Chris Irish’s long delayed review of IDW’s season 10, some more terrific analysis, and something we are always pleased to present.
Season 10, Issue 16: Immaculate, Part 1
Written by: Joe Harris
Art by: Colin Lorimer
Colors by: Joana Lafuente
Letters by: Neil Uyetake
Editor: Denton J. Tipton
Executive Producer: Chris Carter
This installation of Season 10 opens up in front of an abortion clinic with a group of pro-life protesters in Murphysville, North Carolina. A blonde pregnant woman is standing across the street from them, saying the Lord’s Prayer to herself. A bright white panel with a black speech bubble says, “I will never abandon you, my child,” and she says she believes it. She walks through the snarling crowd to the clinic, the group lobs insults at her aggressively, and she is greeted by some clinic workers. Once inside she talks to the receptionist, who asks if she is with anyone, and she confirms, but when the receptionist notices no one with her, the pregnant woman says, “You’ll see.” She’s inside the doctor’s office now, ready for a procedure. The doctor asks if they’ve met before, and she says they haven’t. As the doctor talks to the woman, the receptionist in the office area is reviewing files and mumbles to herself that she’s seen the woman before as well. She pulls out a file with the name “Joanie Cartwright” on it and has a look of shock before she runs to the doctor’s office. From outside the clinic we see a giant explosion, and the protesters look on as the blonde woman walks from the fire unscathed, and no longer pregnant. She addresses the crowd and asks if they want to burn it all down and says, “Follow Us.” Enter title panel.
We join Mulder and Scully at the familiar FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. Our protagonists enter an office as two other agents are discussing something with A.D. Morales. One tells Mulder it’s “spooky stuff,” and Mulder quips at him, but Morales at the desk clarifies that it isn’t Mulder being called “Spooky.” She hands them a picture of Joanie Cartwright, who is age 16, that was taken before the explosion at the abortion clinic. They are told that the girl smuggled in a crude fertilizer bomb and blew the clinic up, killing six people. Mulder asks why they are being brought into this investigation as the local field office would be better suited (a familiar occurrence in The X-Files, nice touch). Mulder is handed some more pictures and is told that they are confirmed not be retouched, and in one photo the girl has a faint halo over her head. It also looks like there’s a ghostly figure behind the girl (fantastic artwork, by the way). Scully and Mulder are reminded that their past dealings in Saudi Arabia have put the X-Files under scrutiny (the storyline “Pilgrims”), which is familiar territory for both Mulder and Scully over the years.
Mulder and Scully travel to North Carolina to interview a survivor who has images of the girl standing in the explosion with a ghostly figure seeming to stand next to her. Mulder and Scully question her about the girl in question. Initially, she can’t recall the name of the boy who brought Joanie in the first time, but she has some sort of flash where Joanie says, “He will not abandon you,” and she tells them the boy’s name. Joanie again addresses her and says, “I can tell you where to find him,” and the receptionist tells Mulder and Scully. Scully tells Mulder they should let Morales know the details, but Mulder suggests the quiet approach—not surprising, knowing Mulder’s tendency to buck authority through the years.
Scully finds a relative of Joanie in a church in Murphysville. The lady is leaning on a pew praying the same prayer Joanie was at the beginning of the issue. The same “He will not abandon me” is mentioned as Scully approaches. Scully addresses the lady as “Mrs. Cartwright,” presumably Joanie’s mother. Scully asks her where Joanie is, but the mother keeps praying and mumbles that Joanie is a good girl, then says, “Don’t you see?” and turns to Scully, who sees the lady’s eyes are clouded. After this shock, the church’s pastor Alvin Johns approaches Scully and explains that he’s been caring for Mrs. Cartwright since her husband died. Pastor Johns offers to walk and talk with Scully.
Back to Mulder, he’s outside of Murphysville in a trailer park. In a thoroughly creepy X-Files scene with red sky and crosses hanging in a nearby tree, Mulder begins to investigate the area. During his poking around we see Pastor Johns and Scully walking and talking about the town and how religious people in the area are. As he says this, Mulder finds an unlocked trailer and enters. He finds an open book on Demonology lying on a desk. He finds a picture of Joanie in the pages of the book as someone else enters the trailer. Mulder surprises the man and runs from the scene. Back to Scully, she confronts the pastor and says it looks like Mrs. Cartwright’s eyesight was taken from her, and the Pastor says that it should. Returning to Mulder, he’s chasing the men, and he sees the man mysteriously get yanked to a halt by an unknown force. Mulder catches up to the man and notices a large group of men, women, and children standing in the way, all with the same problem with their eyes that Mrs. Cartwright has. Back to Scully, the pastor finishes his sentence, telling her that Mrs. Cartwright took her sight by herself.
Now Mulder and Scully are at the Murphysville Police Station interrogating the man who turns out to be Daniel, the boy who took Joanie in for her first abortion. Mulder grills him, and Daniel tries to explain himself. As Mulder and Scully talk to Daniel, we see a scene in Murphysville where a group of people encounter a dark woman with a group of armed individuals behind them. Back in the police station, Mulder and Scully are outside the interrogation room, discussing the case, while Daniel is waiting inside the room. As they are discussing the case, Daniel is staring at the mirror that separates the room and seems to be hallucinating. He says, “She wasn’t ready to have a baby,” as he reaches for a pen. In the next panels we see Joanie Cartwright standing among dead people left behind by the crowd she leads. Mulder and Scully hear Daniel scream and rush into the room to see that he’s gouged his eyes out, and the issue ends.
Season 10, Issue 17: Immaculate, Part 2
Written by: Joe Harris
Art by: Colin Lorimer
Colors by: Joana Lafuente
Letters by: Shawn Lee
Editor: Denton J. Tipton
Executive producer: Chris Carter
Part two of “Immaculate” starts with an FBI team going over the group of dead in the streets left behind at the end of the last issue. Mulder and Scully are walking amongst them. Scully tells Mulder the mobile ballistics lab is on the site, and Mulder has one of his hunches that the bullets will be traced back to these people’s friends and neighbors. Scully notices that not only have the dead been shot to pieces, but that they all seem white as a sheet, as if something terrified them beyond just getting shot. They go over the corpses and discuss what’s going on between images of the violence that unfolded earlier with the people being shot down and Joanie leading. Mulder says that an autopsy might shed some light on the events. As they walk away someone approaches a deceased woman and puts a hand on the dead woman’s head. We see a flash of her last moments, seeing Joanie with a large demon-looking shadow behind her. We see that it’s in fact Frank Black from the X-Files spinoff Millennium, before the title block.
The next scene opens in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina at a kind of refugee camp. A small boy is calling for his mother, but his sister is the only relative he has. Her name is Sarah, and she says she’ll take care of him. His name is Lucas. She assures him that she’ll be back and leaves him in his tent and goes to see Joanie. She recognizes Joanie from school, but Joanie only says, “He is our heart, he is our shepherd.” Sarah tells Joanie that they can’t find their mother, and Joanie tells her that she’s in a better place. Joanie is standing on the edge of a cliff and tells Sarah that she will see things for herself. Sarah starts to go back to Lucas, but everyone starts to gather around her and gets on their knees, and they all start chanting, “He is come” repeatedly.
We join Scully in the next page conducting an autopsy on one of the victims from the previous shooting. She notes an extreme amount of blood loss even for someone shot three times and that the dead man’s eyes are burned—that tells her that he was exposed to intense light. She goes on to say that some victims seem to have been scared to death, literally. Scully hears a noise in the hallway and goes to check but only finds a briefcase with a familiar symbol from Millennium on it. Inside she finds a file on Joanie Cartwright. Later on in the town church, Scully is waiting for Pastor Johns. She tells him that she’s come to see him and presents the briefcase that she found in the hallway in the morgue.
Elsewhere, Mulder is in the forest, leading a team that’s going to investigate the wooded area where the suspects from the mass shooting in town were last seen. Mulder asks one of the men where Scully is but is met by Frank Black, who informs him that she is seeking the truth and that he isn’t going to find anything in the woods if he continues following that lead. Mulder and Frank go into the FBI Mobile Command Unit bus to discuss the situation. Frank imparts what he knows to Agent Mulder regarding the case. They sort of clash regarding the nature of the case itself, being domestic terrorism or something worse. Frank tells Mulder what’s causing these problems is Joanie Cartwright. She believed that she was talking to God, but Frank knows better. Mulder asks him if it has anything to do with the Millennium Group, but Frank tells him he’s no longer associated with them. Right then another agent barges in and tells Mulder he has to see something. The girl Sarah from the beginning of the issue carries her brother to the agents. His eyes have been burned like the people who encountered Joanie in the town. Mulder talks to the girl while the agents try to help the boy. She says she never wanted to follow Joanie but everyone else seemed attracted to her for some reason. They load Sarah’s brother, Lucas, into an ambulance. Sarah tries to explain what it is that makes people want to follow her and how they would do anything for her, amongst panels showing people swan diving off the cliff to their deaths from earlier at the camp.
Back at the town church, Scully is talking to the pastor. She asks if he’s aware that Joanie has had an abortion once already, and he confirms that he knew. Scully asks why it seems that he was the one who signed her out from school before her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. Scully indicates that the investigation is not over and she will be seeing him again. In the woods the FBI task force has found Joanie standing alone at the edge of the cliff. She tells the men that she never meant to hurt anyone and wasn’t ready to have a baby. They try to calm her down and get her to back off from the edge, but she says, “He said he’d never leave me,” right before she swan dives off the cliff. Mulder lunges to try and save her, but Frank holds him back. Mulder asks Frank what would do this to these people, and Frank says, “If you knew the things I knew, Agent Mulder, your hair would be gray too.” Below them at the bottom of the cliff Frank can see a demon emerging from the pile of bodies strewn on the cliff floor.
In the woods the paramedics are working on trying to save Lucas as Sarah looks on. They charge an AED and shock the boy’s chest to shock his heart back. Scully is leaving the church as this is happening and calls Mulder. She tells him that she has a good idea who the father of Joanie’s children was but can’t prove it without testimony. Mulder says it’d be difficult to do so since Joanie just committed suicide. Mulder tells Scully about Frank Black helping him and that he’s no longer part of the Millennium Group. Mulder looks up for a moment and sees that Sarah is no longer in the camp. Back at the church we see Sarah appear. She sneaks into the church where the pastor is alone. She approaches him, and he sees a halo on her head and giant demon wings coming out of her back. She says, “He is come.” And the issue ends.
This story line was pretty creepy. It didn’t really clarify what this demon actually was, but that leaves it open for further story lines either in more X-Files issues or in Millennium comics. It was great to see Frank Black working with Mulder and Scully again. The whole thing was pretty creepy and touched on multiple hot button issues in today’s society as only The X-Files can. This kind of fearless commentary on difficult subjects is vital to the comics as it was in the television series.
Season 10, Issue 18: Monica and John
Written by: Joe Harris
Art by: Matthew Dow Smith
Colors by: Jordie Bellaire
Letters by: Shawn Lee
Editor: Denton J. Tipton
Executive Producer: Chris Carter
This issue opens in a farmhouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. An unidentified man is putting his shoes on, heads downstairs, then pulls a kettle off the burner. The man eats breakfast, reads a paper, then deposits the issue on a pile of others near the table. The person exits the kitchen, goes down to the basement via a hidden door, and grabs a set of keys off the wall, and there are a couple FBI badges hanging on the wall. One of them is Monica Reyes’s. The mystery character opens another door, and we find Monica Reyes curled up in a dark room alone. The person gives her some food to eat and shuts her in again. Monica hits the door but the person leaves her. She sees that she knocked her food to the floor, and we see the wall is scored with dozens of marks, indicating that she’s been locked up for a long time.
The mystery person then leaves the house in a truck as snow is falling. The person heads to the local post office and picks up a package. The postal worker tells the person that they should fix their address, and they say they will fix it. On a poster board behind them, there is missing person’s notifications for both Agent Reyes and Agent Doggett. The person leaves the post office, and we see that it is in fact Agent Doggett himself. Monica couldn’t tell who he was since the basement was dark.
In a flashback to events early in the comic Season 10, we see Agent Doggett doubled over in the dirt as the remains of the exploded pipeline are smoldering around him. Some workers call for help for Doggett and a man face down on the ground, but Doggett seems to have started glowing red, then stabs the man through the chest (pretty nice nod to Terminator 2). What we thought was Doggett turns into a cloaked man who proceeds to kill the rest of the workers, picks up the real Agent Doggett from the ground, and walks off.
In Sioux Falls in another dark cell, a long haired and bearded man hears a man in the hallway. The man is clearly John Doggett. He says he’s been in the cell for eighteen months, so clearly the Doggett we saw earlier was an imposter. Doggett yells at the imposter through the door before a mouse appears and then transforms into the hooded man, who grabs his throat and lifts him in the air. The man tells Doggett he’s been waiting for a sign before disappearing, leaving the door open. Doggett takes his chance and leaves the cell. He finds his and Reyes’s FBI badges hanging in the hall and goes to her cell to let her out. As he approaches her she tackles him, clearly not trusting him. He finally tells her it’s really him, sparing a further beating. They hold each other in the dark cell.
At the FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, we join Agent Scully. Mulder is currently testifying at a parole board, covered in Millennium #1. Skinner enters the office as she’s about to leave and tells her to come see something. He shares the news that someone resembling John Doggett was spotted at a post office in Sioux Falls. As the panels catch Scully up, it shows the FBI responding to the house John and Monica were held in. It also flashes back to their escape, where John finds one of the shivs used to kill the Alien Bounty Hunters in the show. The hooded man tells Doggett that he’s to kill him, but John tries to arrest him instead to find out why he did this to them. Before he can do that, Monica drives the shiv into the man’s neck, and he dissolves into the green paste that the other aliens have in the series. Doggett questions Reyes to why she did it, but she tells him that they forgot all about them, just as Skinner and Scully burst in with an FBI team. Scully and the team assist Monica, and Scully sees Doggett at the top of the stairs. She runs up and hugs John and asks if he’s alright. He says he will file a report on the events and that they’re fine.
Now aside from Agent Mulder, who is busy elsewhere, the team is back together. This could aid Mulder and Scully to uncover this new conspiracy pretty well since Reyes and Doggett bring a lot to the X-Files. We shall see how these events play out in the following issues!
Special thanks for editorial assistance from A.M.D.
