Review: The X-Files - Season 3: "Hell Money"

Review: The X-Files – Season 3: “Hell Money”

GATES, Tucker (Dir.), 2007 (first aired 1996), X-Files, Season 3: “Hell Money”, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment LLC.

Season three of the X-Files is where a whole bunch of FBI weirdness really falls into place. I don’t mean the “mythology episodes” – the ones wherein Mulder and Scully get to the bottom of What’s Really Going On; I was never a big fan of those episodes. The ones I like are the standalone ones that tell their own tale and don’t wallow in their own conspiracy crapulence.

So what does Season Three have to offer? Well, Scully gets a dog and then loses a dog; Mulder gets whistled back from the dead by means of a sweat lodge, a packet of sunflower seeds, and a Navajo medicine man; Scully fights with her sister and then her sister gets shot; Mulder receives a warning against dabbling with auto-erotic asphyxiation, and Skinner goes on an impending-divorce-fuelled bender and sleeps with Samantha Carter from Stargate (and people say there’s no such thing as conspiracies!).

Along the way, there are some of the best episodes the show ever came up with: “DPO” wherein Giovanni Ribisi gains the ability to throw lightning bolts and zaps Jack Black in the back; “War of the Coprophages” in which Mulder is convinced that aliens are invading the planet by means of remote-controlled, cockroach-shaped robots; “The Walk” which has one of the most vicious and unrelenting villains the show ever generated, despite having no arms or legs; “2Shy”, a cautionary tale about online dating wherein Mr. Right is a fat-sucking vampire; and of course, the Emmy-winning “The Final Repose of Clyde Bruckman” a classic piece of television writing if ever there was one. And I don’t even have to mention, surely, the gloriously gleeful “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’”…

But then there’s “Hell Money”.

I have a penchant for all things Chinese, and so a Chinese-themed episode was bound to light my firecracker. Written by Jeffrey Vlaming, the story concerns an illegal gambling ring in San Francisco’s Chinatown where the losers are forced to donate randomly-selected body parts to an underground organ trafficking ring. Mulder and Scully are brought in to investigate the death of a man immolated alive in a crematorium and the trail leads them to a crooked cop with a weighing conscience and a vicious, rigged game of chance.

The thing that appeals to me the most about this episode is that there is absolutely nothing supernatural or paranormal going on at all. It’s like an episode of “Scooby-doo” without the silliness.

Of course, the investigation takes place during the annual Festival of the Hungry Ghosts, so there’s a lot of talk about the afterlife – ghost banquets, offerings to the dead, Hell-Money and so forth – but there’s no mystical whatsit at the end of the trail. If this bothered the ever-expectant Mulder, I’ll bet that it was sheer relief for Scully.

James Hong plays the eerily-creepy organ thief and proves – as he stated in Blade Runner – that he only does eyes…with a few kidneys, hearts, and lungs on the side. His speech to Scully at the end of this episode, justifying his actions as giving hope, not taking lives, is pure evil, chillingly delivered. As a point of interest, this is one of Lucy Liu’s first film appearances: she does a creditable job of playing the invalid daughter of one of the gamblers, but it’s a long way from Charlie’s Angels.

If I have a quibble with the episode, it’s the treatment Mulder and Scully have of the cop (played by B.D. Wong) assigned to help them on the case. From the get-go, they distrust him and treat him with suspicion, despite the fact that there’s nothing that he does overtly that would incline them in that direction. It’s true that he turns out to be crooked, but you can’t blame him given the cultural pressure that’s being applied. I put it down to the average FBI agent’s innate ability to smell a rat (or maybe slipshod pacing in the writing process).

The other cool thing about this installment is that, even having exposed the syndicate and their hideous activities, nothing changes. The bad guys simply fade away and set up again somewhere else, eliminating any bothersome loose ends by throwing them in the crematorium incinerator.

As the credits roll, the viewer is free to imagine James Hong’s character smoking and chuckling and saying:

“And you thought we wouldn’t get away with it. You pesky kids!”

Four-and-a-half tentacled horrors.