But if a human does it, you get banned from TV. Everybody seems to think that’s fine and they love birds. When the bird is sick, the mother kicks it out of the nest. Morgan: So we had this family of human beings act as nature does. It was inspired by this book called “Dark Nature.” Wong: Originally it was obviously alive when they buried it, but we changed it a little bit because it was too harsh. There was also the buried baby in the opening scene.Ī. Wong: I think it had to do with the incest. As it turns out it, it was one they never repeated until several years later.Ī. Wong: We were obligated to do four episodes that season, and we thought this was the most down-the-middle, straightforward “X-Files” of all of them. Did you have any sense that what you were doing might be controversial?Ī. So we had been working out the story where there was another brother under the bed, and Jim Wong one day goes: “It’s the mother! The mother’s under the bed!” And I felt Freud and Joseph Campbell do back flips, and that was that. It just seemed like such a horrifying situation, and I’d been trying to use it. They said, “Hey, we got something to show you.” And they take him up to a room with a cot, and under the cot was a man on a platform, and he was wheeled out and they stood him up and they clapped and danced and the guy did tricks. Before he was famous he was traveling in musical theater, and he rented a room in a tenement with a family that took a liking to him. The other major thing was, in college I had read Charlie Chaplin’s biography. Morgan: My wife, Kristen, had shown me “ Brother’s Keeper”, which was about this family close to where my brother and I grew up. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Ī. Wong recently looked back on “Home” in a joint phone call.
He added, “Some places bought it.” (For the record, it’s not.) “We didn’t think we were pushing the envelope of taste in the way people seem to ascribe to us - ‘Oh, there’s incest, there’s killing a baby.’ ” “We were trying to make a terrifying show,” Mr. “One person’s safety and comfort is another’s nightmare.” “The episode was called ‘Home’ because Jim and I were returning ‘home’ to ‘The X-Files’ to do some more episodes, and that caused us to think about the notion of ‘Home,’ ” Mr.
#X FILES HOME PEACOCK SERIES#
They were aiming only to make a straightforward “Monster of the Week” episode, one that also explored fears about change and nodded at the fact that the writers were returning to the series after working on a different show the previous season. Glen Morgan and James Wong, who wrote “Home,” among many other memorable “X-Files” installments, weren’t trying to be provocative, they said recently. (The brothers brutally club the sheriff and his wife to death to “ Wonderful, Wonderful.”) “A boy will do anything for his mother,” she growls to Scully, not long before she and one surviving son escape with plans to start a new family.Īside from the scares, “Home” functions as a sort of dark mirror onto vintage Americana, imagining a sinister underbelly to insular small towns, motherhood and family, classic Cadillacs and even Johnny Mathis.
She is the mother, lover and puppet master of the brothers (one of whom is also the father of the other two). Eventually the agents discover Ma Peacock, a ghastly, limbless torso, played by Karin Konoval, who lives on a rolling cart under a bed in the family home. After a group of children discover the tiny corpse, Mulder and Scully arrive to investigate, and the brothers kill multiple townspeople in an attempt to preserve their way of life. The episode begins, fittingly, on a dark and stormy night, as the hideously disfigured Peacock brothers bury a deformed baby in a field. Netflix describes “Home” as “the agents encounter a family of inbred animal-like brothers living on a farm,” which is accurate but also leaves out plenty. It’s available on Netflix and Hulu, and if you haven’t seen it, be warned that spoilers start now. The episode has since become a fixture on various “ scariest shows ever” lists and endures as one of the most beloved in the series’s history. While “Home” appeared later on the cable channel FX, it was never again broadcast on Fox, save for a special Halloween airing in 1999 network ads at the time billed it as “an episode so controversial, it’s been banned from television for three years.” Viewers complained that the tale about the murderous inbred clan was too disturbing and network executives apparently agreed. (A reporter’s wife: “Please, God, not at the dinner table.”) The Peacocks are at the center of “Home,” an “X-Files” episode that originally aired in October 1996. It’s likely to be some combination of a shudder, a squeal and a groan, a mix of delight and revulsion.
Here’s a fun Halloween trick: Mention the Peacock family to an unsuspecting “X-Files” fan and enjoy the reaction.
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