‘The X-Files’: Scully Receives A Message From William — But Is She Ready To Accept It?

‘The X-Files’: Scully Receives A Message From William — But Is She Ready To Accept It?

Mulder and Scully meet a teen with peculiar psychic powers. Is he actually their son, William?

Well, it’s taken 20 years, but The X-Files is finally getting into CreepyPasta! Mulder and Scully are on the trail of Ghouli, a giant monster with rows of teeth and tons of arms, who lures teens to an abandoned ship called Chimera. Subtlety has never been The X-Files‘ strong suit. At Chimera, two girls have stabbed each other nearly to death because they each thought the other was Ghouli during one terrifying night. They have a lot more in common than just their ghost hunting, actually.

The girls have identical stories of how they got to Chimera, why they went there, and who told them to go — their boyfriends. Make that boyfriend. They’re both dating a boy named Jackson Van De Kamp (and it’s definitely the same dude). Mulder and Scully go to ask this kid some questions and discover he’s living in the house that Scully keeps seeing in her seizure visions. But why would magic Jackson lure her there at the same moment he seemingly shoots his parents and then himself?

This sparks one of the best X-Files tropes: Scully going nuts and Mulder pretending to be the skeptic. Scully’s now convinced that this teen is their long-lost son, William, who they’ve already determined has to have some kind of psychic ability. To Scully, this is teenage William asking his parents to find him. She’s devastated when the kid dies, but her hopes get back up when his body disappears from the morgue — he’s been faking it. And she’s right; this is William! Unfortunately, this isn’t going to end up happily ever after. Far from it.

Instead of “I want to believe,” the episode opened with,”You see what I want you to see.” William, not unlike Liam Neeson, has a particular set of skills. He just tends to use his to fool two girls into going out with him at the same time and write killer CreepyPasta about a demon named Ghouli. We find out via our dear friend Skinner that Scully was the unwilling participants in Project Closed Door, a government experiment dedicated to studying the effects of making human-alien DNA hybrids (aka chimeras). Jackson, aka William, is one of the last remaining subjects of that experiment, and for that, we discover that the two bumbling DOD agents who’ve been following Mulder around all season are actually attempting to find and kill him.

So he’s been doing what he does best: shapeshifting and creating false realities. Mulder, Scully, and the rest of the police at the crime scene saw him dead with a bullet in his head because he wanted them to. The girlfriends saw Ghouli because he put it in their heads. And he’s going to keep it going. He knows his origins, and he knows about Scully. That’s why he morphs into a nice, older man at a gas station outside of town to speak to her. It’s not the mother-son reunion that anyone wanted, but it clearly brings her some closure when Mulder shows her who she was really talking to on surveillance camera footage. We have a feeling this won’t be the last time they see each other.

The X-Files airs Wednesdays at 8:00pm on Fox.

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