Ribs

S2 E10: Red Museum

The X-Files, 20th Century Studios, 1993.

It is difficult to maintain the moral high ground while eating ribs with barbecue sauce on your face.

Dana Scully does not appear concerned about this.

She and Mulder have come to Delta Glen, Wisconsin, to investigate a series of teenagers who disappear and later turn up terrified, half-dressed and marked with the same mysterious phrase. The local sheriff has a theory: possession. He also has a suspect: the Church of the Red Museum, a group of white-robed vegetarians who believe in soul transference, have turned hundreds of cattle into pets and live in a town where this has done approximately nothing for their popularity.

This is cow country. The Red Museum has chosen to establish a monument to the barbarity of meat production in a place where the restaurant recommendation is ribs.

Mulder and Scully go to the restaurant. They order the ribs.

Scully, in particular, attacks hers. She has barbecue sauce on her fingers, barbecue sauce around her mouth and absolutely no visible conflict about any of this as she observes, “You know, Mulder, ribs like these, I’d say the Church of the Red Museum has its work cut out for it.”

One imagines a Red Museum pamphlet being extended and then silently withdrawn.

Mulder uses dinner to explain “walk-ins,” the church’s belief that a person who has lost hope can become vulnerable to occupation by a new, enlightened spirit. According to the literature, Abraham Lincoln was one. So were Mikhail Gorbachev and Nixon adviser Charles Colson.

Nixon was not.

“Not even they wanna claim Nixon,” Mulder explains.

Unfortunately, “Red Museum” has considerably more planned for them than dinner.

What initially looks like a story about an eccentric religious sect keeps expanding outward. The church members may be strange, but strange is not the same thing as guilty, a distinction that Delta Glen itself seems disinclined to make. One of the group’s members walks past the restaurant and is immediately harassed by local teenagers, who call him names, mock his beliefs and generally behave with enough casual ugliness to suggest that if an evil spirit has entered anybody in town, it may want to broaden the search.

From there, every convenient explanation begins to fall apart. Maybe the kids are being drugged. Maybe something being given to the cattle is affecting the town. Maybe a local doctor has been conducting experiments. Maybe the people abducting the teenagers know about those experiments. Maybe the government does too.

This is the basic occupational hazard of being Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. You begin the day asking why a teenager woke up in the woods and end it saying things like, “Somebody’s been paying to have those kids injected with alien DNA.”

Our taxes certainly don’t cover this adequately.

Make it! Oven-Baked Ribs by Inspired Taste