X-Files 30 Anniversary Retrospective: Home - 30 Years Ago Today One of the Most Controversial Episodes In TV History Aired

 

By the fall of 1996 I was basically locked into watching The X-Files every Friday night and not looking forward to its moving to Sunday in just two weeks' time. (I had no idea how that would not only turn the show to mainstream hit but revolutionize first network and then all of television as a result.) And on October 11^th 1996 I saw 'Home' complete with the first viewer discretion warning I'd seen associated with The X-Files.

I didn't know until much after the fact just how much controversy was associated with this episode. Immediately after it aired everybody and their grandmother raised a public stink to Fox and they immediately took out of syndication. Home wouldn't be aired again until 1999 at which point it had been released as part of the collection of VHS tapes that aired many classic X-Files episodes.  Naturally once the DVD's had been released in 2002 the networks couldn't come up with a good argument not to syndicate it and both the Sci-Fi channel and other cable networks (such as the horror network Chiller) would do so. But its controversy remains to this day: Comet, the cable network that currently has the syndication rights to it rarely reruns in, usually saving it for special occasions.

Here's the thing, even by the standards of what The X-Files aired during Season 4 Home isn't really the goriest or most gruesome episode. A month later The X-Files would air Sanguinarium which is by far the bloodiest episode in the entire run of the series and even by the standards of today is a gush in blood in a way that might turn the stomach of fans of Ti West. And Leonard Betts famously has us wading in surgical waste, has a decapitated head and a trunkful of cancerous tumors and Fox had no problem airing it after the Super Bowl that year when it became the most watched episode in the show's history. Yet despite all of that I do understand why even in an era when The Walking Dead is in its fourth spinoff (I lost count) cable channels might be wary of rerunning it. And that has less to do with the blood and gore then what Home is really dealing with.

As I've written in previous articles this is the first episode that Glen Morgan and James Wong wrote after returning to The X-Files in Season 4. They'd left the show in Season 2 to try their own ambitious FOX series: Space: Above & Beyond, which despite positive reviews and decent ratings was canceled by the network. Chris Carter and Ten-Thirteen welcomed them back with open arms. After their first script aired there's a possibility Carter might have wondered if he should have been so hasty.

During the first two seasons Morgan & Wong had perfected the Monster of the Week standard, essentially created Skinner and The Lone Gunmen and given us our first real insight into the Smoking Man. By the time they left The X-Files was on its way to its first Emmy nomination for Best Drama and was about to go from cult hit to mainstream one. So there's a part of me that wonders if they'd come back deciding to poking at that constructs of the series they'd done so much to build. Glen's brother Darin had tried to deconstruct the show in a satirical lens and achieved iconic status. Morgan and Wong seemed to be trying to do the same thing in each of their four scripts, only in almost all of them they were being deadly serious.

As Robert Shearman brilliantly phrases it in his rave for this episode:

If anything (Morgan & Wong)  seem more unforgiving of The X-Files now that it's a big hit; there seems to be an anger to the way they take its conventional limitations and smash them. Home kicks off their reign of terror in the most controversial way possible…Its teaser kicks off with a child being born with the help of rusty kitchen implements – a fork to prod it out of the womb, scissors to cut the umbilical cord – and the screaming baby is then taken out and buried alive in the mud. The senses are revolted.

The episode is, of course, much criticized, but it is actually very hard to be more revolting then this. There's a brutality to the story which is sickening – there is probably no murder as tense in the entire series as that of the sheriff and his wife. But its hardly just a collection of disturbing set pieces and gore. Instead its an attack on US values and the family system, and more raw and more blunt then you could ever have expected on network television.

And I suspect its that reason, not the gore and bloodiness that have made certain cable stations, well, squeamish about rerunning it these days.

The title for the record has many meaning not the least of which that it’s the name of the town where all these horrible things take place: Home, Pennsylvania. That may also be part of the reason cable is reluctant to air it: if Home was in Mississippi or Wyoming the more liberal stations might be more inclined to put it on the air these days. It would be easier to accept the idea of the Peacock family – which we are told in the first act are the latest in a line of centuries of inbreeding – if they lived in red state America. (There's a hint late in the episode that the Peacock family were Confederates sympathizers at one point.) And it might be just as easy to accept the folksy sheriff – who despite being African-American is named Andy Taylor(a brilliant Tucker Smallwood) and very much has the same values of the character he's named for – if they actually lived in the South.

But by putting it in Pennsylvania it's a lot harder to take. Now don't get me wrong; I'm absolutely certain that it was banned from network television because of the gore and the gruesomeness of the subject matter. But America was far less polarized during the Clinton years then it is today. And the show makes it very clear that Taylor and the Peacocks have coexisted for years because they've never threatened each other. It's only when Mulder and Scully, the interlopers from the federal government come to town, that the two end up destroying each other.   You really don't have to go that far to go from Mulder and Scully commenting so dismissively about the Peacock family even as they see the violence they do when they lash out to say, Hilary, referring to rural America as a 'basket of deplorables'.

What leads to the darker irony is that when we reach the end of the episode is that Mulder and Scully were essentially called in under false pretenses. The Peacocks were guilty of no real crime before Taylor called in the bureau and Mulder and Scully's assumptions about who the mother of the child were are completely, and horribly, wrong. By the time they realize the most sickening truth about the episode, the Sheriff and his wife are dead, Deputy Pastor has been killed by a booby trap and the agents are forced to kill two of the brothers in self-defense. Perhaps that's the reason so much of the banter by the agents, often a highlight, strikes viewers as tonally off. Mulder and Scully realize that much of this mess is because of them and watching Scully and Mulder make jokes about Babe while trying to force the sheep out of the Peacock's fold really seems out of place.

Or perhaps there's more to it than just that. When we first see Mulder he actually seems distracted from work and seems oddly nostalgic about his childhood.  We've never once heard Mulder actually thinking of settling down before; his character has tunnel vision about everything. But the fact that during the first act he genuinely seems to be considering it shows that even he has had visions of a life beyond the job once.

This is reflected more directly when Scully, in the aftermath of the horrific autopsy done in the bathroom sink in the sheriff's office, begins reflecting on motherhood for the first time in the series. It's worth remembering Morgan and Wong were also gifted at being the first writers to deal with Scully's family life in the classic episodes Beyond The Sea and One Breath and they showed us an image of Fox and Samantha in a flashback in Little Green Men. The other scripts they'll write in Season 4 well pull back to curtain more directly on the longings of the regulars pasts so it's clear that's more of what's in play here then any foreshadowing of future storylines.

Morgan and Wong didn't just title the episode Home for the sight gag of the credits when we learned where the show was taking place: this is very much a story of defining what 'home' is for different people. And the show never gives a clear answer. As Monster of the Week makes clear in its review of the episode:

Is 'home' what the Peacocks inhabit in their insular, closed off world? Or is it the quiet, pleasant life of the Taylors, all cozy porches and silent moments together? Does it mean what Mulder and Scully share, a life spent endlessly on the road, building a home in each new city?"

There are no doubt people who would argue for one version or the other (though probably not to the grotesqueries the Peacocks take it to) and quite a few who would answer 'none of the above'.

They also write:

"Mulder and Scully are our heroes, but they also represent the world that threatens to homogenize all this weirdness…The old ways of life are dying, as high speed electrical cables smooth out our differences, one connection at a time."

The writers almost seem nostalgic for a simpler time when 'you had to be road-tripping through the Texas wilderness to run across a family of chainsaw-wielding freaks. Now Mulder and Scully could pop in and out of a small town to hang out with an inbred sideshow in just a few days' time."

To which I have to say: I actually would feel safer if the family of freaks stayed in their section of America, thank you very much. Indeed anyone who watches the sequence where the Peacocks go on a family road trip to murder the Taylors, all to the tune of 'Wonderful, Wonderful," would no doubt really wish the Peacocks just had board game nights like other families.

Shearman argues that this particular sequence may be the most tense in the entire series and he's not far off. Watching it play out is one of the most frightening single sequences and I sometimes wonder if David Fincher and M. Night Shyamalan – both of whom were in the early stages of their careers in 1996 –  were fans of the show and used this particular sequence as a model for much of their work in their careers. Full credit must also be given to director Kim Manners, who was gifted at playing the audience like the piano as anyone else among the directors on the show and the incredible cinematography of John Bartley, who may never have use the lack of lighting to more power during his tenure then here.

Shearman actually makes the argument that Morgan & Wong were making a subtle critique against The X-Files itself. He argues that the writers are 'objecting to the format of a show which has our FBI agents witness atrocities on a weekly basis only to bounce back ready for the next case. You could be tempted to say…that to be fair, it's not such a crime for a show to be escapist fun – but as an invective against complacency their point still stands."

In this Shearman, as he frequently does throughout his book, reads far too much into the writer's motivations. I suspect if they heard these words Morgan & Wong would be stunned by it. In fact in an interview for Monster of The Week Wong tells the authors that they were stunned by just how upset Standards & Practices were; saying "I thought we had done worse stuff before." He describes showing the teaser to one such executives and its clear they were trying to assuage them on it not that being that made and the employee watched in shock. They weren't helped because Kim Manners was watching it and his reaction was: "That was fucking great!"

And just to drive the point home that all Morgan and Wong were trying to do was write a scary TV show he tells us that when they went to Millennium the following year they actually pitched the idea of the Peacock family having an encounter with Frank Black. (And honestly given the nature of Millennium they would have fit right in.) But when they pitched to the head of Fox at the time he told them: "Never. The Peacocks are never going to be on the air again." Then he added "The reason we have the V-Chip is because of your show!"

Which…honestly could have been possible. By 1996 television was about to be forced to give broadcast ratings for its programs. Network TV was going to be struggling for TV-PG and TV-14 but every time I watch 'Home' I can't help but think that this if you were to air it on cable you might still not be comfortable giving it a TV-MA. And it's not even because of the violence or the gore or even the horrible deformities that we see not just every Peacock living family member having but are clearly on display in the photo gallery that's in the home.

No it's because of the fact that Mrs. Peacock, played in one of the most unsettling guest appearances by Karin Konoval, is not a victim of the Peacock's inbreeding but a willing participant. We learn that Edmund is the brother and the father of the other two boys and she is perfectly fine with what they are doing. The way she tells Scully "They're such good boys" and tells Scully "Maybe one day you'll have the pride when you know your boy will do anything for his mother" is a term that I believe would shock a generation used to this kind of thing happening regularly in Westeros.

Indeed I'd argue the Game of Thrones comparison is a valid one. House Peacock (ha ha) doesn't want power or territory but when they are threatened they are far more dangerous and lethal with their weapons then anything we see with the swords and dragons on HBO. They are willing to kill to protect what's there and you can argue there's the same twisted love here that you see in the House Lanister but without the fantasy element the viewer sees just how ugly and brutal it truly is. The Peacock's even have a very superhuman type power; none of them can feel pain in the traditional sense. ("It runs in the family," Mama brags to Scully.) And as a result when we see the Peacock's brutally bludgeon the Sheriff and his wife to death or see them fall upon Deputy Pastor once he's been decapitated by one of their traps,  I defy even the viewer raised on the Saw franchise not to be a little revolted. One doesn't so much enjoy 'Home' as one experiences it and you might not want to experience it that often.

But there's a time and place for everything and since we're nearing Halloween now's as good a time as any to track it down. It's still available on Hulu as we speak and those of you who still have your DVDs and VHS's (like yours truly) can watch it. However, a word of caution. Though they used a Johnny Mathis impersonator for 'Wonderful, Wonderful', I can assure you that you'll never be able to hear the original ever again without wondering whether the Peacocks are still traveling the highway of America, looking to rebuild their family. Maybe they've found a rental in Texas to settle down in by now – though I suspect everybody gives these neighbors their space.