223 OUR TOWN

"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
William Blake as quoted by Mulder in Our Town

"You know that what you eat you are but what is sweet now turns so sour"
George Harrison Savoy Truffle

"Does this taste funny to you?"
One cannibal to another while they dined on a circus clown

SYNOPSIS

DUDLEY, ARKANSAS
WASHINGTON, DC

A meat processing plant comes under scrutiny after several people mysteriously disappear from a small town.

SCULLYVISION

Scully is at first concerned about their treatment by higher ups by assigning this case to the X Files as opposed to normal agents out of the Kansas City office, as well as using humor to make her point in being skeptical. When they get to Dudley, AR, Sherif Arens helps Scully's skeptibility nicely with quick answers to all of Mulder's questions and comments. If she wasn't so darn quick to believe him, they might have put some thought as to how prepped he was with answers to Mulder's questions and comments. But, at the time, her main focus is that George Kearns disappeared because he was going to file a report that the Chaco Chicken plant should be shut down.

Scully does most of the interrogations in this episode while Mulder looks for witches pegs and evidence of foxfire, evidence of the fantastic. When Paula Graves holds a knife to the guy's throat, Mulder attempts to calm her down by saying, "We're federal agents," while Scully actually takes control of the situation, only to have that rat bastard Sherif Arens kill Paula by gunshot. We can all just hope that they fished her dead body out of the chicken feed vat before any chickens munched on her as a protein snack.

After visiting the chicken processing plant and watching Paula sink in to the chicken mulch, Scully stops off to pick up a bucket of chicken for dinner. Well, I guess if you can stomach an autopsy, it would take a lot to kill your appetite.

As always, we truly hate to see our hero knocked unconscious and then bound and gagged with duct tape and nearly beheaded. She didn't seem to put up too much of a struggle when they put her in that clamp device but perhaps she was still groggy from the blow to the head. However, she did look genuinely terrified.

Last but not least, we also hate to see Detective Mulder outsmart Doctor Scully by figuring our why those bones were so smooth on the ends. Maybe he isn't a better detective than Scully, he just knows more weird stuff than she does.

THINGS LEARNED
or All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From the X Files

Line hypnosis is caused by high-speed repetitive activity.

Chickens feed on chickens in chicken processing plants. I'll never eat chicken again.

Creutzfeldt- Jacob Disease is a rare degenerative disorder characterized by the formation of sponge like holes in the brain tissue. Victims of Creutzfeldt-Jacob suffer from progressive dementia and severe seizures. I'm sure that line hypnosis has nothing to do with it, but chickens eating chickens, and us eating those chickens might. One never knows.

Some cannibalistic rituals are enacted with a belief that they can prolong life. I'll stick to Wheaties and vitamins and hope for the best.

WRITER
Frank Spotnitz

The man who helped take over the mythology episodes with the penning of End Game tries his hand at a Monster of the Week episode here, the target: cannibalism. According to Frank, all research on cannibalism was hard to find, but this episode seems extremely well researched. It also ends with something I normally hate, namely Scully getting kidnapped and has to be saved by her partner, but here, in this context, and how it was written and acted, it was a satisfying addition to their friendship. When Mulder brushed the hair out of Scully's face at the end, it was a tender touch that indicated that maybe he drove so fast to save Scully for more than because he doesn't want to break in a new partner.

Spotnitz got his inspiration for this episode from the Spencer Tracy film Bad Day at Black Rock. That was also a story of a town with something to hide. Though their secret was somewhat less sinister than cannibalism.

DIRECTOR
Rob Bowman

The guy who directed Genderbender and Sleepless before this one did a wonderful job portraying how 'normal' Dudley, AR, seems on the surface, and as Scully and Mulder uncover more and more abnormality, the look seems to get darker and darker. There's nice symbolism, humor, and good old fashioned anxiety woven together in this satisfying episode.

MacGUFFIN OF THE WEEK

It's cannibalism, not fox fire spirits that are at the root of this X File.

THE USUAL THINGS
Guns
Scully performs an autopsy
Cell Phones
Danny
Mulder Shoots People
Scully Is Kidnapped
Scully skips lunch
Collectible heads in wooden cabinet

Side note: Named for Thornton Wilder's play of the same name, although the towns in question certainly are different. According to Frank Spotnitz, all the characters in the episode are named for real life cannibals.

SCORE CARD FOR SAVING EACH OTHER'S ASS
5-4
Mulder clearly saves Scully from the cannibals, and thank goodness.

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

JO: I liked Our Town but it left me with absolutely no ideas for point/counterpoint.
JOHN: Me neither.
JO: Well, I guess we don't absolutely need a point/counterpoint for every episode.
JOHN: What, and disappoint our readers?
JO: What readers?

ATHENAEUM

Mulder entered the old library with every intention of reading Wilder's play "Our Town." He hadn't read it in years. The old fashioned card catalogue sent him directly to a suspiciously thin volume which turned out to be a dictionary of terms commonly used in the town of Dudley Arkansas. He opened it and read.

Cannibal - people, people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Cool flashlights - it's true that those meddling FBI agents had the coolest flashlights on the planet. They must have been using Xenon gas filled incandescent lamps. It ain't true though that they cost $10,000 each.

Eat me - the favorite greeting among Dudley citizens. Bite me is also quite popular.

Eating Raoul - longest running film ever at the Dudley Drive Inn.

Foxfire - swamp gas or marsh gas, not to be confused with Xenon gas or passing gas, a popular past time in Dudley. Swamp gas is actually methane, hydrogen sulfide and phosphine, resulting from decomposition of organic materials. It usually has no smell, but sounds like the small popping explosions similar to a gas burner igniting. This eerie occurrence has often been used to explain away actual UFO sightings.

Hypnosis - A state of intense relaxation and concentration, in which the mind becomes remote and detached from everyday cares and concerns. It has been around since the ancient Babylonians, Greeks and Egyptians. It is named after the Greek word for sleep, hypnos, although the actual state of hypnosis is very different from sleep, not to mention coma (see earlier visit to Ath from Ascension episode). Many famous people have used hypnosis or hypnotherapy to improve their lives, including Mozart, Chopin, Thomas Edison, Einstein, Churchill, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis to name only a few.

Immortality - woo hoo, if you found the solution to aging, wouldn't you spend eternity working in a chicken processing plant too?

Kuru - a curious degenerative brain disease suffered by cannibals in Papua, New Guinea. The real breakthrough for understanding Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease occurred in 1957 with the discovery of Kuru.

Line hypnosis - also known as Assembly Line Hypnosis, a trance like state resulting from observing or participating in repetitive movements. It might give you headaches or make you grab your plant manager and hold a knife to his throat. Not to be confused with On-line Hypnosis which is....well, you know. Also not to be confused with White Line Hypnosis where you are driving along the highway and completely miss your exit and then realize that you don't remember anything for miles back or you arrive at your destination and wonder how you got there so quickly.

Our Town - a play penned by Thornton Wilder who was a three time Pulitzer Prize winner and the only winner for both fiction and drama. That's what we heard anyway. In Dudley the only theater we get is Mrs. Smith's annual fourth grade class production of Little Red Riding Hood.

Mulder put the book back on the shelf and went home. He had just about enough of deadly Dudley.

QUOTES

GEORGE: No one'll see us.

PAULA: It's a small town.

SCULLY: Come on, Mulder, don't you see what they're doing? They're wasting our time. They're sending us on some kind of a wild goose chase.
MULDER: Chicken chase.

SCULLY: George Kearns was a federal poultry inspector assigned to Dudley, Arkansas, home of Chaco Chicken. I'm not questioning the case's legitimacy, just their motives in assigning it to us. I mean, doesn't it bother you at all that they're undermining your work?

MULDER: They may "think" they are, but on the night George Kearns disappeared a woman on the I-10 saw a strange fire in an adjacent field.
SCULLY: Yes, I read that report. She claims that she saw some kind of a fox fire spirit. I'm surprised she didn't call Oprah as soon as she got off the phone with the police.

MULDER: Folk tales dating back to the 19th century from the Ozarks describe people being taken away by fireballs. It's supposed to be the spirits of massacred Indians.
SCULLY: Those are only legends, Mulder.
MULDER: Well, most legends don't leave behind twelve foot burn marks.

SCULLY: I didn't think anything gave you nightmares.
MULDER: I was young.

SHERIFF: I'm happy to help you but I'm not sure how much there is to investigate.
SCULLY: Well, Sheriff Arens, a man is missing.

JESS: The only problem this plant ever had was George.
SCULLY: Problem enough to do something about?

JESS: It's a feed grinder. Chops up bone and tissue. See, any part of the bird we can't package we process, use as feed.
MULDER: Chickens feed on chickens?

MULDER: If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise, Scully.

CHACO: Feeding these chickens helps me clear my mind. They're perfect creatures, you know. We eat their meat, their eggs. We sleep on pillows stuffed with their feathers. Not many people I know are as useful as these chickens.

CHACO: You know, when I came here after the war, Dudley was just a patch of dirt. I built that plant and put my whole family to work there. We made this town one of the biggest chicken processors in the nation. We couldn't have done that with trouble makers and layabouts.
SCULLY: I assume you're talking about George Kearns.
CHACO: Men like George Kearns don't build things. They tend to tear them down.

CHACO: You know, living a long life is a mixed blessing. You spend your youth trying to build something for yourself and your family and your community only to watch it all taken away from you at your old age. Still... I'm not ready to die just yet. You go do your autopsy on Paula. I want to know what happened to my granddaughter.

SCULLY: It's a specimen from Paula Gray's brain. She suffered from a rare degenerative disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. It's characterized by the formation of sponge like holes in the brain tissue.

SCULLY: This girl would have been dead in months.
MULDER: Except that Paula Gray was no girl. This is her personnel file, Scully. Check it out. It says here that Paula Gray was born in 1948, which means that this woman, Chaco's granddaughter, was 47 years old.
SCULLY: There's got to be some kind of a mistake.
MULDER: Let's find out. Her birth certificate should be on file at the Seth County courthouse. Who knows, Scully? This could be even more interesting than foxfire.

SCULLY: The odds that Paula Gray and George Kearns had the same disease are practically nonexistent. Creutzfeldt-Jacob can be hereditary but it's not communicable. That two unrelated people in the same small town would contract the same rare disease is...

SCULLY: I just came up with a sick theory, Mulder.
MULDER: I'm listening.
SCULLY: You saw the feed grinders at the plant. What if somebody put George Kearns' body in there? Creutzfeldt-Jacob is a prion disease which means it could have been passed on to the chickens and in turn anyone who consumed them.

MULDER: Well, I'd like it dragged as soon as possible.
SHERIFF: Why would you want to do that?
MULDER: To see what's in there.
SCULLY: Well, so far I've been able to isolate nine distinct skeletons. This one belonged to the late George Kearns.

SCULLY: The older bones show signs of decay and surface abrasion just like you'd expect but for some reason all of them, even Kearns', are smooth and buffed at the ends.
MULDER: It's almost like they've been polished.

MULDER: Scully, I think the good people of Dudley have been eating more than just chicken.

MULDER: Some cannibalistic rituals are enacted with a belief that they can prolong life.

SCULLY: Cannibalism is one thing but increasing longevity by eating human flesh...
MULDER: Think about it, Scully. From vampirism to Catholicism, whether literally or symbolically, the reward for eating flesh is eternal life. I don't claim to know how it works, but we both saw Paula Gray.

CHACO: This town wasn't built in a day. It's not about to fall apart in a day.

MULDER: (screaming into Scully's cell after he heard a noise) Scully? Scully! Scully! What happened? Scully! Are you there? Are you all right? Answer me! SCULLY!!

CHACO: Look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. This isn't faith anymore it's just fear. They've turned us into an abomination.

CHACO: Kill me... And you kill us all.

SCULLY'S REPORT Pending further review, the Chaco processing plant has been closed by the USDA. So far, no evidence of contaminated chicken has been discovered. Though it remains unknown how many citizens participated in the ritual activity, 27 have become fatally ill with Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. What is known is that a transport plane carrying Walter Chaco was shot down in 1944 over New Guinea. Chaco was the only survivor of that crash. According to naval records, he spent six months with the Jole, a tribe whose cannibalistic practices have long been suspected but never proven. Naval records also show that Walter Chaco was born in 1902 making him 93 years old at the time of his death. As of this date, his remains still have not been found.