A witch hunt! Only not?
I kind of liked the subversion of the typically very conservative Christian school board by making them devil worshippers instead. Of course, then everything got very weird and seriously fucked up. Because apparently they aren't devil worshippy enough.
I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this, but this show does creepy extremely well. Like in many other episodes before, I got that very deep discomfort - in a good way - that really felt like I was immersed in the story's setting.
I'm assuming there must have been some discussions 'between episodes' between Mulder and Scully about what happened in Minnesota in 'Irresistable', because she seems to be fine here, even when discovering a body with its heart and eyes removed. Though in a nice bit of continuity, she comments about how murderers often remove parts of their victims, since we'd seen that just one episode before.
And for some reason, Mulder is especially sarcastic in this episode. He's kind of awesome.
But really, this is yet another episode that focuses on fear, mass hysteria, paranoia, and conspiracy, but interestingly, isn't about the government conspiracies that dominate most of the alien mythology episodes. And that makes it somewhat hard to unravel what's real and what's imagined or constructed.
As far as I can tell, though, Mrs Paddock represents the demon the boys accidentally summoned in the first scene in the woods, and all the really bad things started happening once she arrived. With the camera focusing on her during the first dissection scene, I think we're meant to believe that she planted the memories in Shannon's mind. We also saw the heart and eyes in her desk drawer, which she also inexplicably placed a stack of papers directly on top of.
Scully, naturally, doesn't believe that Paddock's arrival is anything more than coincidence, and Mulder, just as naturally, is quick to assume the worst.
But because the Devil is playing tricks on everyone, it's pretty easy to get Mulder and Scully to chase after the wrong people, though the parents and teachers are far from innocent in all this, though it sounds more like they were ritually abusing children, but never actually murdered anyone. It's certainly a little ironic that it's their failure to be murderers that is their downfall. They are, as they realised, being punished for being insufficiently evil.
And fortunately for Mulder and Scully, Paddock's goal is eliminating the mediocre devil worshippers, but she seems to have no particular interest in the agents, and ends up saving them from the righteous mob.
After a rewatch of this, I'm inclined to say it really was a spectacular episode. It was well acted all around, and the filming style made it extremely dark and unsettling, pretty much all the time. I think there were maybe two or three scenes that were actually lit at normal levels? But the writing was solid, too, with some good, unpredictable misdirects, and a villain hiding in plain sight.
It seems like the show is really getting back on track.
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