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"My people live with ghosts, the ghosts of our fathers and our father's fathers. They call to us from distant memory showing us the path."
"No ghosts called to those men - you did - by preying on their hopelessness and desperation."
There were no real ghosts in "Hell Money" despite the presence of our favorite ghost busters (as Mulder says "Who ya gonna call?"). The ghosts that were witnessed were in the minds of the victims. No doubt the "this wasn't an X-File" troops will be whining in full force about this one. However, if I may point out, this show gave us something that many folks have been asking for for a long, long time. What we have beneath all the mystical cultural layers is basically an X-File case that turns out to be a hoax and that our dear Dr. Scully solves. While Mulder goes on about haunted houses Scully methodically pokes and prods at glass eyes and cut up cadavers to give us the real answer to the string of mysterious deaths.
This was an interesting episode, certainly not a great one. I have often wondered why the show didn't tap more into the cultural myths that abound in the realm of the paranormal. "Dod Kalm" took a stab at some Norse mythology and "Teso", well who knows what that was a stab at. Instead of just giving us our usual teaser foreign language lesson, this one continues through the entire episode. Jeffery Vlaming, in his choice to keep much of the episode's dialog in Cantonese, throws the audience into the atmosphere of the episode. We must try to figure out the rules of the game without being explicitly told.
We rely, like Mulder and Scully, on Detective Chao to give us the answers that we need to the barriers of language and culture. This allows the audience in a way to take the same journey they do and to begin to have the same doubts. While Chao hides his own guilt by using the mysteries of his culture - those of Hell Money and the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts - he lets it slip early on that it is his mortgage that haunts him.
This episode did have a prime example of something that we have seen before, in fact it was present in the other Vlaming written piece this season, that being a further glimpse into just why Dana Scully is an FBI agent and doesn't have that lovely family practice somewhere in Vermont. She just really despises people that prey on others and really truly longs for justice. Whenever we get these 'Scully confronts the guilty criminal' scenes Gillian Anderson just infuses Scully with contempt. Her delivery of the line "I understand that you are going to prison for a very long time" is rife with her anger. This is one of the reasons we love Scully, her frustration for people forced into desperate situations and her prevailing sense of justice despite all that she has seen. She just hates those bad guys.
We also had some fun Mulder/Scully interaction as usual. Scully's silent sigh as Mulder starts in on his "haunted" theories. Mulder jumping in the grave as Lt. Neary asks Scully "What the hell is he doing?" and her slight shake of the head in reply as she waits along with him for the answer. And of course the delightful autopsy scene (only in the X-Files can you ever call an autopsy scene delightful). I like the fact that Scully is allowing herself to crack the slightest of smiles (not too much, wouldn't want to encourage him) at Mulder's quips. The "Do you know how much the human body is worth Mulder?" and his reply "Depends on the body." was fun enough that Scully even allows herself to crack the worst joke to Mulder's delight: "this is one man who left his heart in San Francisco".
So what didn't work? Why was this episode not as successful as it could have been? For me the major reasons were the heavy handedness of the social issues and the pacing. The story could have done without the overstated moral lessons (or at least picked one instead of such a grab bag). Here we have the plight of immigrants, the poor, and the uninsured. Mr. Hsin being forced into the game to save his sick daughter - not because he is a bad man. Additionally, we have the ABC (American Born Chinese) Detective Chao who must wrestle with protecting his people (which he really isn't doing) or paying his mortgage with the real "Hell Money" - that gained from the lottery that could never be won. We ended up being asked to feel sorry for these people for too many reasons instead of one compelling one.
All this also slowed the story down considerably. I don't mind reading subtitles, but the scenes between the father and daughter just dragged. Nothing was happening. They were exposition only for social commentary. Also, I don't know about you folks, but I figured out the rules of the game the first time around so that by the third time we had to watch it things had just become repetitive instead of intense.
Even the attempted theme of luck doesn't really pan out for me. We see it first early on with the discussion between Mulder and the Lieutenant: "We got lucky with this one." M:"Lucky? That's an interesting word for it." Luck is infused in the no-win lottery and again in Mr. Hsin's pleas of "Maybe I'm not so lucky." However despite introducing this prevailing theme it really went no where. Again an idea half formed.
-Wow, win a chance to lose your eye. Here I've been stupidly playing the Colorado lottery. What a fool I've been.
-The shots in the beginning of the cremation alive were very hot, so to speak.
-Bear gall bladder soup. Yum.
-You know if you are going to bring back the frogs I can't think of a better way than to have one crawl out of a body during an autopsy. Boy those run of the mill bodies must just bore Dana to tears these days.
-Fun little Mulder moment with him rolling his eyes and sighing at the fireworks as Scully pokes fun at him with the "looks like you just saw a ghost" comment.
-Do good people ever wear pinky rings or is that reserved for the truly evil?
Autumn
"What a way to go"