X-Files Episode Guide: All Souls

Teleplay by Frank Spotnitz & John Shiban; Story by Billy Brown & Dan Angel

Directed by Allen Coulter

'The X-Files' would, more often than not, make major missteps every time it tried to deal with religion. A lot of the time, that could also be magnified by the fact that a lot of those episodes were written by first time authors for the series. Never, however, has this exploded so horribly with this episode which has something to offend both fans of the series and religious viewers.

The irony is, that the writers no doubt felt that this would be an opportunity to deal with Scully's renewed faith, coming so soon after her brush with death. Unfortunately, the writers also chose to make this the only episode in the entire canon to deal with the death of Scully's daughter. Spotnitz & Shiban, credited with the teleplay, no doubt thought that this would be a good way to resolve the overwhelming issues that Scully had been dealing with. But All Souls is such a horrid mish-mash of these themes that it more often than not makes you wonder "What the hell were the writers thinking?" It's bad enough that the teaser deals with the baptism of a developmentally and physically disabled girl, and is followed by her walking out onto the street and getting her eyes burned out, with the last image we see being that of a telephone pole shaped as a cross. But all that imagery is practically subtle compared to everything we are deluged with in the course of this episode.

So it turns out that this girl was one of a four quadruplets, all similarly physically and mentally challenged, all born with defects that resembled the wings of angels. None of them had the ability to speak, making them seem even less individual. (Hell, one of the four isn't even bothered to be named by the script.). And it seems that they are being hunted by God and the Devil. The devil is taking the form of a friendly seeming social worker (I'll admit it's interesting to see Glenn Morshower when he had hair); God appears to be taking the form of a really whacked out priest. Only that's not really God, (We'll get to that in a minute.)  Which would seem to put up a mildly interesting conflict, except that both sides seem to want the girls dead, and the series seems determined to make sure that the afterlife is not part of this series. In which case, what is the frigging point, and why are we not interesting in doing anything to stop the deaths of these girls?

It is here that the script does perhaps the most appalling thing. Scully has been called in, not by the FBI, but by her priest, who we met briefly during the cancer arc. We should've known from that alone that this would involve Scully the Catholic rather than the Scully the scientist. Scully the scientist would dismiss outright the adoptive mother's claim that the death of one of the girls was God's will, and yet somehow she comes to that exact conclusion by the end of the episode. And that's reason that when Scully finally gets to the fourth child before God can, she let's the girl die. And her only consequence seems to be that she is weeping in a confessional, worried about a sin that she doesn't even thing God can forgive.

What makes this so much worse is the visions that Scully is having. It's bad enough that we are given to believe that Scully is acting with God's will; it's so much worse that it's being done through the eyes of Emily. That just another level of manipulation, both to our heroine, which is something we wouldn't be expected to believe in any other episode, and to the audience, which is even more appalling. How can we be expected to care about a child we barely got a chance to know? It's a crass kind of work that the series is usually so much better at. Even worse is the fact that Scully has been chosen to see an angel that is apparently the father of these children--- an explanation which seems so ludicrous, even her priest seems utterly unwilling to support it. And yet that is what we are supposed to accept, and what are arch-skeptic seems to be swallowing.

And the cherry on top of the crap sundae that we are being served is that none of this seems to be questioned by anyone. Scully doesn't need to be confessing this sin to a priest; she's needs to be talking to Mulder, to ask what the hell she was thinking. But the episode does what the series always does when X-Files is dealing with religion; it turns Mulder in to the harshest possible skeptic. Hell, it keeps him on the sidelines for the majority of the episode, just so he isn't there in order to question the lunacy that Scully is going through. The series does what it has on so many other occasion; it relies on Gillian Anderson to try and sell it. And this time she just can't. And if she could, she wouldn't deserve too. This episode insults almost everybody - organized religion, the mentally challenged , law enforcement, social workers. dying children. One can only imagine what people would've thought if this had been there only exposure to the series/

Part of this could be blamed on Angel and Brown (this would be their only script for the series) but there's no excuse for the more controlling hands of Spotnitz and Shiban being the ones to handle this episode. But then again, it hard to imagine any other element of All Souls being workable. Even in a season that's had major ups and downs, there's no excuse for something like this being produced.

My score 1 star