By the time The X-Files got to its fourth season, it had become a hit show with its own fan base called “X-Philes.” This is something considering a lot of people had predicted it would be canceled by the halfway point of the first season. One of the smartest moves the Fox Network did was take it off the Friday night slots and move it to Sunday nights after the third episode where it was able to piggy-back off The Simpsons, which had moved back to Sundays.
But the start of season four still had the shows appearing on Friday night and one of the those was “Home,” which on the surface seemed like a simpler show that didn’t deal with the alien/government conspiracy shows that became synonomous with the show. However, this wasn’t another monster/creature show that had also become common even thoiugh it did have some elements that seem horrific. “Home” is a far more different show and thus a bit more disturbing when you think about it.
The opening is on a dark, stormy night where a woman is giving birth mostly in darkness. But there’s something wrong with the babty. It’s crying but it sounds different. Three men take it out in the rain and bury it as it’s still alive. Some time later, some young boys playing baseball in a field discover the baby corpse. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are brought in to investigate.
The field is adjacent to a secluded land owned by the Peacocks in ther rural town of Home, Penn. Sheriff Andy Taylor (Tucker Smallwood) informs the agents the Peacocks have lived in the home since the days of the Civil War and basically keep to themselves. They raise their own livestock and garden and no one knows much about them but to leave them alone. It’s probably no coincidence the sheriff shares the same name with the character from The Andy Griffith Show.
Mulder romanticizes the small rustic rural area as one of those towns where no one locks their doors. Even the motels don’t have locks but he’s smart enough to use a chair to prop the door. But there’s something wrong as they discover during an autopsy, since Scully is also a medical doctor, that the child was buried alive as well as shows symptoms and defects constant with inbreeding. Believing that the Peacocks are all men, they suspect they’ve abducted a woman and raped her. But the story gets far more disturbing.
The following contains spoilers!!
The Peacocks seek out and murder Sheriff Taylor and his wife who was going to issue warrants the next day. This leads to Mulder, Scully and the Deputy Barney Paster to try to go into the house. Notice how the deputy is named Barney, like the sheriff is named Andy. Anyway, Paster goes in first but a booty trap decapitates him and then judging from what we see from binoculars, he’s ripped to shreds by the Peacock men. He’s possibly even devoured. Mulder says this behavior is part of their most animalistic nature since they have been cut off from society.
Creating a diversion by releasing the hogs, Mulder and Scully are able to go in while the men are out rounding them up, but they discover a hysterical woman, Mrs. Peacock (Karin Konoval on a roller board underneath a bed. She’s lost her limbs as Mulder tries to calm her down, Scully realizes from nearby photos she lives there. The woman who is also deformed is the mother and had sex with her eldest son, Edmund (Chris Nelson Norris) to produce her other two sons.
A fight breaks out by the Peacock sons can withstand gunshots but George (John Troittier) and Sherman (Adrian Hughes) are eventually killed. But Mrs. Peacock has already been taken in the fight by Edmund who has sex with her in the trunk of a Cadillac, which he leaves her in, before driving off to find a new home.
Granted, it’s a disturbing episode in content for audiences in 1996. A reported 18.85 million viewers tuned in and it was one of the few to contain a titlecard before airing with a viewers discretion advised warning of the graphic content. The TV’s rating system wasn’t implemented until mid-December of that year. Fox never reran the show until three years later on Oct. 31, 1999 advertising it for Halloween as the day was also on a Sunday. It carried the TV-MA rating, the only time the show ever did.
Nowadays, shows like Criminal Minds, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and especially American Horror Story have dealt with stories that were more graphic. Remember the Mr. Scratch episode or the Human Marionette episode of Criminal Minds? And CSI where the mob boss had a infant baby fetish probably had some viewers wondering what the hell they were watching. And a lot of “Home” could be contained within a the first act of an AHS episode.
Ironically, Glen Morgan, who co-wrote it with James Wong, said it was Standards and Practices that demanded some changes. Morgan and Wong were returning to the show after their pet project show Space: Above and Beyond had been canceled the previous season. The Peacocks weren’t supposed to be deformed, but just a reclusive family that looked normal but were inbred. And the baby was told not to sound normal. So, you could blame them, I guess.
Morgan said the episode was inspired by the acclaimed documentary Brother’s Keeper about a murder trial involving a close-knit reclusive set of brothers, The Wards, who lived on a farm near Utica, N.Y. When the ill William died one night, his brother, Delbert, who slept next to him, was charged with murder. But Delbert was a low IQ and was unaware of judicial terms such as “wave your rights.” Delbert was later acquitted.
There was also an incident Charlie Chaplin recounted in his autobiography that he had been staying with a tenement family in Wales who had a son who lived in a kitchen cupboard. The episode is compared to Sam Shepherd’s Buried Child which dealt with an inbred child being buried in the backyard. The episode has been compared to the works of David Lynch and Tobe Hooper. Kim Manners directed 52 of the 202 episodes and said this is his favorite, even though the burial of the baby wasn’t the easiest to film. Morgan said that some of the crew members were disturbed by the episode’s content.
William B. Davis, who played Cigarette Smoking Man but doesn’t appear here, said the show is well written and directed, but felt the violence was too much and may have turned some fans off. Well, not too many. The X-Files finished in the top 20 that year with a rank at 12. And people have viewed the episode more of a satire on the rise on the concern of traditional family values in the 1990s. “Home” might be a idyllic place, but there’s a darkness that lies somewhere just like in Lynch’s Blue Velvet that people want to avoid.
Bascially every town has a family like the Peacocks and while they don’t indulge in incest and inbreeding, people avoid them. Morgan said there was a family in the town in which he grew up where they were always so dirty. Ironically, the Peacocks are neighbors of his parents. Mrs. Peacock makes a mention of the “War of Northern Aggression” which shows her view points and also the isolation their family has dealth with.
What’s crazy is so little violence is actually shown and most of its implied or suggested off screen. But like the movie Se7en, it shows our imagination is far worst than what we really see. It’s a creepy episode and despite not having any alien or monsters, you have to ask yourself who is the really worse, the rural somewhat feral people who keep to themselves or the well-trained and educated FBI agents who see them as a problem. What is it about people who don’t conform to our concept of “normalcy” that gets under our skin? And at the same time, why are we obsessed with a “simpler” time even though there’s always been violence and hostility.
If you actually stayed in a motel where they didn’t have locks, how would you sleep at night? You’d probably be like Mulder, making sure no one could sneak in. He’s no different than the Peacocks making sure no one comes in his place.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 