“Excelsis Dei” is quite an overt commentary episode. The plot is like a dark version of Cocoon, or Awakenings, as a nurse at a retirement home claims that she has been raped by the spirits of one of her former patients. That results in a critique of patriarchal realism, in which it is easier to believe in the paranormal than in the possibility of rape. At one level this plays out allegorically, the invisible rapist gesturing towards systemic assault decades before #MeToo. Yet it’s also possible, paranormally, that Mulder and Scully are genuinely dealing with an instance of “entity rape.” Mulder acts as the pivot between these two planes, and the locus of the episode’s social critique in this respect. He can imagine the most outlandish supernatural possibilities but finds it difficult to credit the paranormal when rape is involved. Instead, in a curious double twist, he affirms the rape to deny the woman’s account of it, speculating that instead of a spirit entity she has merely forgotten the face of her very real human attacker in a paroxysm of trauma. All of that takes place against the backdrop of what one male employee of the nursing home blithely refers to as the “ sexual harassment fad” of the early 90s. 

At the same time, the episode critiques the disavowal of the aged in a postmodern era when, as Don DeLillo noted in White Noise, death is more abstracted and notional than ever before. Early in the episode it seems like the spirits of old residents might be taking their revenge on nurses and staff. The invisibility of old people, especially in nursing homes, turns into a literal invisibility and parnormal horror. Yet “Excelsis Dei” never deifies the aged either. Some of the men in the facility are plain creepy and Scully in particular is alive to all the pawing and fawning the female nurses have to endure.

Interestingly, “Excelsis Dei” also continues the fungal anxiety of “Firewalker.” Fungi have an uncanny presence in the series generally. Not classified as animal or plant, and existing in a biological category all of their own, they’re often used as cipher for the sentient otherness of a networked world – images for rhizomatic sprawl rather than arboreal structure. One of the twists of the episode is that a Chinese doctor is giving the patients special mushrooms on the side because his cultural norms dictate a different ethic of care. In China, he tells the agents, several generations will live together in a single household, rather than leaving the aged to languish in retirement homes. He keeps these mushrooms in the basement, a tableau that anticipates the esoteric horror of Mindhunter, especially once the agents learn that these fungi create a shamanic portal for the dead, and are the source of the episode’s various hauntings. 

Finally, “Excelsis Dei” is one of the stronger episodes in the second season to unfold in a single space. Never leaving the nursing home works well to capture the claustrophobic fatalism of its residents but it could have still resulted in a fairly dour narrative had not director Stephen Surjik painted such a vivid picture of it. As the mushrooms set in and the shamanic portal opens, he gradually strips the interiors of their naturalistic coordinates, until they feel more like a spaceship (long dank corridors covered in pipes) and then a sinking ship, thanks to a scene that required the crew to flood a hallway with 3300 gallons of water. At times, it reminded me of James Cameron’s brand of fluid claustrophobia, especially in Aliens and Titanic. Not the most terrifying of X-Files episodes, then, but haunting and enduring in its own unique way.