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Hell Money

From X-Files Wiki

Series: The X-Files
Original Airdate: 03-29-96
Production Number: 3x19
Date(s): 1995
Written by: Jeff Vlaming
Directed by: Tucker Gates

In Chinatown, Mulder and Scully discover an illegal lottery in which the "losers" are forced to donate their internal organs.

Contents

[edit] Summary

A Chinese man flees through San Francisco's Chinatown, entering his apartment. There, he is confronted by someone telling him its time to pay the price, and is overtaken by three figures wearing masks. A security guard later finds the three figures near a crematory oven, where the man is inside, on fire.

When agents are sent to investigate, Mulder discovers a Chinese character scrawled inside the oven door, along with a wad of currency. Glen Chao, a detective of Asian descent, identifies the writing as the Chinese word for "ghost." He also explains that the currency is called "hell money," which is used as an offering to spirits during the Chinese Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. The threesome learn that the victim's name is Johnny Lo. They search Lo's apartment and discover blood stains beneath a newly installed wall-to-wall carpet.

Elsewhere, an Asian man, Hsin, temporarily leaves his daughter, Kim, so he can attend a mysterious meeting. At an abandoned restaurant, Hsin participates in a strange game in which players draw colored tiles from jade vases. A Wiry Man draws a tile that elicits great excitement from the crowd - and a sense of relief from Hsin. The Wiry Man is escorted to a back room, where he is drugged. Shortly thereafter, the agents discover his body in a cemetery.

Scully's autopsy on the Wiry Man's corpse reveals evidence that the man's body organs had been harvested. The agents confront Chao about their discovery, but they sense he is being protective about the goings-on within the Chinese community. But Chao does provide the name of the man who installed the carpet in Johnny Lo's apartment: Hsin. Mulder, Scully and Chao pay a visit to Hsin's apartment. Hsin's eye is heavily bandaged, which he claims is a work-related injury. As Chao and Hsin carry on a conversation in Chinese, Mulder discovers one of the colored game tiles. After the threesome leave the apartment, Hsin tells his daughter they need money for her leukemia treatments. But Kim blames her father's eye injury on the mysterious meetings. Moved by his daughter's concern, Hsin tells the head-gamesman, a Hard-Faced Man, that he no longer wishes to participate. But the Hard-Faced Man insists Hsin is close to winning a jackpot worth two million dollars.

Meanwhile, Chao is attacked by what appear to be masked demons. But when Mulder visits the hospital, Chao is not to be found. By checking a hospital chart, the agents realize Chao's blood type matches the blood found on the carpet padding at Johnny Lo's apartment. Mulder suspects Chao is somehow involved.

The agents return to Hsin's apartment, where they question Kim. She explains that the family has no medical insurance, and that the cost of leukemia treatments is very high. Mulder realizes Hsin is participating in some sort of game. The agents pay a visit to an organ procurement organization, where they are told that a number of Asian men request typing and antigen work-ups, only to disappear.

The agents trace a phone number supplied by the organization to an abandoned restaurant. Inside the kitchen, the agent's discover human organs being stored in freezers. Unbeknownst to them, another game is underway in a room over the restaurant. Hsin loses and is dragged to the back room. Chao, no longer willing to help cover up the activity, interrupts the game and smashes one of the jade vases - revealing tiles of all the same color within. The participants realize that the game is rigged, and a melee breaks out. The agents hear the commotion and race upstairs. They find Chao holding the Hard-Faced Man - about to remove one of Hsin's organs - at gun point. Hsin is rescued and his daughter is placed on a recipient list at the organ procurement organization.

[edit] Background Information

  • Although this episode was credited as having been written by Jeffrey Vlaming, it was show-runner Chris Carter who came up with the idea of doing an episode about a pyramid scheme for body parts, a notion that became the basis for this episode.
  • Even though the game in this episode was entirely fictitious and was created from scratch by The X-Files' props department, many people thought the game was real, a fact that interested story editor Frank Spotnitz.
  • The scene in which a frog emerges from a corpse's chest was relatively simple, in comparison to the series' usual technical standards. The makeup effects team, under Toby Lindala, used stock molds to rig a fake human torso that was placed over the actor as he lay on a table. To film several close-ups of the frog's emergence, the fake torso alone was then placed on a table that had a hole in the mid-section, so that the series' animal wrangler could gently push the frog through the opening from underneath the table.
  • The scenes of this episode that are set inside the crematorium were actually filmed within a soundstage.
  • During postproduction, the lines of dialogue spoken by both the Japanese actor Michael Yama, who played Hsin, and Lucy Liu, who portrayed Hsin's daughter and spoke Chinese with a Mandarin accent, were re-recorded, with assistance from a vocal coach, after it was realized that the two performers were meant to be speaking in a Cantonese dialect. These rerecorded lines were then dubbed over the episode's original soundtrack. The decision to rerecord the dialogue was influenced by several factors, including sensitivity to the Chinese community.

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SEMICOLON-SEPARATED LIST OF ITEMS/LOCATIONS REFERENCED IN EPISODE (BUT NOT LINKED TO IF ALREADY LINKED IN SUMMARY OR GUEST STARS SECTIONS)


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