It was hard to imagine when I first watched this just how devastating the hysteria over Satanic Ritual Abuse was to families and communities during the 1990s. Having since looked into it, the episode becomes a lot more powerful, and a lot more interesting. The reactions make a lot more sense, and the characters seem less like obsessive lunatics and more like genuinely frightened people.<br /><br />"Die Hand Die Verletzt" starts out so quirky, with the rain of frogs and the teens out to try and "get some". Or maybe it's the welter of teenage horror since then that makes these things seems light. Either way, even for The X-Files, this one gets dark fast, and the moral ambiguity present is wonderful as the cultists' lies turn out to be rather more well- intentioned than the comparatively friendly words of the demonic substitute teacher. Ms. Paddock is remarkable in her power to dominate the episode, even when not on screen, and it's great to see the agents (to quote a later episode with similar themes) not knowing which side they're on.<br /><br />In a way, the story tries to do a little too much in too little time, but does at least show the right things. We don't need to see the rituals, the sacrifices or whatever; they're far more interesting for being a mystery to us. Through skillful editing, we as the audience are kept only slightly less in the dark than the agents, enough to trick us into thinking we know what's going on and which side we're on, but at the end, we're left with a bittersweet little epilogue that serves best to show us how foolish we were for thinking we understood what was going on. It encapsulates everything the preceding hour was about, and if that means we don't get all the answers we want, it's much better for it.