Those creatures under the bed are real good, Tommy, real good indeed. That was a good thing you did to Agent Reyes and Agent Harrison, too, sending them to the cornfield.
(Side note: it is a shame this post is going up on October 30. It would be the perfect Halloween episode.)
OK, I know the writers claimed they weren't trying to imitate the Twilight Zone masterpiece, 'It's a Good Life', but that's what I immediately thought of once it was revealed that the kid was actually the one behind all the horror.
Only in this case, his imagination is only projected on others as imagination and thankfully, Doggett lacks an imagination (thank you for that, Agent Harrison!) and is able to make the hallucination stop. In fact, as soon as Doggett was covered with the extremely fake-looking skittering creatures, I said, "Ignore them and they'll go away," and compared the concept to 'How the Ghosts Stole Christmas', which had a similar resolution.
Also, it is once again demonstrated that children on The X-Files are creepy one hundred per cent of the time.
The cold open and the start of their investigation made me first believe the monsters were going to be a metaphor for abuse, and that the father was a horrible, horrible person who was doing abusive things to his late wife and his son, and that showing him locking the child in his room with the scary monsters was meant as a stand in for some more horrific thing he was actually doing. Even midway through the episode, I still kind of suspected that the father was the villain.
I should have guessed from the rather childish title of the episode that everything was going to center on Tommy and his drawings, but it wasn't set up that way. And a slight problem with the idea is that lots of kids believe there are monsters under the bed, and of course there aren't, but it's dark and every little movement can be freaky and why am I writing this at eleven o'clock at night before I go to bed?
Where was I? Right, kids imagine things. It's kind of what they do. So while that should have led to a fairly obvious conclusion that there wasn't anything there at all, this is The X-Files, and your worst nightmares are real. (Remember 'The Host'? Yeah, I still have the occasional nightmare about that.) So something was there, but it was still about halfway into the episode before it was clear Tommy was creating all the horror.
And we're not even sure why, except that it's apparently accidental? I have kind of a hard time believing that, too, because if he was say, made aware of his ability, then perhaps he could control it, or imagine his family with a billion dollars in the bank. So they portrayed Tommy then as being extremely malicious with his imagination - what kid draws a person bleeding from their eyeballs? That's seriously creepy.
But even once Doggett revealed that not believing in the kid's imagination was the key to avoiding letting him hurt you, I completely fell for the trick at the end and thought the room was on fire. I couldn't figure out how he'd manage to escape, so nice job on the misdirect, writers.
As with Leyla Harrison's last appearance, this episode was full of inside jokes and references to past episodes, including 'Field Trip', which I guess is proof enough that Mulder and Scully really were rescued, because I'd find it even harder to believe that if they were still hallucinating, they'd have created John Doggett and told him about their little adventure. I think it makes me feel better about my own prospects, too. That is, I'm not being devoured by mushrooms while I hallucinate my life.
This episode was told in two halves, and I feel I really need to say something about the utterly bizarre (as if the part with Doggett and Reyes and Harrison wasn't bizarre enough) half that involved Scully. Because let me get this straight: Gabe thinks he can get Leyla to go out with him and tries to impress her by bringing Scully a dead cat to perform an autopsy on. He knows she's a medical doctor and not a veterinarian, right? I mean, sure, I get that certain features are shared by all mammals, but still, the layout of the internal organs, for example, is very different in cats and humans.
Also, using kitchen implements to perform an autopsy is beyond gross, though it's somewhat reminiscent of the inverse story in the Red Dwarf episode, 'Polymorph', in which medical implements were used to serve a meal. ("This isn't a meal, it's an autopsy!") I hope Scully disinfects her entire kitchen after that, or better yet, burns her house down and moves somewhere else.
The final scene was definitely another of those nightmare fuel moments and had a very A Clockwork Orange (or possibly Robot Chicken) feel.
I can just imagine Tommy saying, "I was cured, all right."
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