An art thief is suffocated by a black plastic garbage bag.
From the homeless people discarded like an empty soda can, to the metaphor of garbage truck standing in for the black carriage of Death, to the self-involved yuppie compacting her trash in her spotless house, we are surrounded by images of garbage. Of course disposability is the touchstone of this episode. Trash Man: People treat people like trash. Scully is puzzled by a pendant in her mother’s effects, made from a quarter: what does this memento signify? What happened to Charles Scully, to estrange him from his family? Even as we ponder Scully pondering, in the background a nurse empties a trash can. Morgan teases us with mysteries: why does every single caller on Scully’s phone show up as “William”? All of the caller IDs that we see are associated with that name even when Mulder calls her his name is initially shown as “William” (which is, after all, the middle name of both Fox Mulder and David Duchovny). Scully: I wanted to ask her more questions. It’s a bravura performance, but exactly what we expect from Gillian Anderson.
Without words, with only the slightest, most nuanced expressions, Anderson lets us see into the troubled soul of a woman in middle age looking back on a life full of turmoil and loss. As Scully speaks to her unconscious mother, she speaks to herself, in a reflective moment when we see how deep are the scars inflicted by her abduction, her coma and her pregnancy on her soul. Instead, he wisely lets Gillian Anderson express deep and varied emotions through voice, timbre, body language. Long hours by the bedside of her dying, comatose mother puts Scully in a contemplative mood, and yet Morgan avoids the cliche of the inner monologue or the expository conversation. She leaves for the hospital immediately, as Mulder soldiers on with the case. At the crime scene, Scully gets a call from her brother Bill, alerting her to a family crisis: their mother Margaret Scully (Sheila Larken) has had a heart attack. He then takes some of the man’s body parts back to the garbage truck, tosses them in, and climbs in with the air of a tired man climbing into bed. Street people hide in terror as a garbage truck drops off a shambling man made of garbage, who tracks (literally) the bureaucrat to his office and tears him limb from limb. He does so at the behest of a city council member, Daryl Landry (Daryl Shuttleworth), who stands watching and eating out of a disposable container. We open with a horrific murder committed on the person of a minor bureaucrat who is using the power of the Housing and Urban Development bureau to evict homeless street people from an encampment. Nancy: I’ve been threatening you for months. He directs it with a deft hand and eye, which take us on a journey of sad self-reflection as Dana Scully faces her mother’s mortality and her own legacy. Layer on layer of meaning, a rich tiramisu of a story that gives us the blend of horror, pathos and poignancy he does so very well. The episode eventually reveals they have been keeping their mother, a quadruple amputee, underneath a bed.This may be the finest hour of The X-Files that Glen Morgan ever wrote, and that’s saying a lot. The episode features three brothers, one of whom is also the father of the other two, defending their way of life from outsiders through murder. The FBI is called in after the body of a deformed newborn was found buried alive, and the family decides to attack local residents so their secret won't be uncovered. Insufficiently described on streaming platforms as a monster-of-the-week episode with Mulder and Scully encountering a family of inbred brothers, the horrors of "Home" are hard to capture. "Home," the second episode of Season 4, is perhaps the best example of this. It may be unsurprising now that The X-Files dove into taboo topics like incest, but these episodes at the time proved wildly controversial. Part of the show's premise was an exploration of the fringes of science, ideas and humanity. The X-Files never shied away from controversial topics.