Episode: “Home”,
in which the discovery of the corpse of a severely mutated newborn leads to
circumstances even more lacking in taste than that particular discovery. Mulder
and Scully never encountered anyone like The Peacock Family of “Home”, and
network TV hadn’t, either. This episode was so intensely disturbing that it earned
its own special viewer warning and has the distinction of being the only X-Files episode with a TV-MA rating. Back in 1996, this kind of stuff simply
did not appear on a network, not even a network like FOX. I personally could not believe what
I’d seen. If the episode’s goal was to shock and
disturb, it did its job like no other (though the subsequent “Sanguinarium”
episode is the one that earns the pure gross-out award).
