iRewind | THE X-FILES - “Home”

Season 4 | Episode 2 | Original Airdate: Oct. 11, 1996

One of the darkest and most frightening episodes of the classic conspiracy series, THE X-FILES, was ultimately banned from getting replayed after it aired, even though “Home” was heavily scrutinized by the censors.

There are a few television series that hold up as well to the times as The X-Files. Created by Chris Carter in 1993, it ran on FOX for 9 consecutive seasons, including two theatrical features, and later added two televised limited series to its mythology. With its themes of government conspiracies, unexplained phenomena across rural America and the Arctic tundra, and false narratives contaminating the news cycle, the show, restored to high definition, stands out especially well through the lens of our contemporary turbulent times.

After the show's intense pilot set-up the premise, the second episode of the series undoubtedly set the tone for the series to come, illustrating the polar opposite perspectives of the two agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned to an investigative branch of the FBI that fields cases that no one else wants to follow. “The Truth is Out There,” but as audiences learned during the course of those eleven seasons, there were forces at work that didn’t want the truth to get out of control, intent on gaslighting sects of the population from the unknown.

Today, as political strife and corruption upend our democracy, with attacks leading to a culture war of near-insurmountable odds, The X-Files have, in a sense, predicted a cynicism toward the truth that is pervasive in every part of our society today, testing the very foundation of America. It’s very challenging in our digital age to navigate the fast-flowing current of information and the misinformation that runs parallel to it. Conspiracies are everywhere, and even when the truth is in plain sight, the public is bombarded with distractions, causing more static than clarity.

I’ve been excited to revisit The X-Files. After attending this year’s Terrificon Comic Con in Connecticut at the Mohegan Sun and meeting “X-Files” actor Mitch Pileggi, who played FBI Director Walter Skinner, I expressed to him how much the series meant to me and my dad. At the conclusion of every episode, my dad and I would call each other and compare notes; it was a ritual that kept us close. As if on cue, the internet started trending an interest in a particular episode, one of the series’s more radical…

“Home”

The episode itself opens up very ominously. A woman is giving birth in the dark and is seemingly suffering during the process. The three individuals assisting in the birth are gnarly and deformed in appearance, although they are mostly in shadow or silhouetted. As soon as the baby is born, it’s swaddled in dirty linens, and the next scene is utterly disturbing. The POV shifts to that of the newborn as it is buried alive! The episode's Original Air Date, October 11, 1996, proved to be the last time that “Home” appeared on television. It was immediately taken out of rerun circulation and removed from syndication. Fortunately, it would be included in commercial DVD and Blu-ray, as well as Digital releases.

It isn’t long before Mulder and Scully are brought in to investigate, what eventually becomes a crime scene, the small town finds itself ill-equipped to handle…or won’t. The small town is home to a family, the Peacocks, who have been there for generations. The three reclusive Peacock men who inhabit the home appear to live alone, and as the story goes, their parents were killed in a car crash. Scully’s analysis of the unearthed dead baby reveals it is badly deformed, and its deformities are likely the result of inbreeding and related to the Peacock men, which raises questions. As the investigation continues, the local police chief and his wife are brutally murdered in a way that is animalistic and primal.

With little other recourse, and with the help of the local deputy, Mulder and Scully move in on the Peacocks' home to arrest the brothers on suspicion of murder, and make a startling discovery! Inside one of the bedrooms, hidden underneath a mattress, they find Mrs. Peacock! The family matriarch, who had been thought lost in a car accident, was alive, a limbless torso. Defiant of any rescue, she admits that she and her “boys” were doing exactly what was necessary for generations since the Civil War to keep their family line “pure.”

The heinous act of a mother repeatedly having sex with her male children in order to keep their bloodline pure, and it leads to serious genetic mutations and disfigurements, is a often visited horror trope that has been a part of some of the genre’s most disturbing feature films. The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre feature the horror of inbred people who prey on their victims and molest and torture them to death. The X-Files episode takes it a step further, as the story incorporates bits of fact into the narrative, and it makes a social statement on rural isolationists with racist tendencies, keeping themselves “pure” and avoiding mixing with other races.

The mixing of social commentary into science fiction and fantasy has always served creative writers, especially in entertainment. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, at its core, depicted morality plays set on a starship exploring the final frontiers of space. The X-Files, which was based on reality, follows a pair of FBI agents who are chasing down the facts about the unknown and what is true or false. In our modern times, it reveals an entirely new layer of existence, one embroidered in misinformation and the distortion of truth. The X-Files today is an entirely new experience in our world of podcasts and YouTubers, and is deserving of another look-see.

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THE X-FILES | starring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, and Mitch Pileggi, created by Chris Carter | is available now to watch on Blu-ray, and on all Digital Download platforms.

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