Towards the end of the last episode, “Irresistible,” Mulder and Scully reflected that the serial killer was “extraordinary in his ordinariness.” “Die Hand Die Vertletz” returns to that deranged ordinariness but in a more flamboyant register, alternating between lurid  comedy and some of the most disturbing moments in the series to date. At one level, it’s a playfully satirical riff on Satanic Panic. In one of the best cold opens so far, we meet a high school executive at a late night meeting, solemnly discussing the viability and appropriateness of different contenders for the annual musical (it turns out that Grease contains too many swear words). Realising they haven’t ended a meeting with a prayer in a long time, they get ready for devotions, as one of their flock grumbles about missing the start of a football game. Then, as the camera pulls back from this normcore setup to immerse it in a more expressionistic darkness, the teaching staff begin a Satanic chant, calling upon the lord of chaos to watch over their profession.

No surprise, then, that when a local teenager is killed in an apparent ritualistic ceremony, this cabal of Satanic teachers is the first to express moral outrage: “They reach into our children – in music, television, books. They prey on our children’s innocence.” The demonic entity haunting the school turns out to be a homely substitute teacher, a gentle grandmotherly figure who keeps the heart and eyes of the murdered student beneath the attendance roll in her desk. In time, law enforcement takes their cues from the teachers too, as a local police officer bluntly blames the crime on “devil music,” in the same way that conservative pundits would come to attribute Columbine to Marilyn Manson and the Goth-Industrial continuum. All of these comic and satirical moments make it clear that the adherents of Satanic Panic are more cult-like than any occult presence, to the point where the teachers’ Satanism comes to feel like a refracted moral majority hysteria as much as an actual demonic practice.

Yet this revelation also ushers in the darker side of the episode – its insistence that the adults in American society who are most preoccupied with policing moral order are often those who are most to be feared, especially by younger people. This shifts the episode from a kind of precursor to Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, and its vision of a high school overtaken by aliens who operate through the normative masculinity of the football team, into a more distant companion piece to Beth de Araujo’s Soft and Quiet, which starts with a meeting of middle-class women that turns out to be the genesis of a new Nazi cult. The teachers in this episode have also absorbed their philosophy from the Third Reich, by way of a piece of Nazi esoterica that focuses on an apocalyptic figure known only as “the Jew.”

In other words, “Die Hand Die Vertletz” (named after a phrase in this apocryphal Nazi document) invests the regulators of American moral order with a Satanic intensity, evoking a 90s public sphere in which the voice of younger generations, and the testimony of children, becomes mere collateral damage to maintaining the (supposed) moral majority. Director Kim Manners evokes this scenario via one of the most vividly imagistic episodes of the series to date, with many of the key moments revolving around dissociated and disembodied gazes, most notably that of the murdered student, whose eyes are transplanted from desk to jar by the substitute teacher, before her own eyes fuse with those of a demonic snake. Much of the later part of the episode also takes place against the backdrop of a dramatic electric storm, which conceals and reveals these esoteric topoi in dramatic imagistic relief.

That turns Mulder and Scully into parental figures in quite a novel way, marking another step in their increasing intimacy and proximity, since they are virtually the only adults in the episode who can be trusted. No matter how specific or compelling the various students’ testimonies of Satanic abuse are (one girl describes being impregnated three times, having each of her babies killed, and then seeing her sister sacrificed), the teachers and adults in their community blithely brush them away, most comically and disturbingly the substitute teacher herself, who tut-tuts at the idea that any of her students could want to harm themselves, even as she checks her desk to make sure that the eyes and viscera of her victim are still intact.

In the final scenes of the episode, this disconnect between students and teachers, adults and students, and Satanic panic and intention, moves beyond the narrative itself to gesture towards a broader violence welling up within the American public school system. On the one hand, the Satanic cabal plays as an infiltration of neoliberal bureaucracy into a high school setting, as the substitute teachers segues into a demonic superintendant who sends staff into disarray, right down to her final note: “It’s been nice working with you!” On the other hand, this violence at the heart of the American school system is so overdetermined, and ultimately so unsatiated by the specific events of the episode, that it seems to glimpse the era of mass shootings – and, more specifically, the Republican response, which conforms to exactly the combination of brutality and moralism that’s skewered here, in one of the most tonally queasily and comically dystopian episodes of the second season.