“Ghouli” is episode five of season eleven of The X-Files.
The episode opens at night and a person enters an abandoned ship, the Chimera. The person is a teenage girl with a torch – and a knife. There is another girl inside as well, and both seem to think that the other is something bad – a ghouli. One girl falls through the deck, landing in the area where the second girl is. Both don’t see a girl, but some sort of unpleasant monster, and both attack the monster with a knife. Only there is no monster, just another teenage girl.
The opening credits phrase this time (there have been quite a few variations this season, more than usual) is ‘You See What I Want You to See.’
Next, Scully talking about the third state of consciousness, hypnagogia, between asleep and awake. She found herself frozen on a stranger’s bed with a dark figure behind her. Scully regained her ability to move, get up and drew a gun and looked for the figure.
Mulder, for Scully is narrating this to him, asked if she was suffering from sleep paralysis but she says not. She sees a photo of a boat on Mulder’s desk and recognises it; he says it’s from an open X-File. So they travel there – and are followed after they leave the airport.
At the crime scene – the Chimera – local law enforcement, Detective Costa (Louis Ferreira, Colonel Young from SGU), greets them. He says that the two girls are high school seniors from different schools, with no records and no sign that they knew each other prior to the attack. EMTs were called to the scene by an anonymous 911 call and the girls asked the attending EMTs about where ‘ghouli’ was. The girls were seriously injured but both are expected to pull through.
Ghouli leads to a website that has only been active for a couple of months, which mostly contains fan fiction, most of it written by the same person (Mulder bemoans the lack of depth in modern monsters).
When the girls come around, Mulder and Scully question them separately. Neither saw another girl, nor do they recognise the name. Both saw ghouli, and attacked it. Both were led to the Chimera through a dream, identical to the one Scully had, and both were looking for a snow globe, one that Scully was looking for in her dream as well. Both also have the same boyfriend, Jackson.
Following up on the boyfriend leads to the house that Scully woke up in in her dream, just as an apparent double murder suicide is carried out. The boyfriend shot and killed both his parents and then killed himself. Or so it seems. It’s certainly the obvious answer, especially as neither Mulder nor Scully saw anyone else in the house. Detective Costa certainly thinks this is the case. Mulder not so much. The boyfriend had also been prescribed some serious medication, but wasn’t using it. There seem to be agents from another agency – the DoD Mulder deduces – in the area too. Which Mulder does not believe to be a coincidence.
Scully is quite badly affected and wants answers – because she is afraid that the dead boy might be William. Her son. There is definitely something weird going one, and it does seem to be connected to William. Which is probably why the Smoking Man is involved. After all, the Smoking Man did reveal to Skinner at the end of “My Struggle III” that William is not his grandson, with Mulder being the father, but his son.