1X15 LAZARUS

"You don't look different but you have changed."
I'm Looking Through You - Lennon/McCartney

"He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth."
John 43

"Death is only the beginning."

The Mummy in The Mummy

"Turn off your mind relax and float down stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying."

Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles

SYNOPSIS

MARYLAND
Scully's ex-lover's soul is transmigrated with the bank robber who killed him. Scully is skeptical until she apprehends the bank robber's partner and her former lover, Jack Willis, who is not exactly himself, abducts her. Scully tries to save Jack while Mulder tries to save Scully.

SCULLYVISION

Scully works with another agent on a sting again, this time he's not only a friend like Tom Colton, but he's Jack Willis, ex-lover. We've seen Scully on a date with Rod in Jersey Devil, being almost seduced by an alien, now we find out she did the wild thing with an instructor at Quantico. Bad Scully. Doesn't she know the rules? Ah, but that's why we love her. She seems to follow them, but she can throw us for a loop.

Lazarus was a showcase for the multifaceted Scully. We first see her as the agent with a cool head awaiting a bank robbery. When the robber starts shooting, Scully puts him down. In the next scene we encounter Dr. Scully who takes control of the situation which results in the revival of Agent Jack Willis, or his body anyway.

Even though fingerprints prove Jack Willis cut off Dupre's fingers, and knowing Jack as well as she must, she logically comes up with a reason of why he had done it, Post Traumatic Psychosis. Mulder is right when he leaps from the fact that Dupre and Lula were married, taking into account Lula's past and how they met while Dupre was a guard at a woman's facility where Lula was serving time for manslaughter, to think Dupre, in Jack's body, mutilated his corpse to get the ring.

We see TakeNoShitScully later when tough Lula attacks her. Our little agent has Lula down and cuffed in a matter of seconds. Don't mess with Scully. When she's not being tough, she's being smart. Hostage Scully figures out the situation well enough to try to get into Jack's head by reminding him of the times that they had together.

We see PartnerScully who maintains her objectivity with Mulder, remaining skeptical of his apparently loony theories. When Scully is kidnaped Mulder threatens revenge if anything happens to Scully. This partnership is now cemented.

HumanScully, shows questionable judgment by dating Jack when he was her instructor at the FBI Academy. They must have done it in secret because it is not allowed at the FBI. Let's hope this dating of her instructors doesn't turn out to be a pattern for Dana.

OH COME ON!

Granted, Scully's a doctor and she would have told the medics that, but would she be allowed into the ER with Jack?

One might question whether Dr. Scully knows the difference between hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia.

No one in that entire ER saw Dupre's body react to the Defibrillators used on Jack? Or even heard him flopping around on the gurney?

Sure, Jack's got an ass inside him, but he can unhook himself from a ventilator and walk out of the hospital?

Along with clothing, the coroner would have taken Dupre's ring off too.

Mulder makes a math error. He claims that it will take a hundred officers covering 30 homes an hour, three hours to cover 1,000 homes. Would you believe 20 minutes.

THINGS LEARNED
or All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned From the X Files

Fourteen minutes after a body has died, doctors want to give up.

If they have been dead over fourteen minutes, give up. Something spooky might happen that's going to cause a whole lot of trouble.

Here's a kooky thought, the increased electrical activity in a person who has had a past life experience renders a watch inoperable.

Never trust anyone named Lula.

Don't be alone with anyone Mulder suggests had been soul-swapped while having a near death experience.

JACK'S MONSTERVISION

Ah yes, soul transferrin' bank robbers. There's nothing special about Dupre (other than that cool hockey mask he wears to rob banks) until the guy gets a one way ticket to hell courtesy of our Ms. Scully and her gun. In the shootout in the bank, Jack Willis, FBI agent, ex teacher and boyfriend of Scully, is shot also. Instead of meeting the Grim Reaper, Dupre takes the Jack Willis exit and turns around. Now if you are having a hard time with my analogy, I mean his soul moves into Jack Willis' body while they're both in the ER. I guess transferring your soul and getting away with it isn't all that easy. Here's something to keep in mind if you are playing the home game: Do some research. Sure, you might transfer your soul at the spur of the moment, but if you and your soul transferrin' buddy write with different hands or he has diabetes and you don't, an intrepid agent might catch you. Now you can't blame Dupre for coming back for true love, and find out that he was set up, but he could have covered his tracks a lot better. Because of this I'm giving him 3 out of 5 body switching tattoos.

WRITER
Alex Gansa/Howard Gordon

Good episode. Cool concept. Interesting interplay between characters and had strong suspense. The story of the pilot was especially interesting.

DIRECTOR
David Nutter

Cool slide of the mask across the bank floor after Dupre is shot. Nice work making us see into Dupre's new life in the form of Jack Willis. His look when he first sees Scully, a woman Jack dated for over a year, but Dupre could only see the woman who shot him at the bank. Also, when Scully realized, too late, that Mulder was right about Jack not being quite himself.

RUNNING TALLIES
Guns - Scully shoots, she scores
Scully types out a report
Cell Phones
Cross necklace

SCORE CARD FOR SAVING EACH OTHER'S ASS
Scully - 3 - Mulder - 4
She couldn't save herself while handcuffed to a radiator.

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

Mulder saw Scully sitting in the office reflecting on the events of the last few days:

"Hey, Scully... your instructor? What's up with that?"

"Look Mulder, not that it's any of your business but it was foolish on my part. We were discreet and eventually broke it off civilly and no harm was done. And besides, I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay."

"And one more thing. Who are you to question my judgment in past relationships? I can just utter the name Phoebe and that should bring this conversation to a screeching halt."

"Okay, Scully!"

ATHENAEUM

Scully walked down the creaking staircase to what she had come to know as a black hole of libraries. Each time she visited there was a different librarian, or Curator, as they all seemed to prefer to be called.

This time it was a very elderly gentlemen who greeted her. He was dressed impeccably and bowed to her in a courteous greeting. Scully asked for information on near death experience, attempting to come to grips with what happened to Jack.

The elderly man who introduced himself simply as 'Joseph', vanished among the looming book stacks. Scully heard shuffling and the crashing of a huge text to the floor. Joseph seemed like such a kind man to Scully. Suddenly she heard...what was it? Cackling? Impossible, the old man was way too somber for any sort of laughing, especially anything that sounded as sinister as that.

Joseph emerged with many books and periodicals and shrugged off Scully's offer of assistance. "There's so much information here, that it would take you a lifetime to sort through it," said Joseph. "And what we don't know about Near Death Experiences, or NDE's as I like to call them, could fill two libraries. What we do know, young lady, is that the study of death is as old as life itself. Even the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes NDE's that are remarkably similar to those being experienced today. In the 70's however, there was a huge resurgence in the study of death and the reporting of experiences among people who had died, only to return to this Earthly plane. Many people who had 'nearly' died and those who had 'actually technically' died and were resuscitated, reported experiences that were amazingly similar."

Scully's scientific mind searched for an answer, "Some would say that this is all just rumor and hype?"

"Hardly," Joseph firmly shook his head no. "Many carefully conducted medical research studies have been completed. NDE's are generally believed to be of three general types. Autoscopy or the out of body sensation of floating above the room only to look down and see oneself and the entire room in detail. Transcendence or passage through a dark tunnel into the beautiful white light of another dimension where they were greeted and sent back by deceased relatives and friends. Third, the NDE is a combination of the two experiences."

"But aren't there medical and neurological explanations for these similar experiences?" Scully had to argue. "Temporal lobe seizures, drugs, oxygen deprivation, fear induced chemical releases, hallucinations, recollections of the birth trauma, etc."

"None of the above... except maybe the etc. as in something we haven't discovered yet."

"You sound like you know a lot about death," said Scully.

"I know it intimately."

"How is that?"

"I was once known as the Angel of Death."

The blurt of a laugh caught in Scully's throat as Joseph grabbed her wrist quite firmly. "Come, my curious friend. Come back with me among the stacks. You want to know about NDE's? There is only one way to really know. You must experience it for yourself."

Joseph led her to the back among the dusty books and thrust Scully into a chair with amazing strength. He had her hands and feet strapped to the chair before she fully realized that this old man was remarkably strong and very quick. By the time she felt any danger, she was bound tightly.

"Do not be afraid," he cooed, as a madman would to a patient. "This will be a near death experience, not a death experience. First I must remove your jewelry." Joseph reached for the gold cross and uttered 'verboten' as he grasped it firmly and ripped it from her neck. "And your gold fillings."

"What?" Scully felt the surge of fear crawl up her neck. She also felt her weapon pressed into her back but she could not move even an inch. "Who, who are you?"

"Ah, my accent, still noticeable after all these years, is giving me away. I am Josef Mengele, the misunderstood Auschwitz victim."

"Victim? Perpetrator is more accurate. Let me go you crazy bastard!" Scully felt the pin prick in her arm and the sudden rush of relaxation surge through her veins and up into her brain. Her eyelids fluttered. The evil Doctor became blurry and then merged with the books beyond and above him. Then her eyes shut and she felt as if she had begun to float upward.

With a frightening jolt, Scully awoke from her nightmare. It took her a while to figure out where she was. On her couch. Her eyes turned to see the ending credits of Schindler's List on her TV.

QUOTES

SCULLY I'm a doctor. Go up to 400, or I'll do it myself.

MULDER Lovely couple.

SCULLY Am I boring you?
MULDER What does it look like?
SCULLY Two heartbeats.

MULDER Two men died in that crash room, Scully. One man came back. The question is... which one?

MULDER I sense a big "but" coming.

COP Well there's not a lot of family resemblance left because of the rats and the .45 he took in the face.

MULDER (smugly) Happy Birthday, Scully.
SCULLY (confused) You're two months early.

SCULLY Your name is Jack Willis. You were born February 23, 1957. You live at 51 Stanhope.
WILLIS My name is Warren James Dupre. And I was born in Klammath Falls, Oregon in the Year of the Rat.

WILLIS You left me to die on that table while you tried to save your friend!

SCULLY Jack Willis is diabetic. Which means you're diabetic.

LULA It wasn't my brother who set you up.

LULA She's alive. She's not happy, but she's alive.

AGENT BUSKIN Mulder says he's got something.
AGENT WESTON What? An alien virus or new information on the Kennedy assassination?
AGENT BUSKIN Hey, Mulder's all right. You should pay attention. You might learn something from the man.