"Scary Monsters" is the fourteenth episode of the ninth season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files.
The show centers on FBI special agents who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files; this season focuses on the investigations of John Doggett (Robert Patrick), Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).
In this episode, Special Agent Leyla Harrison (Jolie Jenkins) takes Reyes and Doggett on a drive into the mountains after a woman stabs herself repeatedly and her widowed husband refuses to let anyone see their son.
Executive producer Frank Spotnitz suggested to Schnauz that the new FBI agent should be Leyla Harrison, played by Jolie Jenkins, who had first appeared in the Spotnitz-penned eighth season episode "Alone".
The writing staff used Leyla's character to comment on the state of the show and, most notably, the members of the audience who preferred Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) over Doggett.
Meanwhile, Agent Leyla Harrison (Jolie Jenkins) tells Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) about a woman who stabbed herself repeatedly.
However, the writing staff did not want the story to develop into a "kid-in-the-cornfield" territory, according to Gilligan (a reference to a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "It's a Good Life", in which a monster-child can control the world.
Executive producer Frank Spotnitz suggested to Schnauz that the new FBI agent should be Leyla Harrison, played by Jolie Jenkins.
[5] Near the end of "Scary Monsters", Leyla and Gabe Rotter were supposed to walk off-screen, holding hands, which prompted series director Kim Manners to sardonically ask "when did this turn into the fucking Brady Bunch?
[4] The writing staff used Leyla's character to comment on the state of the show and, most notably, the members of the audience who preferred Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) over Doggett.
Harrison suggests early on that Doggett and Reyes may be dealing with a person capable of channeling electricity, a reference to the third season episode "D.P.O."
Doggett later suggests that the three of them may be experiencing some sort of hallucination, and cites the events in the sixth season episode "Field Trip" as an example.
[6] Finally, when Tommy shows Reyes his drawing, he tells her "I made this", a possible reference to the tagline at the end of every Ten Thirteen Production.
[12] Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode four stars out of five.
Despite this, Shearman and Pearson also positively critiqued several of the episode's juxtapositions, such as the scene featuring Scully performing an autopsy on a cat while wearing a kitchen apron that says "something smells goooood", calling them "the funniest of the season".
Crang, in his book Denying the Truth: Revisiting The X-Files after 9/11, called the episode a "solid little entry", saying that it was a "nice spin on the isolation stories that the series has always done so effectively".