infuse some humor into this insipid retread of a script served to try to conceal the fact that the best Stephen King could come up with for an X-File was an idea that was done a lot better some 35 years ago on Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. It's been done so many times with so many minute variations since, that the idea of an evil doll with a life of its own is now a hackneyed cliche. The technical plusses were too few and far between to overcome the weak, derivative script. What was done to Mulder and Scully can only be called character assassination.
My Score: 1 out of 10