X-Files Episode Guide: Invocation

Written by David Amann

Directed by Richard Compton

The last thing one ever wants to complain about an X-Files story is that it's too simple - you'd think after all the unnecessary convolutions of the mytharc, one would be upset about a story that has a plain beginning, middle and end. And yet that may be the basic problem with Invocation, a way too simple ghost story with way too few twists and setpieces.

We have the setup of seven year-old Billy Underwood, who disappears right under his pregnant mother's nose at a school fair. We seem to see the teenage boy who is responsible. Ten years later, Billy reappears in the grade school, not having aged or changed a bit in the time that he's been missing. The boy refuses to say a single word, and follows all the attributes of some kind of creepy demon towards his entire family, particularly his new brother. Doggett and Scully come in to investigate, and Doggett focuses in on the same boy - Ronnie - who was at the scene in the teaser. The Underwood family fragments so that the boy and his father leave the home, and the younger brother Josh is abducted. Eventually, they find the abductor, Josh, and the skeleton of the young boy.

The idea that this is some kind of ghost story is pretty much obvious by the time the first act is over. Indeed, its so obvious you wonder why Scully doesn't cotton to the idea sooner. Much like Patience two episodes earlier, if this were a Mulder and Scully story, this episode not only would be boilerplate, it would have been resolved within the first fifteen minutes. What makes this episode work - at least in fits and starts - are two very separate brilliant performances. The first of which is Robert Patrick's.

It is clear from the moment that the agents are called on to the case that Doggett is taking this way too personally for it to be just another case. There is clearly something in Doggett's past, but whereas with Mulder, where the tragedy involving Samantha was pulled out almost immediately, David Amann manages to find a way to subtly draw out the process. He looks at a photograph of a young boy, and the scene with the police psychic, where it is clear that there is some tragedy in his past, but rather than spell it out -- Doggett doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve the same way that Mulder and Scully could - its shown through the way he focuses on figuring out who did this. The single-mindedness to resolving what happens eventually spills out to be a certain kind of desperation - he has to find the people who did this, its the only way he knows how to deal with the pain that he has. Robert Patrick gives the first well done portrayal of Doggett he will give on the series, and its the first of a series of subtle performances he will give in this way.

The other, even better performance is that of Kim Greist as Mrs. Underwood. Just as its clear that Doggett is undergoing some kind of personal problem, its equally clear that Billy's mother has never been able to deal with the loss of her son. When he is supernaturally returned to her, she is so relieved that she refuses to see the strangeness of the situation in order to be reunited with him - even if it comes at the expense of her own marriage and family. Greist clearly wants to believe that this will work as a panacea to restore something that she clearly regarded as her fault, and watching her deal with this agony as she realizes that something is still not right is one of the most wrenching things the series has managed to do.

The performance are so real and true that they almost make you forget how pedestrian the episode. The problem is, and this is becoming something of a pattern with a lot of the Amann scripts, the critical word is almost.  This is an episode that doesn't have much in the way of scares or shocks. That also works in the story's favor for a bit, because it mostly reminds us that there is a very human tragedy at the center of all this. But the episode is so focused on the performances of Patrick and Greist that it doesn't let you realize that there isn't much there. The realizations about the mark that Billy is drawing is on a knife, and the fact that somehow the psychic's fit leaders her to sing 'All the Pretty Horses' backwards are such bizarre leaps that its hard to imagine that Mulder would've been able to make him, let alone just minted believer Scully. And considering what's going on here, Scully is far less to do over the course of the episode, which unfortunately starts a trend of the next few stories that have even less of our central character.

None of this makes Invocation a terrible episode; some of the acting is very good and there's a dark, terse story underneath. But its a story that would've been ordinary had there never been an X-Files to tell it. And a simple ghost story with no shocks and twists isn't particularly good TV, even if there are some good elements.

My score: 2.5 stars.