Historical note: This is the first episode of The X-Files ever to carry a parental advisory for graphic violence, dealing with themes of incest and infanticide.

As the story begins, a sordid birth is taking place in a run-down home on a stormy evening. The newborn baby is detached from the mother by a hideously deformed man wielding a pair of scissors. The man and two other men look at the baby, then take it out into the thunderstorm and bury it in a shallow grave.

The following day, a group of boys playing a game of baseball in Home, Pennsylvania discover the oozing bloody body of the dead newborn under their home plate. Mulder and Scully are on the scene fairly quickly, aided by Home's local sheriff, Andy Taylor. While Scully is examining the crime scene, Mulder comments that if he were to ever leave the FBI and settle down, it would be in a place like Home.

Scully and Mulder take interest in the Peacock residence, a dilapidated old home dating to the Civil War which is nearest to the crime scene. Sheriff Taylor tells Mulder and Scully the story of the Peacock home. Years ago, the Peacock boys' parents were in a terrible car accident. The father was killed, but the boys dragged the mother home before emergency medical care could arrive to help her; everyone presumes she is dead as well. The three deformed Peacock boys now live alone in Home's very own "haunted house."

Scully's autopsy of the dead baby reveals that it had nearly every birth defect imaginable, but its actual cause of death was suffocation; the baby was buried alive. Outside the police station, Mulder and Scully discuss the moral implications of genetic defects; in the end, Scully becomes convinced that the Peacock boys are holding some poor woman hostage and using her to produce offspring. Mulder, for his part, sees Scully as a "mother figure" for the first time.

Mulder and Scully head over to the Peacock homestead to see what they can find. When they arrive, they find that the house is largely deserted and can find no trace of the Peacocks. In a more humorous moment, Mulder shows feign concern when he finds an old newspaper announcing the death of Elvis. Yet they do find bloody evidence of a recent birth; both Mulder and Scully now believe there is enough evidence to make an arrest. (Sheriff Taylor later issues an arrest warrant.) Unbeknownst to our agents, someone has been quietly hiding and listening to the entire conversation. Later, she instructs the boys to make sure that no one interferes with their home.

That night, Mulder and Scully settle in at their hotel. In the town which Sheriff Taylor described as a place where "no one locks their doors," Mulder jams a chair against his hotel room door after discovering that the lock is broken. He settles in for an evening of watching one of those "Trials of Life" programs on TV. Across town, the Peacock boys hop into their ancient white Cadillac and turn on the radio, which cranks out Johnny Mathis' "Wonderful, Wonderful." The boys drive to Sheriff Taylor's home, break in, and then brutally murder Taylor and his wife.

The following morning, Taylor's deputy, Barney, finds the bodies of the sheriff and his wife. Mulder and Scully arrive on the scene shortly thereafter. Scully is now more concerned than ever that the woman the Peacocks are holding hostage is in grave danger. Rather than wait a day for backup from the Pittsburgh office, they decide to go in alone, today.

Mulder, Scully, and Barney stake out the Peacock house. Barney goes up to the door and lets himself in . . . only to be greeted by one of the Peacocks' booby traps, which spears him right through his gut. The Peacock boys attack and hack Barney to bits. Mulder makes an offhand remark about how they're watching men reverted to the most primitive behavior, seeking only to survive.

To create a distraction, Mulder and Scully release all of the Peacocks' pigs from their pen. While the boys are busy rounding up the pigs, Mulder and Scully slip into the house, avoiding the booby trap that finished off Barney. Inside, they find none other than Ma Peacock lying on her bed, instead of some poor helpless woman. The Peacock's oldest boy, Edmund, has been incestuously fathering her children, including the two younger brothers, in an attempt to keep the family alive. She is in no need of the FBI's "rescue," and is in fact proud of her boys for their loyalty to the family.

The boys return to the house, and in the ensuing fight, the two younger boys are gunned down by Mulder and Scully. But when our two intrepid agents turn around, Edmund and Ma Peacock have slipped away. As the episode concludes, Edmund gets out from behind the wheel of the family Cadillac and checks on Ma Peacock, who is hiding in the trunk. They're going to have to move away, she says, and start a new home. Edmund puts the car in gear and drives away into the night, with "Wonderful, Wonderful" blaring away on the radio.

May 1996: On a plane from Africa bound for America, a young black businessman steps into the bathroom. The door closes for a moment, then he turns, looks up, and screams. Just as the plane is about to land, we see another man with pale black skin and intense yellow eyes, Samuel Aboah, looking at the body of the dead man. Aboah leaves the bathroom as if everything is fine, passing a stewardess on the way back to his seat. Seconds later, a stewardess discovers the body, pale white as a ghost, drained of all skin pigmentation.

Story note: The closing tag line in the credits reads "Deceive Inveigle Obfuscate" instead of "The Truth Is Out There".

Three months later, Scully is called into FBI headquarters early in the morning by Skinner and a doctor from the Philadelphia Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In the Philadelphia area, four black men have disappeared over the last few months. The Philadelphia PD is completely stumped. Then, last night, the last man reported missing was found, all of the pigmentation drawn from his body. The CDC is concerned about an outbreak of a fatal disease. Scully is brought on board the case because of her experience as a doctor.

Mulder joins Scully as she is beginning her autopsy of the victim; he is immediately skeptical of a disease theory. Mulder immediately thinks of a conspiracy theory and suspects foul play. Scully chastises him that "not everything is a conspiracy to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate." Nonetheless, Mulder decides to join the hunt. Meanwhile, Samuel Aboah meets with his immigration counselor, Marcus Duff. Duff explains that when Samuel gains American citizenship, he will be able to bring over all of his relatives. Aboah looks almost horrifically delighted at the prospect.

Mulder starts going over the forensic evidence with Agent Pendrell. Pendrell found asbestos fibers and an African seed on the victim, a seed indigenous only to a rare plant in western Africa. Mulder contacts Scully on the phone and asks her about some of the chemicals the seed secretes; Scully tells Mulder that the compound inhibits higher function in the brain, though it isn't necessarily lethal. For her own part, Scully has found massive damage to the victim's pituitary gland, which secretes melanin, the hormone causing skin pigmentation. She has found the source of the depigmentation, but is still no closer to the actual cause.

Mulder meanders his way up to NYC to meet with Marita Covarrubias, his new contact-in-waiting. He asks for her help in the case. Though she is initially hesitant to help, she drops some cryptic hints about "unknown species" crossing the US border every day.

Back in Philadelphia, Aboah stalks his next victim, taking down a young man near the construction site he works at. Mulder and Scully are on the scene early the next morning. Mulder has turned up some interesting evidence, presumably with Marita's help; a photograph of the man killed at the beginning of the episode. His body was shipped home by the Burkina Faso embassy before it could be autopsied. Mulder and Scully go to the Philadelphia INS office and question Duff, who is hesitant to help. Scully convinces Duff that the FBI is investigating a "public health crisis," and he provides them with Aboah's name. Mulder and Scully stake out Aboah's apartment; when he shows up and sees them, he bolts. After a short chase, Mulder finds Aboah hiding in an alley . . . squeezed inside a drain pipe.

Aboah is taken to the hospital, where it is found that he has a bizarre malady--he has no pituitary gland. X-rays also reveal a strange instrument lodged in Aboah's throat--the device he uses to get at his victims' pituitary glands. Scully remains convinced that there is a pathogen at work; Mulder believes Scully needs to "look up from the microscope" and look for a motive. Aboah eventually escapes from the hospital by squeezing himself into a drawer on a cart.

Mulder runs off to meet with someone he knows "has conspired to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate" -- the minister at the Burkina Faso embassy. Confronted with the death on the airplane, the minister relates the folk tale of the Teliko--a creature which hides in tiny dark places during the day and comes out at night to kill--stealing pigmentation from their victims' bodies. As a child, the minister lost his cousin in a similar event; he is deathly concerned that the Teliko is real, and has come to the United States.

Aboah is stopped in the nick of time before finishing off his next victim -- Marcus Duff. While the search is on, Mulder unveils his theory to Scully: a lost African tribe, of which Aboah is a member, which has evolved with no pituitary gland and needs to feed off of other humans to survive. Mulder and Scully drive to a construction site, where an old building is being torn down; Mulder is sure this is where the asbestos that Pendrell found came from.

Inside the building, Mulder is quickly put out of action by one of Aboah's darts, paralyzed. Scully continues the pursuit, finding several more of Aboah's victims along the way. Just as she finds Mulder, Mulder flicks his eyes to warn Scully that Aboah is approaching behind her. Scully turns and blasts a few holes in Aboah with her pistol as he is in the process of pouncing on them. Aboah is charged with five murders, but is unlikely to survive in the hospital long enough to stand trial.

In her field journal, Scully writes that she is convinced that science will eventually find Aboah's place in evolution. Yet she remains concerned that fear of the unknown us will cause us to "deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate" -- hiding the truth "from others and from ourselves."

Historical note: this was the first episode to air in the new time slot on Sunday night.

The episode opens in Traverse City, Michigan, as a woman, Mary, and her boyfriend, Billy, pull into a drugstore parking lot. The boyfriend is in an incredible hurry, and acts cagey when he sees a police car passing by. Mary goes inside to have her passport photo taken. Realizing that she doesn't have her money with her, she runs out to get it. Arriving at the car, a large man in a raincoat bumps into her. Billy is sitting in the driver's seat with a deep puncture wound through his head. Mary suddenly collapses outside the car, paralyzed; the man in the raincoat collects her into his car and leaves. Inside the drug store, the druggist finishes developing the photo and is surprised not to see a normal photo, but Mary's face contorted in terror, a scream on her lips.

Mulder and Scully are on the scene three days later. There is no evidence to be found, since it was all washed away in the rain; the only lead to follow is the distorted passport photo. At the drugstore, the druggist shows Mulder and Scully the camera. Looking around, Scully sees that the film is expired and stored next to heat. While Scully initially suspected the druggist, after seeing him in person as a gentle old man, she changes her mind. While Scully also suspects that the film's date and storage near heat could explain the distortion, Mulder retorts that that couldn't explain why she looks like she's screaming in the photo. But he must admit that he doesn't really have a theory of his own. Just then, a policeman comes in and informs Mulder and Scully that the case may have just been closed.

At the Mary's house, Mulder and Scully meet a postal inspector; Mary was a sorter at a post office and was intercepting credit cards and running a scam on other peoples' accounts. The inspector thinks she faked her own death and planned to leave the country; but Mulder can't understand why she would murder her boyfriend, who for all intents she appeared to be very much in love with. On a hunch, Mulder finds Mary's polaroid camera and shoots off a few shots. He explains a past incident to Scully where a man could project images into a photo by concentrating on them--psychic photography. When the photos develop, Mary's screaming face is seen once again. Mulder thinks the killer is unwittingly projecting his mental impressions onto the camera; Scully just thinks the film has been doctored in some way.

Later in the day, Mary is found wandering by a highway, a vacant stare on her face. She is picked up by police officers. Rushed to the hospital, they find that Mary is doped up on twilite sleep, a topical anesthetic. A PET scan reveals that Mary has been given a botched frontal lobotomy, using a method involving inserting a surgical lancet through the eye socket. Mary, gaining some awareness of her surroundings, repeats the word "Unruhe" over and over again. Just then, a policeman comes in and tells Mulder and Scully that there's been another abduction. We then cut to a woman tied up in a chair with tape over her mouth. An unseen figure talks to her in German, occasionally using the word "Unruhe" and wielding a long, sharp needle-like instrument.

Arriving at the next crime scene that evening, an accountant is found murdered in his office, with a pick rammed into his brain; the missing woman is Alice Brandt, his secretary. Mulder searches for clues, unable to find much. Wondering about what the word "Unruhe" means, Scully informs Mulder that it means "unrest" in German. Unfortunately, Mulder is unable to find any evidence of psychic photography, which reinforces his theory that the killer doesn't know he's leaving the evidence behind. Scully suddenly notices an emblem for a construction company, because the accountant's office building is under construction. Comparing to photos from the earlier crime scene (also near a site), she notices that the construction company is the same. Scully thinks the killer may be a construction worker. Mulder heads back to D.C. to have the psychic photo out in a lab, and leaves Scully to follow her construction lead. Briefly, another cut of the woman tied up in a chair is seen. She is trying to scream and cries profusely.

At the FBI's photo lab, Mulder has the distortions on the edge of the psychic photos enhanced, and manages to pull up what he thinks is the killer's face. Back in Michigan, Scully chats with the construction company boss; they find that there were 17 workers overlapping at both job sites. They then try to find out who was in charge at each site. At the photo lab, a little more image manipulation reveals a shadow--the killer's shadow--in the background.

Heading to a construction site, Scully meets up with Gerald Schnauz, who was the foreman at one of the crime scene construction sites. Schnauz is doing some high-reach work and walks around on stilts. Schnauz says his crew is on lunch break and he didn't hire any day laborers. Just then, Mulder calls Scully and tells her that he thinks the killer's legs (based on the shadow) are unusually long. Seeing Schnauz on stilts, Scully suddenly realizes the he is the killer. She mutters the word "Unruhe" and draws her gun; Schnauz takes off running. Scully eventually stops him; while patting him down, she is pricked by a large sharp instrument Schnauz is carrying in his pocket.

Under arrest and under questioning from Scully, Schnauz feigns total innocence. Schnauz says the instrument he has is for putting holes in sheet rock. Mulder presses Schnauz and runs over his prior record: he was arrested in 1980 for attacking his father with an axe handle, so severely that his father was put in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Schnauz was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was in a mental hospital until 1986; he says he spent the last ten years taking care of his father, making amends, until he died this year. Mulder also finds that Schnauz's sister committed suicide in 1980. Scully asks Schnauz point-blank where Alice Brandt is. He simply tells Scully she looks "troubled." Mulder confronts him with the psychic photo, showing him the face in the margin of the photo--his father's face. Schnauz finally cracks and says that Alice Brandt is "safe from the Howlers." He tells the police where Alice is, and they pick her up in the middle of the woods; she has already been lobotomized when they find her. Mulder thinks that Schnauz thought he may have been curing these women somehow; but Scully is depressed at her failure and doesn't want to continue.

Back at the prison, Schnauz is being booked. After being fingerprinted and photographed by a deputy, the impossible happens. When Schnauz's rap sheet comes up on the computer, the photo is replaced by a picture of the deputy with his head blown open. The startled deputy turns; Schnauz grabs the deputy's gun and shoots him in the head.

At the booking room, all Mulder can do is stare at the rap sheet photo in disbelief. Just then, a report of an attack on the druggist at the drugstore where Mary was picked up is reported. Schnauz arrived, took all the passport film, and the necessary chemicals to prepare more twilite sleep. On another hunch, Mulder feeds money into a photo booth and says he'll meet Scully outside. At their car, Scully is attacked and drugged on twilite sleep by Schnauz. Inside the drugstore, Mulder collects his photos, and is horrified to see Scully's screaming face. He runs outside, but Schnauz is already at the wheel and tears away, leaving Mulder in the dust.

Analyzing the photo, Mulder sees what looks like six fingers sticking up. The police report that Scully's car has turned up; Mulder thinks he'll switch cars several times. The police have essentially nothing to go on. Examining Schnauz's wallet, Mulder finds an obituary with a picture for Schnauz's father. The father was in the Korean war and was also a retired dentist.

Mulder heads with the police to Gerald Schnauz Sr.'s old dental office. They find footprints in the dust, and see that the dental chair from the exam room is missing. At some unknown location, Scully awakens, bound to the dental chair with duct tape; she spies the long needle instrument resting nearby on a tray. Scully demands to be released, and Schnauz begins talking in German. Scully surprises Schnauz and counters with some German of her own, saying that she has no unrest and doesn't need to be saved. She presses him, wondering if she reminds him of his sister. Schnauz says that his sister was killed by the Howlers. Scully then asks him about the Howlers. Gerry explains that the Howlers live in your head and make you do things you don't want to. Scully thinks that maybe Schnauz's father did something to his sister and Gerry just made the Howlers up to explain it. Gerry becomes enraged and threatens Scully with the needle. Just to prove his point, he pulls out the passport camera he stole from the drugstore and shoots a few photos of himself.

Realizing that time is running out, Mulder makes the missing connection. The six fingers he sees in the psychic photo of Scully are six granite tombstones in the picture of Schnauz's father's burial. The police race to the cemetery; Mulder spots a parked RV. He tries the door and finds it locked. In the RV, Gerry's developed pictures show him dead on the floor. Schnauz then proceeds to tape up Scully's mouth, saying that time is running out. Just then, the trailer rocks as Mulder continues to try the door. Looking in the front seat, Mulder sees a keychain with a tooth hanging off of it and realizes he's in the right place. Mulder smashes the door open with a pipe and shoots Schnauz just an instant before he was about to lobotomize Scully.

Later, Scully finishes her field report. Schnauz left a diary, written to his father, in the second person. A list of the women he wanted to "save" is listed--including Scully. She speculates that "to pursue monsters, we must understand them. We must venture into their minds. Only in doing so, do we risk letting them venture into ours?"

As the episode opens, we see Mulder standing alone in a field, looking at two old photos: one of a young woman, the other of a Civil War soldier. A few lines from the Willam Blake poem "Paracelsus" are heard on voice over. These few eloquent lines are suggestive of the reincarnation of the soul.

We then cut directly to an FBI raid on the Temple of the Seven Stars, an apocalyptic cult in Apison, Tennessee. The agents are searching for illegal firearms, and have arrest warrants for several members of the cult, including Vernon Ephesian, the leader. Mulder and Scully are along for the ride; unfortunately, the suspects are nowhere to be found. Mulder catches sight of a door and a field, which jars something in his mind. He heads out of the compound into the field, seemingly without reason, and finds several of the cult members hiding in an old Civil War bunker.

After the arrest, the entire FBI crew and Skinner go over a tape of a phone tip from one of the cult members, "Sydney," which instigated the FBI raid. Skinner is upset because the firearms have been hidden, and Ephesian and his wives are being held on ridiculous charges which will be dismissed in less than 24 hours. The push is on to find the weapons and get an arraignment before it's too late. They also need to find Sydney, the informant.

Scully and Mulder talk with Skinner after the meeting. We learn that our intrepid duo was brought on the case due to rumored "psychic abilities" in Ephesian, astral projection and the like. Scully thinks that Ephesian is a paranoid sociopath fixed on the book of Revelations, who has enough charisma to bring his wives to the brink of suicide.

Mulder and Scully then proceed to question Ephesian; he believes that his church is a reflection of the seven churches of the Apocalypse, and also believes that he has been reincarnated. Ephesian then waxes philosophic about the Lord saving one's soul and bringing it back into the world again. Mulder then decides that they should question Melissa, age 25, one of Ephesian's wives.

Melissa has been in the compound for a year, but has no children by Ephesian. When pressed about whether or not she's seen any child abuse at the temple, Melissa's psyche collapses and she becomes Sydney, a tried and true Brooklyner living in the 1940s. Scully first thinks that Melissa has multiple-personality disorder, but Mulder thinks she has dropped into a past life.

Mulder thinks that taking Melissa back to the compound will jar a memory or the memory of a personality within her and make her more cooperative. Mulder and Scully have a bit of an argument of the usefulness of this idea with Skinner, but given that 50 lives may be at stake, Skinner sanctions the action. Scully later chastises Mulder for not mentioning his past lives theory to Skinner.

Once back at the compound, Melissa's memory is jarred several times, and her personality flips from Melissa to a little girl named Lily to Syndney to, after looking out the door (where Mulder looked during the raid) to Sarah Kavanaugh, a southern woman during the Civil War. Melissa charges off into the field, and Mulder follows. Melissa/Sarah relates an account of a Civil War battle which took place in the field in 1863 . . . a battle in which she watched Fox Mulder die.

On the drive back to the FBI command center, Mulder arranges for a hypnotist to be waiting for Melissa. Scully and Mulder argue about the value of the hypnotist; Scully thinks there is no value in regressing Melissa into past lives. Mulder wants to believe, but Scully reminds him that he called Vernon Ephesian a sociopath because he believes he was alive in ancient Greece; she wants to know what makes Ephesian a sociopath and Mulder not.

Once under hypnosis, Melissa reveals that she has witnessed child abuse at the Temple; a mother and her son were brutally beaten by Ephesian over the simple matter of a stolen candy bar. Under stress, Melissa turns into Sydney and informs the agents that Vernon and the others have hidden the weapons in one of the Civil War bunkers, but (s)he doesn't know which. Mulder regresses her to the life of Sarah, hoping to find some answers; the Sarah personality shows an obvious love and longing for Mulder. She says that she and Mulder have only come together in passing "in this life."

Pressing to find the truth and going against Scully's better judgment, Mulder allows himself to be hypnotized and regressed into past lives. He first lands in a World War II Polish ghetto; he is a Jewish woman, his son is his sister Samantha, his dead father is Scully, a Gestapo officer is the Cigarette-Smoking Man ("evil comes back as evil"), and his husband is Melissa. Mulder suggests that souls may come back different every time, but always together. He then drops back to the Civil War battle, where he is a Confederate solider named Sullivan Biddle, Scully is his sergeant, and Melissa is Sarah Kavanaugh.

Searching through the county Hall of Records, Scully finds the names Sullivan Biddle and Sarah Kavanaugh in the county register, and then finds photographs of both which look remarkably like Mulder and Melissa. When he sees the pictures, Mulder waxes philosophic and asks Scully if they had known that they had always been friends if that would have changed how they looked at each other. Scully's only answer is that she wouldn't change a thing -- except "maybe that Flukeman thing. I could've lived without that just fine."

The FBI is out of time, and Ephesian and all his wives (including Melissa) are released. Mulder tries one last time to convince Melissa of the reality of the past life scenario, but she won't believe it. The FBI continues the search on the battlefield, because the Temple doesn't own the land. Ephesian calls his followers to worship and begins preaching hellfire and brimstone; believing that the FBI and ATF are the devil's army, he thinks that he can deny his followers to the devil and gain them salvation.

FBI agents move on the compound again and come under fire from Temple followers; one agent is gunned down almost immediately. Risking life and limb, Mulder walks unarmed across the field. He survives unscathed, because Ephesian has poisoned all of his followers, creating his own mini-Jonestown. Only Melissa and Ephesian survive a first dose of poison, but a second finishes them off before Mulder can arrive. Mulder wades through the pile of dead bodies and then takes Melissa in his arms, looking out to the field with a teary face; she has the picture of Sarah Kavanaugh clutched in her hand. The episode closes with a retrospective of Mulder alone in the field, looking at the Civil War photographs and mulling over the lines from "Paracelsus."

The episode opens in the Greenwood Memorial Hospital in Chicago, as Nurse Rebecca Waite consults with a patient about to undergo a cosmetic surgery and tries to soothe her fears about the operation. Nurse Waite goes to tell Dr. Lloyd, the surgeon, that his patient is ready. Dr. Lloyd, seeming very short, tells Waite to prep his next two patients. We see Lloyd preparing to scrub in -- and he's scrubbing his fingernails so hard that they're bleeding. Lloyd then begins his liposuction, goes out of control, and hacks at the patient until she dies.

Later, Mulder and Scully begin their investigation of Dr. Lloyd. Lloyd feels great remorse and doesn't know what possessed him to do what he did. Mulder says that this may be a case of spirit or demon possession. Scully, looking for a more rational explanation, asks Lloyd if he's been taking any medication. He says that he's been taking sleeping pills, but under the advice of his lawyer, refuses to answer further questions. Scully later discovers that Lloyd's sleeping pills are new and somewhat revolutionary because they work directly on the central nervous system; however, they are also highly addictive and have adverse effects on behavior. Dr. Lloyd went through over 19 refills in 5 years. Scully suspects addiction is the cause, but Mulder is doubtful because Lloyd has performed thousands of surgeries with nary a mishap.

In examining the operating room/crime scene, Mulder notices five spots in the shape of a pentagram marked on the floor. Scully, still skeptical, thinks Lloyd was an accident waiting to happen; Mulder is convinced sorcery or black magic is at work. Mulder and Scully briefly question Nurse Waite, but she is hesitant and unwilling to answer questions.

Afterward, the doctors sit down at a meeting and discuss the implications of Lloyd's mistake. They are deeply concerned about the FBI's probe. We then cut to another operating room, where Nurse Waite is prepping a patient -- by dropping leeches on her stomach which dig in and make wounds tracing out the shape of a pentagram. And then we make another cut to Mulder and Scully reviewing the videotape of the operating room where Lloyd killed his patient; the pentagram is clearly visible in the OR prior to the killing. But something doesn't quite fit -- the pentagram is supposed to be a positive symbol of protection. Also, Mulder has noticed that one of the ingredients in Dr. Lloyd's sleeping pills is an herb used in hexing rituals, and it is the only such medicine which has this herb in it. Mulder suspects that whatever ritual is taking place is not finished.

Back at the hospital, two of the doctors, Shannon and Alacqua, are relieved that the FBI has backed off on its probe. Alacqua then calmly leaves and mindlessly murders Dr. Shannon's next patient. Upon seeing this, Nurse Waite bolts from the room. Alacqua, just as Lloyd, claims he was out of his mind and didn't know what he was doing; during the investigation, Scully is shocked to discover that Alacqua is taking the same sleeping pills that Dr. Lloyd was taking. Mulder, meanwhile, has discovered the bruises that Nurse Waite put on one of the patients in the shape of a pentagram. The doctors finally inform Mulder and Scully that similar incidents happened in the hospital several years ago, and Rebecca Waite was a nurse then as well in the ward. She transferred out after the incident, and has just recently transferred back into the ward.

We cut to Rebecca Waite at home, candles lighting her house as she conducts a strange ritual in a strange tongue. Mulder and Scully pay a visit, but by the time they arrive, she is nowhere to be found. Elsewhere, Dr. Franklin returns home to find someone in his house. Upstairs in his bathtub, he finds Rebecca Waite lying immersed in a pool of blood; Waite leaps out of the pool and attacks him, apparently intent on killing him, but in the end he overpowers her. As she is being dragged away, she cries out that she wasn't strong enough to stop "it". She then vomits up dozens of straight pins; at the hospital, she later dies from severe internal bleeding. Mulder informs Franklin of his suspicion that Waite is practicing ritual magic; Franklin, tired from his ordeal, excuses himself to rest. Interestingly, when he lies down on his bed, he floats straight off of it.

Rooting around Waite's house, Mulder finds her book on witchcraft where he finds reference to the possibility of a possessed person mysteriously vomiting objects that they never swallowed. He also finds a witches' calendar; so far, two of the witches high holy days coincide with the two victims' birthdays. Mulder thinks that Waite was actually trying to protect the patients from something -- in all likelihood Dr. Franklin. Suddenly on the move, Mulder and Scully arrive at the hospital just in time to see yet another puzzled surgeon killing a third victim.

Mulder and Scully question Dr. Shannon. She is initially reluctant to talk; she says that the previous incident years ago was quietly covered up by the hospital because of the revenue value of the aesthetic surgery unit. She says that there were five deaths in the original incident; four pateints, and a doctor, Dr. Clifford Cox, who died of a drug overdose. Mulder discovers that the original four patients all had birthdays on the witches' sabbaths; the only one who didn't was Dr. Cox. Mulder has Dr. Shannon run a photo of Dr. Cox through a cosmetic surgery program; after a little morphing action, Dr. Cox looks just like Dr. Franklin. Mulder thinks that Dr. Cox performed a blood sacrifice to transmute himself into Dr. Franklin, and is now in the process of doing the ritual again.

Dr. Shannon encounters Dr. Franklin and confronts him. Franklin "teleports" surgical instruments off of a table into Shannon's body, and she collapses. Looking around Franklin's house, Mulder finds an inverted pentagram inscribed in the floor; the names of the dead patients are inscribed on the points, as is Dr. Shannon's name. Trying to stop the ritual, Mulder tries to delay the surgery to save Shannon's life; meanwhile, Dr. Franklin is seen slowly cutting off his old skin to step into a new body. In the end, it turns out that Dr. Shannon was merely a decoy; elsewhere, a fourth patient is mysteriously killed. Her birthday is October 31, Halloween, or Samhain -- the last of the witches' sabbaths. Dr. Franklin has disappeared, though Mulder finds his old skin layer in an empty operating room.

Across the country, "Dr. Hartman" gets a job in aesthetic surgery in Los Angeles. And we are left with the greater than sneaking suspicion that Dr. Hartman is the reborn and transfigured Dr. Franklin.

[Note: This highly unconventional episode tells the story of the Cigarette-Smoking Man in four parts, which I refer to sequentially in order below.] As the episode opens, the Cigarette-Smoking man (CSM) sets up a pile of eavesdropping equipment and listens in on a conversation between Mulder, Scully, and the Lone Gunmen, the errant conspiracy theorists. The Lone Gunmen have, so they say, potentially discovered everything there is to know about CSM.

In part 1, we learn that CSM was born in 1940. His father was a communist activist executed for treason before CSM could even walk. The CSM's mother was a smoker who died of lung cancer before he could even walk. He became an orphan, a ward of the state. He was an avid reader, and a loner. Then, he vanishes. We then cut to 1962, where CSM is apparently a captain in the Army and at least an acquaintance of Bill Mulder, our faithful Agent Mulder's father. Bill Mulder shows the CSM a picture of Mulder as an infant with his mother.

CSM is called before a bunch of generals and government bigwigs. After a short interrogation, which reveals CSM's hatred of communism and his father, CSM is contracted by a military-government conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, whom the conspiracy views as a communist sympathizer. CSM accepts the assignment, knowing that all traces of his existence will be eradicated if he goes through with it.

We then cut to Dallas, Texas, November 1963. CSM meets with Lee Harvey Oswald, who is being set up as a patsy to distract from the true conspiracy. Later, from a river outlet pipe next to the infamous Grassy Knoll, CSM shoots Kennedy; in the equally infamous Book Depository, Oswald's only concern at the same time is what kind of soda he wants. Realizing he has been set up, Oswald returns to his boarding room, grabs a pistol, kills a police officer, and then heads to the Texas Theater, where CSM said he would be waiting. Police bust into the theater and Oswald is taken away, while CSM calmly watches, puffing his first of many cigarettes (which he has avoided up until this point).

In Part 2, it is now 1968. CSM is in the process of writing a novel entitled "Take a Chance" and is still deeply involved in the conspiracy; in fact, he seems to be the nominal head of the conspiracy. The new target is Martin Luther King; King's civil rights movement is dangerous and has communist overtones. The conspiracy is concerned that King will convince blacks not to fight in Vietnam, and the first domino will fall. CSM suggests King's assassination, and says he will carry it out himself.

In Memphis, Tennessee, April 1968, CSM arrives with his weapons in tow. For a moment, we see him looking at the picture of Bill Mulder's wife and the infant Fox Mulder, almost wistfully. He sets up his patsy by sending the man off to the theater and then assassinates King. In the aftermath, CSM watches the news reports of King's funeral while mulling over the rejection letter he received from a publisher regarding his novel.

In Part 3, we cut to 1991. CSM is on the patch, trying to quit smoking. The scene is a Christmas Eve meeting with his underlings. We find that CSM is responsible for Clarence Thomas' confirmation troubles with Anita Hill, the Rodney King trial, the "Miracle on Ice" in the US/USSR Olympic hockey game, and the Bills' continued losses in the Super Bowl. As CSM's meeting with his cronies concludes, we learn that Gorbachev has resigned; all the enemies are gone. CSM's staff is concerned about Fox Mulder, but CSM says that he will handle it personally. He then politely refuses his cronies' requests to spend Christmas with them, as he has "family" of his own. On his way home, he stops by Mulder's office, but doesn't step in.

After getting another rejection letter, CSM gets a call from Deep Throat and CSM heads out to West Virginia at a tear. A UFO has crashed, and the government has an EBE in captivity. CSM and Deep Throat mull over the fact that they, two men in the shadows, are about to set the course of history once again. CSM says that a live EBE "would advance Bill Mulder's project by decades" but Deep Throat reminds him that secret international agreement requires the extermination of all EBEs. Deep Throat offers his gun to CSM to shoot the alien, saying "I'm the liar. You're the killer." CSM rebuts that he's never killed anyone. In the end, they decide who will do the deed by a coin toss -- and Deep Throat loses.

In Part 4, we see that CSM was directly responsible for bringing Scully onto the X-Files to help debunk Mulder's work. Through his pile of listening devices, CSM has been carefully monitoring Mulder and Scully's every word.

CSM finally gets his big break and a magazine agrees to publish his novel in serial format. He is fully prepared to resign from the conspiracy and give up his smoking habit forever. Unfortunately, when the magazine hits the newsstand, the publisher has chopped the story up and totally changed it. Depressed and angry, CSM tears up his resignation letter, resumes smoking, and muses out loud about how miserable life is, always passing you by. [This is the infamous "Life is like a box of chocolates" speech, which must be heard to be truly believed.]

In the end, the Lone Gunmen seek definitive proof and Frohike in particular is confident that proof will be found. Frohike apparently bases all of his information on CSM's published story, which appears to be largely autobiographical. Looking down his gun sight across from the Lone Gunmen's office, CSM lines up on Frohike and comes within a hair's breadth of killing him. At the last moment, he changes his mind, content in the fact that he can kill Frohike (or anyone, really) whenever he wants.

As the episode opens, Scully is giving testimony before a congressional committee. Scully reads her opening statment, where she states her belief in justice but also her belief that there are men in the government who think themselves above such things. She is interrupted several times by the committee, which is obviously unconcerned about what she has to say. Their only concern seems to be Scully's knowledge of the presumably missing Agent Mulder. As we fade to black, Scully steadfastly refuses to answer the question.

We open on the Harrow Convalescence Home in Boca Raton, Florida. In the middle of the night, a woman sneaks into the building and leads her elderly aunt outside to a waiting van. Inside the van, a euthanasia doctor stands ready to assist her in ending her life. As the lethal drugs take their course, the old woman begins issuing the oily black alien creatures from her nose. We fade to black on screams.

Story note: The closing tag line in the credits reads "E Pur Si Muove" (roughly translated from Italian as "And Yet It Moves") instead of "The Truth is Out There".

In St. Petersburg, Russia, a messenger contacts an older man, Vassily Peskow, at his home, carrying an urget message from "Comrade Arntzen in Krasnoyarsk." Peskow says that he is retired from this line of work; the messenger simply tells him that Arntzen says the Cold War isn't over. He hands Peskow a written message and then leaves.

Back at the prison camp in Tunguska, Mulder awakes in his cell and talks to the man in the next cell. He learns he has been exposed to the "black cancer," which comes from the rock. His neighbor, a captured geologist, has become a test subject, like all the others. He says hundreds of men have died in the tests; these tests are clearly not designed to elucidate a cure. Mulder says he only needs to live long enough to kill Krycek. The geologist hands Mulder his handmade knife (which he had planned to use to kill himself) so that he can make good on his promise.

In the exobiology lab in the US, Pendrell and Scully are still examining the paralyzed exobiologist. They discover some interesting small black organisms attached to the man's pineal gland. We then cut to Richmond, Virginia, and see Vassily Peskow hop onto a bus heading to Charlottesville. At the horse farm of the Well-Manicured Man (WMM) in Charlottesville, Peskow encounters a woman, Dr. Bonita Charne-Sayre, and promptly kills her by choking her to death.

Skinner finally tracks down Scully at her apartment. He is in an uproar because he wants answers about the diplomatic pouch. He wants to know the connections between the pouch, the dead man outside his apartment, and Krycek before he winds up perjuring himself in front of a Senate Subcommittee tomorrow. Scully tells Skinner that the pouch contained a "biohazardous organism." Skinner tells her that she has found the pouch's intended recipient: Dr. Bonita Charne-Sayer. Scully explains that Charne-Sayer is a well-known virologist who is an authority on variola virus--smallpox. Skinner informs Scully that Charne-Sayer was killed when a horse stepped on her throat in a riding accident.

Meanwhile, back at the prison camp, Mulder engineers his escape. While being taken out in some kind of work detail, he sees Krycek chummily associating with the work bosses and the doctor apparently in charge of the "black cancer" experimentation. Mulder breaks out of line, leaps on Krycek in the back of a delivery truck, and pounds him senseless. Mulder then steals the delivery truck and drives away. While in the process of escaping, Krycek regains his senses, slips off the back of the truck, and disappears into the woods. Mulder has his own problems, however, when he discovers that the truck's brakes are out. After bringing the truck to a crashing stop, he flees.

In Charlottesville, the Cigarette-Smoking Man (CSM) meets with WMM. CSM informs WMM of his knowledge of Dr. Charne-Sayre (WMM's personal physician) and her "accident." WMM knows that Charne-Sayre was murdererd and needs CSM's help. We also learn of WMM's indiscretion in taking Charne-Sayre as a lover. WMM wants her killer found; CSM wants the congressional investigation ended. WMM says he can't do that, but that Senator Sorenson "is an honorable man--they are all honorable men." CSM informs WMM that Mulder was captured in Tunguska and then escaped; he makes a strong warning message about "waking the Russian bear." In Tunguska, Krycek encounters a bunch of men in the woods who offer to protect him. Mulder, meanwhile, successfully hides out until nightfall.

The episode opens with Mulder fast asleep and dreaming. In the dream, Mulder follows a point of red light to Bosher's Run State Park. The light stops briefly on an El Camino and spells out the words "Mad Hat." The light then continues into the forest, where it comes to rest on the body of a little girl. The light forms the shape of a heart, the body begins to sink into the ground, and Mulder wakes with a start. Mulder looks up the park in the phone book, drives over in the middle of the night, and finds the scene exactly as he remembers from his dream. The next morning, he calls an FBI forensics team to the scene. He relates to Scully that he's had a recurring dream over the last three nights about this place; at that moment, the team unearths the skeleton of a little girl.

Mulder expects that the girl has been strangled with an electical cord, and is anxious to explore around the girl's chest, where he expects to find a piece of cloth in the shape of a heart missing. He says he knows the MO, which is that of John Lee Roche, who killed 13 girls aged 8-10. He indeed finds a cloth heart cut from the girl's clothes, and victim number 14 has been unearthed.

Back at FBI headquarters, Mulder explains that the killer, John Lee Roche, was hard to catch, and that his profile helped bring in Roche in 1990; the cases dated back to 1979. The case was called "Paper Hearts" because of the trophies that Roche took from his victims. It turns out that Roche was a vacuum cleaner salesman who traveled all over the northeast; he would use his sales as an opportunity to scope people's homes and look for children. Mulder explains that the hearts were never found, but were unnecessary because Roche confessed to 13 murders and was found to be telling the truth under polygraph. But it always bothered him; he always wanted to find and count the hearts.

Doing some work of her own, Scully identifies the victim as Addie Sparks, who went missing from her home in King-of-Prussia, PA, in 1975; this shocks Mulder, because this means that Roche started killing much earlier than the FBI thought. Mulder and Scully head to Pennsylvania to speak with Addie's father; he makes a positive ID of items of clothing from the crime scene. He says that he always thought missing was better than dead, but now that he knows, he's glad that his wife didn't live to see this day.

Leaving the home, Mulder spots a white El Camino, which reminds him of the car in his dream. He recalls that Roche drove an El Camino, which was sold at auction in 1992; Mulder wants to search the car to find the hearts. Mulder and Scully head to Delaware, where the car is in the possession of a teenager who is restoring the vehicle. Mulder makes a detailed search of the car, going as far as to cut the seat cushions open with his knife. Flashing to his dream for a moment and remembering the words "Mad Hat," Mulder decides to check the camper shell. Hidden in the shell's lining, he finds a copy of Alice in Wonderland, with not 13 or 14, but 16 hearts stuck in the pages. Two more victims.

Mulder and Scully head to the federal prison where Roche is serving his life term. They encounter Roche playing basketball; he seems undisturbed by the discovery of Addie Sparks or the 16 paper hearts. He says he lied and said 13 victims because it sounded "more magical." Mulder wants information, arguing Roche has nothing to lose; Roche counters that he has nothing to gain. Roche agrees to play along if Mulder sinks a field goal, which he does. Roche then demands the hearts in exchange for information, saying he knows Mulder's personal stake in the case.

Later, examining the evidence, Mulder falls asleep and has another dream. This time, he follows the red point of light into a scene in 1973, the night that his sister Samantha was abducted. The scene plays out as it has before, except this time, Mulder disticntly sees Roche enter their home and take his sister. Mulder wakes with a start, clutching the two unidentified paper hearts in his hand.

Mulder returns to the prison to interrogate Roche and asks him what he meant by Mulder's "personal stake." Roche recalls traveling to Martha's Vineyard in 1973 and selling a vacuum to Mulder's father, even remembering the specific model. He refuses to give more information, however, without getting his hearts first. Exploding in anger, Mulder strikes Roche in the jaw. Scully is doubtful of Mulder's theory, thinking that Mulder is simply being strung along by Roche; he could have gotten the information he has anywhere, particularly on the Internet. Mulder counters by asking Scully if she ever really believed that Samantha was abducted by aliens; admitting she hasn't, she concedes there must be another explanation.

Later, Mulder heads to his mother's home in Connecticut. He questions his mother as to whether either of the two unidentified paper hearts looks familiar; his mother, however, cannot recall. Mulder then asks his mother if his father ever bought her a vacuum; she replies affirmatively. Mulder then continues to tear apart the basement, until he finds a vacuum of the exact make and model suggested by Roche.

Back in Washington, Mulder confronts Skinner about his sudden denial of access to Roche's case. Mulder explains that Roche may be the key to his sister's disappearance. Scully backs him up, suggesting that Roche was at the right place in the right time in 1973. Skinner reluctantly allows Mulder to continue, provided that Scully keeps an eye on him.

Mulder and Scully return to the prison and hand Roche the two unidentified hearts. Roche then carefully recalls in exquisite detail the events surrounding Samantha's abduction. He then forces Mulder to pick one of the hearts and look for a victim--a 50/50 chance. Mulder chooses, and they head to unearth a body in West Virginia. They find the words "Mad Hat" written on a rock; Mulder immediately begins digging with his bare hands and unearths another skeleton, with a cloth heart missing from her clothes. The body of Samantha Mulder may have at long last been unearthed.

In the morgue, Mulder examines the body and realizes that it cannot be Samantha; Samantha broke her collarbone when she was 6, but the bone on this body is not broken. Mulder and Scully return to the prison again and demand a name; Roche gives them the details, and places the date at July 1974. He identifies the last heart as being Samantha's, but refuses to tell Mulder more unless he can be released to show him personally. Scully ends the interrogation, telling Roche the only thing he's going to do is rot in prison.

Driven to find the truth, Mulder pulls strings and gets Roche released from prison. They then board a plane to Boston. On the flight, when Roche gets up to go to the bathroom, he meets a little girl, Caitlin, speaking with her briefly until Mulder prods him along.

Back in Washington, Skinner is furious when he finds out that Mulder has "checked out" Roche. He nearly explodes at Scully for letting Mulder take Roche out of prison. Both Scully and Skinner book air passage to Boston, following Scully's intuition as to where they've gone. Meanwhile, Mulder takes Roche to a home and has him recall all of the details of the night of his sister's abduction. At the end, Mulder informs Roche that this is the wrong house, miles away from the abduction. Mulder thinks that some kind of nexus formed between Mulder and Roche because of their close association, allowing Roche to invade Mulder's dreams and extract the details necessary to dupe him.

Asleep in his hotel room, Mulder sees the red point of light yet again, and follows it outside, where his sister screams for help. He retrieves his sister from a car just before it speeds away, the red point spelling out the word "Bye." Mulder awakes to hear Scully and Skinner knocking on his door; Roche is gone and his handcuffs are now on Mulder.

Skinner berates Mulder at length for letting Roche go. Mulder's badge and gun are missing. Borrowing Skinner's phone, he gets a passenger manifest for his flight to Boston, and discovers that "Agent Mulder" called ten minutes ago, seeking the same information. Mulder and company arrive in a residential area to find the distraught mother of Caitlin, the girl Roche talked to on the plane. Roche has taken Caitlin, passing as Mulder and using his official credentials.

The FBI descends down on Roche's old home in Boston like the plague. In a flash of insight, Mulder realizes that Roche is holding Caitlin in an old streetcar yard nearby; there are so many cars that finding the right one would be impossible. Mulder draws his extra gun from his ankle holster, and then hears a scream. He steps into one of the cars to find Roche with Caitlin. Scully and Skinner catch up moments later.

Mulder asks Caitlin to close her eyes and count to twenty. Mulder moves closer and sees Roche with Mulder's gun pointed at Caitlin; he promises to kill Caitlin, but Mulder wants for the situation not to end badly. Roche taunts Mulder with the last heart; if he is killed, Mulder will never know the truth. As Caitlin reaches twenty, Mulder sees Roche ready to pull the trigger and shoots Roche in the head.

Back in his office at FBI headquarters, Scully tells Mulder that the lab analysis shows the dye in the fabric of the last heart was made between 1969 and 1974, and tries to reassure Mulder that the last girl was not Samantha. She suggests Mulder go home to get some sleep. Mulder simply laughs ironically and hugs Scully briefly. In the end, Mulder is left alone to examine the unidentified sixteenth paper heart.

The tale opens as an older woman in a migrant workers' camp in California begins relating a story, a fairy tale she saw with her own eyes. As the story begins, a truck pulls into the camp, taking on workers for illegal field work. Before hopping on, a man, Soledad Buente, speaks with a young woman named Maria Durantes and gives her a kiss. Maria then has a brief conversation with Eladio, Soledad's brother.

Maria's mother yells at Maria for letting one of the family's goats escape while she was talking. Maria chases after the goat, with the brother in tow. Suddenly, an enormous bright light flashes in the sky and yellow rain begins to fall. Maria's mother runs across the field to find Maria and the goat both dead, covered with some strange fungus. The brother is nowhere to be found.

Mulder and Scully are on the scene three days later. Mulder goes over the details of the case; Scully is taken aback that no one has examined Maria's body, but Mulder reminds her that no one really cares about migrant workers. They descend to the village, and after convincing the villagers that they are not from Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), begin asking questions about Maria. The superstitious workers believe that Maria was a victim of "El Chupacabra," a small gray creature with a large head and large black eyes; they think it came and ate away Maria's eyes and face. Soledad says that Eladio Buente, his brother, killed Maria, and that El Chupacabra is simply a myth. Scully suggests this case is simply a case of "Two men. One woman. Trouble."

Mulder heads to INS and speaks to Agent Lozano. Lozano goes through the list of people currently in custody, all of whom use obvious pseudonyms, like "Juan Valdez" and "Erik Estrada." When told that Mulder is investigating Maria Durantes' death, Lozano waxes on about El Chupacabra, and how the workers just made it up to fill their small lives. Meanwhile, Scully heads to the morgue and finds Maria's body almost completely decayed.

INS finds Eladio in custody and Mulder questions him. He protests that he didn't kill Maria; he recalls a loud noise, a bright light, the falling of hot rain, and then saw that the goat and Maria were dead. Confused, he ran until he was picked up. Eladio is stuffed on a bus to appear before a judge and be deported back to Mexico, but Mulder wants to hold onto him until the murder is solved.

Scully meets up with Mulder and tells him that Maria's cause of death was natural, but strange. Her body was overrun by aspergillus, a common but nonlethal fungus. On the road, they find the bus Eladio boarded pulled off the road and the driver dead, overcome by a fungus different from the one which killed Maria. Scully believes the killer is infection, but Mulder believes that Eladio is some kind of carrier.

Elsewhere, Eladio meets a barber who apparently illegally runs immigrants over the border; he is somewhat surprised that Eladio wants to go back to Mexico, rather than to get away from it. Back at the camp, a construction boss pulls into town, looking for workers. When he opens the back of his truck, he finds Eladio already waiting; the other workers refuse to approach him.

In a mycology laboratory, Scully finds that the bus driver was killed by athlete's foot; an enzyme isolated from both crime scenes seems to be weirdly accelerating the growth of the fungi. Lozano and Mulder return to the workers' camp, one step behind Eladio. Mulder wants to continue the search; Lozano is reluctant to intervene in a matter between two brothers.

At the construction site, Eladio calls for the work boss, who doesn't answer. He wipes a strange yellow sweat away from himself, then takes water from a cooler. Moments later, fungi are seen covering the water spigot where Eladio touched it. At that moment, his brother, Soledad, catches up with him. Soledad finds Eladio's construction boss dead in a port-a-pot, covered with fungus.

Fleeing the scene in a truck, Eladio visits his cousin Gabrielle in Fresno County. Gabrielle is afraid to help him, having heard the rumors about Maria and El Chupacabra. Desperate for money but unwilling to wait around until Gabrielle gets paid at her job, Eladio disappears again. Still a step behind, Mulder gets a call from Scully, who believes that Eladio is spreading the enzyme as a carrier; Mulder thinks that the yellow rain may be from a meteorite hitting a lake and throwing water in the air, and that the enzyme is extraterrestrial in origin. At the construction site, the barber seen earlier with Eladio catches up with Mulder and Lozano and offers to lead them to him. Mulder and Lozano finally catch up to Eladio at a truck stop, but in the chase Eladio manages to lose them; Eladio escapes in the back of a truck filled with farm animals.

That night, at a roadblock, Mulder, Scully, and Lozano find the truck Eladio escaped in; all of the animals in the truck are dead, covered with fungus. Brought to the scene, Maria's mother knows that Eladio has visited Gabrielle. Mulder and company visit Gabrielle and tell her not to admit her brother because he is sick and to call if she sees him. Not quite trusting Gabrielle, they hang back and watch Gabrielle. Meanwhile, Eladio shows up at the market where Gabrielle works and starts eating candy off the shelf until a clerk chases him away; Eladio looks increasingly ill, covered with bizarre blotches.

At Gabrielle's house, Mulder, Scully, and Lozano see Soledad exit the house and pull away in his car; they follow him. Gabrielle calls Eladio at the market; Eladio is desperate to know where she is. Gabrielle tearfully tells Eladio that she could only lie to Soledad for so long. Panicked, Eladio flees from the market. Soledad arrives at the market, gun drawn; Mulder, Scully, and Lozano are moments behind. After a brief standoff, Soledad gives up, claiming he only wanted vengeance. After he is arrested, Scully turns a corner and discovered the dead, fungus-covered corpse of the clerk who chased Eladio out minutes before.

Eladio returns to Gabrielle's house; seeing his ghastly appearance, she is frightened. Eladio finally looks at himself in the mirror and realizes that he has (at least indirectly) killed Maria Durantes; he has become El Chupacabra. Once again, Mulder and company return moments behind; Gabrielle says that, afraid of Eladio, she gave him all of her money so that he could return to Mexico. Mulder realizes that Eladio has no intention of returning to Mexico, but rather seeks to stand off once and for all with his brother. Lozano returns to the workers' camp to pick up Eladio, but then bright lights danced across the sky, and that more Chupacabras appeared. Lozano was killed by fungal infection. They came and took up Eladio and Soledad.

We then cut back to the woman who narrates the story; this is only her version of the ending. According to Gabrielle, Soledad attempted to grab Lozano's gun. In the struggle, the gun went off, killing Lozano. Unable to kill his brother, Soledad and Eladio ran off to Mexico.

In debriefing with Skinner, Mulder and Scully report that now both Soledad and Eladio, both of whom have an abnormal tolerance to the bizarre accelerating enzyme, have presumably disappeared off to Mexico. At the camp, Lozano is found with a bullet wound and the fungal infection eating away at his body.

As we see weirdly mutated Soledad and Eladio hopping a ride on a truck, Scully explains that these men just have a way of disappearing, making tracking them down difficult at best. As Mulder explains, "The truth is, nobody cares."

Historical note: This is the second episode to carry a parental advisory, this time for violence and "scenes of a graphic nature."

As the episode opens, an ambulance carrying EMT Leonard Betts, driver Michelle Wilkes, and a patient, tears down a Pittsburgh street. In the back, Leonard correctly diagnoses the patient's condition, almost magically. Distracted, the ambulance driver runs a red light and the ambulance is wrecked. The driver leaves the vehicle and finds Leonard's body, decapitated. We then cut to Leonard's body being put on a morgue slab. Later that night, the medical examiner hears a noise and goes into the morgue to investigate. Leonard's morgue freezer is open, and clothes are strewn on the ground. Suddenly, a blunt object stikes the ME across the back of the head, and the outline of a headless body is seen walking away.

Mulder and Scully are on the scene the next day. They investigate Betts' morgue freezer and find it empty. Mulder is suspicious that Betts' headless body somehow kicked its way out of the morgue; Scully thinks it's simply a case of body-snatching for profit. A security guard shows them film from security cameras; a man is seen walking out of the morgue at the proper time, but the camera is fuzzy, obscuring the head. Mulder wonders where the body would be stored; Scully takes him down to a biological waste area, where extra body parts from autopsies are stored. Scully immediately roots into the smelly detached sea of body parts; Mulder reluctantly joins, and Leonard Betts' head is soon located. Scully goes off to examine Betts' head, and Mulder heads to Betts' home.

In the morgue, Scully begins to cut open Leonard's head, but then does a double take when the head's eyes and mouth open as she begins her incision; she is so disturbed that she cannot continue the cutting. Elsewhere, Mulder begins rooting through Leonard's home. He finds a newspaper clipping naming Leonard EMT of the year. In the bathroom, he finds blood, bloody clothes, and a bathtub full of iodine solution. Bloodstained footprints lead out the bathroom window. Scully phones Mulder and says that PET scans of Betts' head were inconclusive, experiencing some kind of intereference from radiation. Mulder relates his findings, and calls the Pittsburgh police to have the building put under surveillance. As Mulder leaves, the iodine bath bubbles, and Leonard's head pops above the surface.

Mulder returns to the hospital where Leonard worked and talks to Michelle Wilkes, the ambulance driver. Michelle tells Mulder that Leonard was a brilliant EMT who could just look at people and tell them what was wrong with them, especially cancer patients; Leonard volunteered in cancer centers in his spare time. He was also a very private man with no family or friends. Later that day, Michelle thinks she hears Leonard's voice over the radio, diagnosing another patient.

Meanwhile, Scully has Betts' head frozen in epoxy resin and then sliced thin for analysis. They find that every cell in Betts' head was completely cancerous; there is no way that Betts should have even been alive. Mulder and Scully take the slice to a lab at the University of Maryland, where they have a Kirlian or aura photograph of the brain slice taken. The aura photograph looks like a head with the outline of the remainder of a body attached. Mulder thinks that Leonard's cancer was an evolution, in some way normal for him; he thinks that Leonard can regrow body parts, using cancer regeneratively. He points to the iodine solution he found at Betts' home, which is often used to help lizards and reptiles regrow body parts.

Scully has Betts' fingerprints analyzed and a match comes up with the name "Albert Tanner," who has a mother living in Pittsburgh. Mulder and Scully question her (and find a photo looking exactly like Leonard), but she says that Albert died six years ago in a car accident. Back at the hospital, Michelle encounters Leonard, amazed that he's still alive. Leonard hugs her, apologizes for what he has to do, and then gives her a lethal injection of potassium chloride. A security guard chases after Leonard, tackles him, handcuffs him to a car, and then goes to get backup. Betts looks at the handcuffs, and then pulls off his own thumb, gets free of the cuffs, and escapes.

Mulder and Scully are on the scene the next morning. The security guard positively identified Betts, and Mulder is convinced that Betts tore off his own thumb because he knew he could grow another one. He theorizes that evolution goes in huge spurts, and that Leonard is a new evolution. In Betts' car, they find cancerous body parts in a cooler. Mulder thinks that Betts needs to eat cancer to survive. They have Betts' car traced, and Albert Tanner's mother Elaine shows up as the owner.

Now convinced that Mrs. Tanner is protecting her son, the FBI plows through her house with a search warrant, but fail to find anything except for a receipt for a storage locker. Mrs. Tanner is entirely reluctant to help in any way. Elsewhere, Leonard cruises into a bar and finds a smoking biker who hacks and wheezes badly. Outside the bar, Leonard attacks him, saying, "I'm sorry, but you've got something I need."

Mulder and Scully head to investigate the storage locker, where Betts is regenerating and shedding his old skin. Our intrepid FBI duo arrives, finding the body of the biker from the bar. Suddenly, Betts plows out of the locker in a car. Mulder and Scully shoot at the car, and it bursts into flames. Autopsy of the body shows removal of the biker's lung; Mulder suggests further investigation will show that the biker had lung cancer. Scully is certain that Betts is dead, but Mulder wants to know how his mother can bury him six years ago and have him still turn up alive. Mulder has Albert Tanner's coffin exhumed and finds a decaying body that looks exactly like Leonard Betts.

Back at Mrs. Tanner's house, Mrs. Tanner gives Leonard an iodine bath and expresses her concern. She offers herself to restore Leonard's strength, because the police are after him. Mulder and Scully stake out the Tanner residence and are shocked when an ambulance suddenly pulls up, responding to a call. Mulder and Scully burst in to find Elaine Tanner unconscious, cut open and bleeding out. Mulder thinks Leonard fed on her to survive and then called an ambulance to save her life. Mulder begins scouring the area for Leonard, and Scully rides with the ambulance to the hospital.

At the hospital, Scully finds iodine solution dripping down from the ambulance; Scully talks to Mulder on the phone and tells him to get to the hospital quickly. Scully climbs up the ambulance and finds bloody fingerprints on the roof. Suddenly, Betts grabs her and pulls her into the ambulance. "I'm sorry," he says, "but you've got something I need." Betts and Scully struggle, but ultimately Scully gains the upper hand and kills Betts by shocking his head with cardiac paddles.

Betts is dead, and the agents learn that Elaine Tanner has cancer but will pull through. Scully is still shocked that Betts came after her. Despite Mulder's words of encouragement, Scully just wants to go home. Later that evening, Scully wakes up at home in a bout of coughing. She sees a spot of blood on her pillow, and when she turns on the light finds that her nose is bleeding. . . .

The episode opens in a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania court, as Ed Jerse is granted a divorce from his wife; Jerse reluctantly signs the court documents. Later, he holes himself up in a bar in Philadelphia's Little Russia, the Hard Eight. He looks at a picture of his kids and then burns a hole through the photo with his cigarette. Walking out into the rain, he spies a tattoo parlor across the street and heads inside. He has a winking tattoo of "Betty" put on his arm with the words "Never Again" written under it. At home, Jerse suddenly collapses to the floor, and we see that both of the tattoo's eyes are open.

At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, Mulder and Scully meet with some questionable Russian characters who are feeding Mulder information on UFOs. Uninterested, Scully walks along the wall and finds a dried rose petal lying at the foot of the momument; she takes the petal and pockets it.

Back in Philadelphia, Ed Jerse talks to a client at the brokerage where he works. In his head, he hears the word "Loser" and someone laughing at him. Thinking it's the woman in the next cubicle, he confronts her, trashes her desk (at the direction of the voice), and then gets sent home by his boss.

At the FBI building, Scully looks around Mulder's office, contemplating it. Mulder rolls in, explaining that he has to take a vacation; he hasn't had one in four years, and the Bureau will stop paying him for eight weeks if he doesn't take time. He hands Scully a few files to work on while he's away. Scully wants to know why she doesn't have a desk; Mulder feigns ignorance and makes a wisecrack about how there would be no space with another desk. He then goes on to berate her for wandering away at the Vietnam Memorial while he was questioning someone; the contact's name is Pudovkin, an aerospace engineer who worked in Russia and saw a UFO crash. Mulder wants Scully to check on several people related to the case, all of whom live in Little Russia in Philadelphia. Scully is unwilling to follow the lead because she believes the Russians were recounting an episode of "Rocky and Bullwinkle."

Mulder is angry, having worked hard to get the case opened. Scully is worried that the work has become not only Mulder's life, but her own as well. She feels that they're not even going in circles, "but in a straight line, two steps forward and three steps back, while my own life is standing still." Mulder suggests it may be good for them to spend some time away from each other; he tells Scully his vacation is to someplace personal, something "spiritual." As Mulder leaves, Scully pulls out the rose petal and leaves it on Mulder's desk.

In Philadelphia, Ed Jerse talks to his boss over the telephone, begging for another chance, but in the end he is fired. Jerse continues to hear the voice in his head, telling him what a loser he is. He becomes convinced that his downstairs neighbor is the one talking to him; trying to ignore Jerse's ranting, she turns on her stereo. Heading downstairs, Jerse encounters two Jehovah's Witnesses; he talks crazily, saying that his neighbor knows what's going on in his head. Going into a rage, Jerse brutally murders his neighbor, then stuffs her body in the building's furnace. "Betty" encourages Jerse, saying he will never again be hurt as long as she's around.

On the road, Mulder calls his office to check up on Scully, but she's gone off to reluctantly follow Mulder's lead in Philadelphia. Spotting one of the suspects going into a grocery, she learns that they have been chasing after men involved in the Russian mob. She follows the suspect into the tattoo parlor that Jerse was in; inside, Jerse is talking to the owner of the parlor, ranting about the tattoo talking to him. Scully notes a tattoo of a snake eating its own tail before the tattoo artist calls her over to look at Jerse's tattoo. Jerse and Scully talk briefly. He recounts how he was in the bar across the street and wandered over to get his tattoo; he asks Scully out, but she declines, saying that her flight is leaving town this evening. Jerse gives her his card anyhow.

That evening, Mulder calls Scully from his vacation spot: Graceland, the home of Elvis. Scully tells him that she's handed over the case to the local FBI section. Mulder is irritated, but Scully says that she has to go. "What, you got a date or something?" he asks. Her silence tells all. Scully calls Jerse at home, taking up his offer, saying that her flight was cancelled due to bad weather. "Betty" continues to berate Ed, cautioning him against Scully. Jerse just puts out his cigarette by smashing it into the tattoo.

Scully meets Jerse at his apartment, and passes people looking for Jerse's downstairs neighbor. She notes that Jerse's tattoo is bleeding and offers to treat it, but Jerse insists on taking care of it himself; while he's in the bathroom, Scully spies the burned photograph of Jerse with his children. In the end, Scully actually insists on going to the crummy bar across from the tattoo parlor. Scully relates the story of her life: there is always some controlling authority figure in her life, starting with her father. She relates the story of how when she was young she snuck out of her house at night to smoke her mother's cigarettes as an act of rebellion. Jerse explains he doesn't want to go in circles, only forward. Impulsively, Scully goes to the tattoo parlor, where she has the image of the snake eating its own tail tattooed on her back, using the same red color as in Jerse's tattoo.

Jerse and Scully return to Jerse's apartment; the storm has gotten very bad, and Jerse insists on Scully staying overnight for her safety. Ed's tattoo begins bleeding, and Scully insists on looking at it. She notes the burn mark from the cigarette; "Betty" tells Jerse to "get her hands off me." Jerse grabs Scully. "Betty" tells Jerse if he kisses Scully that she's dead. Jerse leans closer to Scully, and he pushes his apartment door shut.

The following morning, Mulder has returned to the FBI building. He calls Scully's hotel in Philadelphia, only to find that she's not there. He glimpses the rose petal sitting on his desk. In Philadelphia, Jerse awakens alone in bed, leaves a note for Scully, and then leaves. Scully wakes later to a knock on the door. Two police detectives arrive, looking for Jerse; Scully flashes her FBI badge, and the detectives relate that Jerse's neighbor, Kaye Schilling, is missing. Mixed blood types were found at the scene, along with a foreign toxic substance. Scully looks the substance up on a WWW database and finds that it is an ergot derivative found in rye (which was used in the tattoo artist's red ink); it is a powerful psychotic and causes auditory hallucinations. Scully calls Mulder at his office, but as soon as Mulder answers, she hangs up.

Jerse returns, and Scully explains the problem with the tattoos, and how the alkaloid can cause hallucinations. Ed breaks down, finally admitting that he's been hearing voices in his head and that "Betty" is talking to him. Scully thinks they should get to a hospital. She heads to the next room to change, accidentally dropping her FBI badge in plain view of Jerse. "Betty" encourages Ed to find out who Scully called. Ed hits the redial and connects to the FBI. Going into a rage, Jerse overpowers Scully and takes her down to the furance to burn. At the last moment, Scully regains consciousness and struggles with Ed; Scully tells Ed to take control. Ed stuffs his arm into the furnace fire, and when the tattoo is burned, he collapses.

Back at the FBI building, Mulder congratulates Scully for making a record second appearance in the X-Files. Jerse is in custody and being treated at a burn center; both he and Scully had traces of ergot in their blood, but not enough to cause hallucinations. Mulder makes a wisecrack about getting "NY" tattooed on his ass to commemorate the Yankees' World Series victory. "Better late than never," he says. Scully picks the rose petal up off the desk and sits in sullen silence.

Mulder starts rattling off the next X-File to work on. "All this because I didn't get you a desk?" Mulder asks. "Not everything is about you, Mulder. This is my life," she replies. Mulder's only comeback is, "Yes, but it's . . ."

The story opens with a soliloquy by Scully in which she comments on her own mortality. She seems to be addressing Mulder and telling him that she wrote what she did to help him understand her; she confesses that she trusts him as she trusts no one else. Finally, she concludes with an apology that Mulder must continue the journey they started together alone. During the soliloquy, we see a point of light grow into a hospital X-ray room, where Scully holds an X-ray of her head, showing a massive tumor.

Mulder arrives at the hospital and meets Scully in the oncology wing; he gives her flowers, joking that he swiped them from a guy with a broken leg. Scully tells Mulder that she has the tumor, and that he is the only one that knows. She tells him that the tumor is inoperable and that her chance of survival is near zero; Mulder, for once, refuses to accept that.

The episode opens on a Jewish funeral in the Ben Zion cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. A prayer is said over the body being laid to rest; participants in the funeral then take turns saying their goodbyes, tossing an handful of dirt onto the coffin. While waiting, one woman, Ariel Luria, has a flashback of a murder in a grocery store. An older man tells Ariel that she doesn't have to do this, but she says she wants to; as she picks up a handful of dirt, she has another flashback to the murder and then sullenly walks away from the funeral. That night, a thunderstorm descends over New York; in the cemetery, a shadowy figure is seen forming a human shape out of mud. The figure departs, and moments later, the muddy outline takes a breath.

In Washington, Mulder and Scully go over the case of one Isaac Luria, murdered two days ago in the market that he owned. Luria was a Hasidic Jew, and his murder seems to have been an anti-Semitic hate crime. The only thing stolen was the security camera's tape, which police eventually recovered from a 16-year-old boy, Tony Oliver. In the video, Oliver was seen beating Luria up. Mulder asks Scully if Oliver was arrested; Scully replies in the negative, because Oliver is dead, strangled while he was watching the video. The twist is that the fingerprints found on Oliver's body are those of Isaac Luria. Scully thinks that this is a resurrection hoax, and informs Mulder that they have been assigned the case to figure out what's going on.

Mulder and Scully go to the Weiss residence in Williamsburg, New York; they meet Ariel's father, and then proceed to talk to Ariel. The FBI duo bring with them a request for exhumation to examine Isaac's grave. Ariel's father is vehement in denying the request; Mulder and Scully simply want to figure out what's going on before the other two suspects in Isaac's murder die like Tony Oliver. Ariel's father still denies the request, and becomes incensed when Scully tells him that they could have the grave exhumed without his permission. When they leave, Scully is left with the impression that Ariel's father knows more than he's admitting, which is why he's reluctant to allow the exhumation. Taking out a hate pamphlet that anti-Semites distributed in the neighborhood, Mulder thinks he has an idea where to get information on Isaac's murder. As they pull away from the Weiss residence, we see a muddy hand gripping a railing across the street, looking up towards Ariel.

Mulder and Scully head to Brujes Copy Shop, where they meet an anti-Semitic printer; his shop is right across the street from Isaac's store. Scully believes that the other two suspects, Derek Banks and Clinton McGuire, are known to the printer. Mulder thinks that the boys read one of the printer's anti-Semitic pamphlets, and that incited them to commit the murder. The printer gives the agents a hard time, suspecting Jews at work, theorizing that Jews run the FBI, and that Mulder himself may be a Jew.

They inform the printer that Tony Oliver is dead; in the back room, one of the other two murder suspects is watching the security camera tape as Mulder and Scully speak to the printer. Their parting is terse, at best; Scully relates the rumor that Luria has risen from the grave, seeking revenge. Mulder and Scully leave; the printer returns to the back room to find that Derek is gone. Later that night, Derek and Clinton head to the cemetery and begin digging up Luria's grave. During the digging, Clinton returns to their car to get tools to open the coffin, where he is attacked by an unseen figure and killed. Derek succeeds in opening the grave and find's Luria's body inside; he calls out to Clinton, and turns to find Clinton's body lying by the car.

Police are on the scene shortly. Examining Clinton's body, Scully finds signs of strangulation on his neck. Scully thinks that Derek and Clinton came to desecrate the corpse; Mulder simply thinks they came because they were afraid. Examining the body, Mulder finds Luria's hands are still attached, destroying Scully's theory of how Luria's fingerprints wound up on Tony Oliver's body. They find a strange, non-standard marking on Luria's hand, and a book which bursts into flames when Mulder picks it up.

The following morning, the printer encounters Derek in his shop; the printer is nearly outraged that Derek and the others killed a man, saying he never said to kill anyone. Derek, for his part, is sick of printing pamphlets, thinking that actions speak louder than words. Elsewhere, Mulder and Scully have the book they found analyzed by a Jewish scholar; he tells them it is the "Book of Creation"--a text never buried with the dead; the book has never spontaneously combusted, either. The scholar suspects that someone is simply playing a trick; Scully suggests that arsine gas in the ground may have caused the flames. They do, however, find a name imprinted on the cover--Jacob Weiss, Ariel Luria's father.

Ariel is distraught that her father may be involved in the murders. She also explains to the agents that she and Isaac were not married yet; their wedding day was supposed to be tomorrow. She shows Mulder and Scully the communal wedding ring that she was going to wear; it is an old piece from Prague, where Ariel's father lived as a child. He survived Nazi persecution and retained the ring as a memory of his home. Scully presses to know where Jacob Weiss is, and she finally relents and leads them to a synagogue, where Jacob is found praying. Mulder and Scully head towards him, but he disappears in the crowd of people. The agents head into a back room of the synagogue, shadowy and poorly lit. They find a body hanging from a noose on one of the rafters, and spy another person moving around in the room. The figure knocks Mulder and Scully over and almost escapes, but Scully gets hold of her gun and stops the escaping figure--Jacob Weiss. Scully arrests Weiss, but as they leave, Mulder looks around the room as if they missed something. We see the hand of another person press up against one of the rafters, with a series of Hebrew letters visible.

Ariel meets Mulder and Scully at the police station, still in shock that her father is under suspicion. Mulder questions Weiss; he says that he encountered someone vandalizing the synagogue and killed them in self-defense. While he admits his guilt, Mulder is convinced that there is more to the story, and that someone else was in the room. Doing a background check on Weiss, Scully finds that he was a member of a Jewish terrorist organization in his youth and was involved in a bombing which killed several people. Meanwhile, Ariel talks with her father; she cannot believe he confessed, and when he suggests that there is more than meets the eye, her disbelief multiplies even more, and there is a strange recognition in her eyes.

Back at the printing shop, the mysterious figure with the Hebrew letters on his hand breaks in and strangles the printer. Meanwhile, Mulder meets with the Jewish scholar he talked to earlier, asking to hear about the myth of the golem. The scholar explains that it was believed that it was possible for a righteous man to bring a body made of earth or clay to life by the power of the Word; this body was the golem. The scholar explains that the book found in Luria's grave contains detailed instructions for animating the inanimate. A single word, meaning truth, must be inscribed on the golem's hand; the golem is a body without a soul, essentially a monster. To destroy the golem, the last letter must be removed from the word on the hand, changing to the Hebrew word for dead. Scully then calls Mulder, telling him that Curt Brunges, the printer, is dead.

Mulder is at least satisfied that Jacob Weiss is innocent, since he was in custody during the murder. And to everyone's surprise, review of the security camera tape shows none other than Isaac Luria walking into the print shop; Scully is in awe, and Mulder thinks that he's found his golem. Scully thinks the video is altered, and Mulder explains his golem theory. Furthermore, Mulder thinks the golem was created out of love--by Ariel.

The agents fail to find Ariel at home, and the communal wedding ring is missing; realizing that today should have been Ariel and Isaac's wedding day, Mulder and Scully head to the synagogue. Jacob Weiss, released from custody, arrives ahead of the agents, seeking out Ariel and Isaac Luria. Weiss tries to convince Ariel that what she brought back from death is really a monster. Ariel says she only wanted to say goodbye, something she was denied when Isaac was alive; she never thought the incantation would actually work.

Hearing a noise, Jacob goes to investigate; Mulder and Scully arrive just as Isaac overpowers Jacob and tries to hang him. Scully stays with Jacob, who is barely alive, and Mulder goes to find Ariel. He locates her in the back room, and as they go to leave, the golem emerges from the shadows. Mulder fires his gun several times to no avail; just as Isaac is about to kill him, Ariel distracts him. She finally has her wedding ceremony and says her goodbyes. She rubs one of the letters off of Isaac's hand, and the golem turns to dust. Ariel drops a handful of dust over Isaac's body, chanting the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead; she has finally made her peace.

The story opens in Washington, D.C. at a Vietnam Veterans rally. At a podium, a general speaks to an enthusiastic crowd. In the background, Assistant Director Skinner calls out to his agents, looking for something. Scully and Mulder are among them; Scully looks at a photo and then spots their suspect. Scully loses contact with the man, but sees him heading for a sound booth. In his sector of the crowd, Mulder spots the man and sees him draw a gun. Mulder draws his gun, and then the shooter vanishes directly before Mulder's eyes.

We then jump to Fort Evanston, Maryland, twelve hours previous to the rally. A general, Peter MacDougal, arrives in a helicopter and is then escorted off the base by limousine. In the back of his car, the general finds a playing card with the king of hearts on it. The figure of a skull and crossed swords is on the other side. When the general looks up, someone else is in the car with him. He pulls a gun and shoots the general in the head.

Shortly thereafter, AD Skinner briefs in his agents on the general's murder. The general's driver, Private Burkholder, is being held because of his ties to a paramilitary organization, Right Hand, which is bent on violent overthrow of the government; however, because of the presence of the card, which was used by US soldiers in Vietnam to mark their kills, an accomplice is suspected. Concern is high because there are several generals in town for a rededication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, all of whom could be potential targets.

Mulder thinks that Burkholder may be telling the truth and that he is totally innocent. Skinner says that the official FBI line is that they will pursue the Right Hand and its leader, an ex-soldier named Denny Markham. Scully and Mulder speak with Skinner; Burkholder took a polygraph and passed. Skinner gives Mulder and Scully permission to serve a warrant on Markham and try to prevent further loss of life.

Mulder and Scully drive out to the Right Hand compound, where they are stopped at a gate. They speak with Markham on intercom; he admits them through the gate, and then proceeds to send three vicious dogs chasing after them. Markham is reluctant to come forward with information on Burkholder; he professes that there are thousands of names on his mailing lists, and he can't track them all. Scully shows Markham the warrant for his arrest; spying a dozen soldiers surrounding his compound, Markham concedes. Mulder wants to know where the marker playing card came from; Markham is somewhat cryptic, saying only that more men are going to die. Mulder and Scully arrest Markham and have his compound cleared of illegal weapons. Markham points Mulder to a photograph of Markham with another man, Nathaniel Teager, whom Markham says killed General MacDougal. Teager was a Green Beret who was a POW in Vietnam; the Right Hand liberated him in 1995. Shortly after his liberation, he disappeared. Mulder thinks that possibly Teager is on a one-man revenge spree for injustices committed in Vietnam.

At the Vietnam Memorial, Teager visits Renee Davenport, who is placing flowers by her husband Gary's name; she tells her that Gary is still alive and hands her his dog tags. Still in disbelief, Mrs. Davenport looks up, and Teager has disappeared.

Mulder and Scully meet Skinner at the Memorial, where a parade is about to begin. Pictures of Teager are circulating among the FBI; Skinner is doubtful, because Army forensics has Teager's remains in possession. Mulder and Scully go to question Renee Davenport; she is totally distraught, but manages to positively identify Teager. She begins to cry, and her eye starts bleeding from a burst capillary. Mulder wants to get her an eye exam; he thinks there is a connection between the bleeding eye and Teager's ability to disappear. While Scully has Mrs. Davenport checked out, Mulder goes to an Army forensics lab and meets with a doctor, who show him Teager's remains: a few teeth. Mulder finds the conclusion of death somewhat presumptive; he wants to know who made such a conclusion.

The examiner turns out to be General Steffan, who now works at the Pentagon. Mulder calls Steffan in his car and tells him the situation; he also puts two agents on Steffan to protect him. Steffan heads into the Pentagon, and Teager silently enters behind them. The FBI agents following Steffan check to make sure his office is clear; satisfied, they leave. Steffan enters and finds a marker card, the king of diamonds, on his desk. Just then, Scully calls Mulder; the opthamologist found a "floating blind spot" in Mrs. Davenport's eye, which could be caused by several diseases; but Davenport has none of those. Mulder thinks the scarring is some kind of by-product of Teager's disappearing act. General Steffan then cuts into Scully's call, telling Mulder that he found a card on his desk. At that moment, Teager appears and shoots Steffan; Mulder hears the entire incident over the phone.

At Steffan's office, Mulder tells Scully that the general's secretary had organized his desk just minutes before; the window of opportunity was tiny, and Pentagon security is tight. Skinner calls Mulder and Scully out, where he shows them the security video of Teager walking through the metal detector. Mulder explains that he thinks Teager has a special ability to make himself disappear from sight, by manipulating the human blind spot; thus he can be seen on video, but not necessarily by the eye. Mulder speculates that Teager learned something from his Viet Cong captors during his years as a POW. He thinks the only way to stop Teager is to find the next target before Teager does.

Elsewhere, General Benjamin Bloch meets with Denny Markham, who is being held in prison; Markham seems to know that Teager has struck again. Markham insinuates that there is some deeper reason to Teager's actions. When Bloch says he's only trying to stop the killing of soldiers who fought for their country, Markham shadily replies, "I guess that's one way of lookin' at it." Bloch offers Markham a deal, but Markham says he can't control Teager; he says they both know what Teager wants, but that Bloch can't give him that without "draggin' that nice clean uniform of yours through the mud." Incensed, Bloch leaves.

At the Vietnam Memorial, the parade is just about to start, and General Bloch is in the motorcade. Teager stands inconspicuously in the crowd of onlookers. At the Lincoln Memorial, Mulder meets with Marita Covarrubias, who provides Mulder with an important link: Generals MacDougal and Steffan share a connection. Both were part of a three-man commission supposedly responsible for sending special forces soldiers into Vietnam and then leaving them behind for capture and death. The story is becoming public and is highly embarassing to the US military. More panicked now than ever, Mulder pleads to know who the third man is.

Getting a call from Mulder, Scully and Skinner stop General Bloch's car just before he comes into Teager's shooting range; suddenly, Scully spies Teager and draws her gun. The crowd goes into a panic, but Teager vanishes yet again.

Time elapses, and the crowd begins assembling for the speech seen at the beginning of the story. Mulder explains to Scully and Skinner that the government wanted the FBI to fail in order to silence the men responsible for the government's POW policy. Teager gets his revenge, and the government gets their way. In the crowd, Teager begins working his way towards the podium; suddenly, another veteran in the audience recognizes Teager and begins following him. Teager finally talks to the man, and explains that all will be clear after tonight; he was left to die, and people knew about it. Teager hands the man a list of those still held in captivity, and then disappears again.

Just then, General Bloch comes to the podium--and on the podium is another marker card, the ace of clubs. He is slightly disturbed, but begins delivering his speech anyhow. As his speech begins, the scenes from the beginning of the story are replayed up to the point where Mulder spies Teager, draws his gun, and then loses sight of him.

Skinner pulls Mulder off the stage to relative safety, but Teager disappears again. Mulder suddenly realizes that Teager can only be invisible when he is in direct line-of-sight; thus the other two generals were both killed in close quarters, where remaining invisible was easy. Mulder and Scully head for General Bloch's car, just in time to stop the general from getting in. Shots come out from the car, and Skinner throws Bloch to the ground. Teager tries to take off in the car, but is gunned down by another FBI agent. He falls out of the car, barely alive. Mulder and Scully approach.

Staring vacantly upward, Teager flatly states, "Teager, Nathaniel J., Sergeant, Green Beret detachment B11, service number 82278, date of birth March 7, 1942. Teager, Nathaniel J., Sergeant. . ."

The next day, Skinner and Mulder meet at the Vietnam Memorial; according to the government, the shooter was one Thomas Lynch, who has been in and out of VA psychiatric hospitals; he's also on Denny Markham's mailing lists, and Markham positively identified the body. Mulder thinks the lies are simply being covered with more lies; Skinner can't do anything, because the case has been turned over to CID. Mulder says, "They're not just denying this man's life, they're denying his death. And with all due respect, sir, it could be you." Skinner is left alone staring at Teager's name on the Vietnam Memorial.

From behind the light over where Mulder is diving, two figures emerge in scuba gear. Mulder surfaces to find another ship in the area, sweeping around with search lights. Mulder swims for shore and then tries to make a run for it, but is ultimately tackled down and captured.

Back at the bar, Scully checks briefly on Pendrell and then goes to find the Mustached Man; too late, Scully finds that his wound was superficial and he has escaped, trailing blood. Police and paramedics are on the scene in seconds; Pendrell is taken away in an ambulance, sporting a punctured lung. Scully reassures Pendrell that he's going to be OK. Finally relaxing for a moment, she notices that her nose is bleeding and wipes away the blood with a touch of annoyance. Moments later, Assistant Director Skinner arrives; Scully tells Skinner that Frish was the target and that he was supposed to be met by a marshal. Skinner tells Scully that the order was countermanded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that Frish is under military arrest for a charge of murder. The military also has Mulder in custody for interfering with a military investigation of the crash of Flight 549; the military has admitted to shooting down the plane by accident. Skinner notes the bloody rag Scully is carrying and insists that she take better care of herself.

Scully arrives at a military prison to pick up Mulder. She tells Mulder the official military story: Flight 549 was put on a wrong course and collided with a military jet. Only Frish and Gonzales could have done this, and they think Frish suddenly came forward, feeling guilt. Mulder tells Scully he found the second crash site and shows her the radiation burns on his head--from what he suspects is a UFO.

Scully believes the military story because it came from Mike Millar, who had no reason to share the information. She also reports how Millar found Sharon Graffia wandering at the crash site, and then tells Mulder something surprising: Sharon is not Max Fenig's sister, but an unemployed aeronautical engineer who has been in a mental instituation. She met Max at the mental institution. And then, dropping another bombshell, Scully tells Mulder that Agent Pendrell is dead; Mulder tells Scully that for Pendrell and all the others who died, they have to find the truth.

Mulder and Scully proceed to visit Max's trailer, which looks just as trashed as it did in the past. Mulder says he's looking for evidence as to why Max was coming to Washington to see Mulder; he wants to know why Max went to such great risk. He plays a VCR tape of Max, telling "his story." Max relates how he has become an alien abductee and is never alone; he has dedicated his life to providing proof of the UFO conspiracy. While Max narrates, we see the scuba team back at the New York lake cleaning up the crash and zippering what looks like alien bodies in bags; they also pull a man out of the water, suffering from severe radiation burns. The Mustached Man is supervising the operation.

At the NTSB field headquarters, Millar is wrapping up the preliminary investigation, conceding that the military's story is the most plausible; there is no evidence to support anything further. Mulder and Scully arrive and touch base. Mulder doesn't buy the military's story and then proceeds to relate his account of the incident:

In Mulder's version, the plane was brought down by the presence of Max Fenig; he believes Max was followed, wanting what Max carried with him, the object which caused the crash. The object, Mulder thinks, was the first physical proof of extraterrestrial life. While someone was in the process of taking out Max, an invisible aircraft showed up. Max knew the second craft was a UFO, and knew he was about to be abducted. Then, a third aircraft, a military jet, was given Flight 549's coordinates by Frish and Gonzales; Frish and Gonzales had no idea what they had started. Time stood still on 549 for nine minutes while the radar-invisible UFO tore the emergency door off the plane and retrieved the object from Max Fenig. Mulder speculates that if the UFO had completed its operation, then 549 would have been fine; but the UFO and 549, flying in tandem, were intercepted by the military jet. The jet had orders to take down the UFO; it did so, but in the process, finished off 549 as well.

Millar's response is simple: "Where I come from, that's what we call a whopper." While Scully does not agree with Mulder, she says there must be some reason for the radiation damage to the plane. Millar finds only one piece of radioactive evidence, which was the very bag that Max Fenig was carrying.

Scully thinks the investigation is at a dead end; Mulder wants to back up and start again with Sharon Graffia, who is now in a mental institution. He says they owe it to Pendrell and all the others who died. While Scully goes to interview Sharon, Mulder returns to Max's trailer to look for more evidence. At the trailer, Mulder meets the superintendent of Max's trailer park; the super gives Mulder all of Max's mail. Looking through the mail, Mulder finds an envelope with a return address to "Paul Gidney"; inside the envelope is a luggage slip.

At the mental institution, Scully talks to Sharon, pressing her for any information she has. Sharon is reluctant to talk, afraid that she will get into trouble. Scully notes that Sharon has the same radiation blisters that Max did. Finally, Sharon admits that she stole a radioactive piece of alien hardware from her former employer. There were three interlocking parts: Sharon had one, Max had one on the flight, but she has no idea where the third piece is.

At the Syracuse airport, Mulder redeems Max's luggage slip. Mulder then notices men approaching him and flashes his badge to escape out the back. Scully tells Mulder that the property is stolen and that he shouldn't open the bag because the part is radioactive. Looking in the airport X-ray machine, Mulder sees a part with three grooves in it. He hops onto a flight from Syracuse to Washington, wanting to get the part to a safe location. On the flight, we see the Mustached Man sitting in one of the seats.

Once the flight is in the air, the Mustached Man sits down next to Mulder. Realizing that he is in danger, Mulder tells the Mustached Man that he has a gun pointed at him. The Mustached Man tries to scare Mulder off from firing by telling him what will happen if he misses and depressurizes the plane, creating a gaping hole that pulls everything toward it. The Mustached Man shows little fear of dying, saying that some things are more important than one man's life. The Mustached Man says that a few lives, even those of innocent plane passengers, are worth the cost to save millions. Mulder forces the Mustached Man toward the back of the plane and into the bathroom. Securing the Mustached Man with a snack cart, he calls Scully on the airphone.

Mulder tells Scully that he has Pendrell's killer at bay and asks her to alert Skinner. And suddenly, Mulder notices that his watch has stopped.

Mulder hurriedly moves forward and tells a stewardess to tell the captain that the plane is about to be intercepted. Just then, the Mustached Man escapes from the bathroom with his gun drawn. He forces Mulder to drop the bag and then collects it. Then, the plane begins to shake violently and a bright white light appears. In a moment of confusion, Mulder manages to draw his gun; he screams for the Mustached Man to drop the bag, but he refuses to do so. Mulder fires his gun, but finds that it won't function.

The plane arrives on-schedule at the Washington Airport. Scully, Skinner, and several other FBI agents scamper across the jetway to meet Mulder; they are surprised to find that the Mustached Man is gone. Comparing his watch to Skinner's, Mulder finds that his watch is nine minutes behind. Regarding the whereabouts of the Mustached Man, Mulder can only say, "I think he got the connecting flight."

Back at Max's trailer, Mulder, Scully, and Sharon review Max Fenig's home video. Sharon decides to keep the tapes; Mulder tells her they could be worth something someday. Sharon thanks Scully. Scully says that's how Max would have wanted it, because Sharon lost someone close. "So did you," Sharon replies.

Leaving the trailer, Scully is filled with some thoughts of Pendrell; she admits she didn't even know his first name. Scully says she was really thinking about the meaning of the keychain that Mulder gave her for her birthday. She thinks that it expresses Mulder's belief in extraordinary men and women, perseverance, and teamwork--and that the sacrifices made in the effort shouldn't be forgotten. "I just thought it was a pretty cool keychain," Mulder deadpans.

The episode opens at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, at around 11:40 p.m.. An old man is seen running around looking for someone. He encounters two men, Jason Nichols and Lucas Menand, arguing about some publication. The old man accosts them, saying that he has something important to say and that they need to listen. The old man is picked up by campus security; as he is dragged away, screaming Lucas' name, he says that Lucas will be killed at 11:46 p.m.; he mumbles about "the papers" and says that he won't see "the bus." Lucas and Jason part tersely; just then, Jason sees a bus pulling around the corner. Looking back, he sees Lucas fumbling with his umbrella and dropping a pile of papers behind a car. Looking at his watch, Jason notes that the time is 11:45 and then rushes to stop Lucas from picking his papers up; unfortunately, he is not in time, and the bus strikes Lucas, killing him at exactly 11:46 p.m.. The bus driver hops out of the bus, shouting that Jason killed Lucas by pushing him in front of the bus.

Mulder and Scully go over the case the next morning. Jason has been taken into custody, charged with Lucas' murder. Jason is an associate professor of biology at MIT, and Lucas was one of his postdocs; they were last seen together arguing. Scully doesn't understand why the case is an X-File until Mulder plays back a tape of Jason's interrogation--where he reports the old man knowing that the accident was going to happen ahead of time. Mulder then reveals that the campus security officer who picked up the old man is now dead. Arriving in Boston, Scully examines the body; the security guard is frozen completely solid--at 15 degrees F and dropping as time goes on. Scully hypothesizes that the security guard was exposed to a chemical refrigerant.

Mulder heads to the police station to interrogate Jason Nichols; when they arrive, Nichols is seen talking with his girlfriend, Lisa Ianelli. Mulder recounts the story of the frozen guard to Nichols; Nichols, however, is agitated. He tells Mulder that Lucas threatened Nichols, saying that he would publicly announce that Nichols had falsified his research data. Jason says he may have been a little lax, but only because he was in a hurry to renew his grant funding, a grant which Lucas was also competing for. The interesting twist is that the grant funding is for cryobiology--studying the effects of freezing on biological systems. Just then, Scully calls Mulder from the morgue, saying that Jason Nichols' fingerprints have been found all over the frozen campus police officer.

At a hotel, a Dr. Yonechi has just arrived in the United States, and is somewhat frustrated that he cannot get a hotel room. Just then, the old man arrives and explains that there was a mix-up with his room and that Dr. Nichols was unable to meet him. He has a new room for Yonechi and leads him upstairs; Yonechi invites him inside. Noticing that the old man is sweating, Yonechi offers him a glass of water. The old man professes that he is a great admirer of Yonechi, and appreciated his contributions to "my work"--he says that he solved the "vitrification" problem, but Yonechi said that he hasn't done so yet. The old man then produces a needle with which he pricks Yonechi's hand. The old man apologizes for what he has done, and then watches Yonechi scream in agony as he begins to freeze.

Mulder and Scully examine Yonechi's body shortly after it's discovered. Mulder's check with the desk clerk confirms that an old man was with Yonechi when he checked in. Scully hypothesizes that Nichols has an accomplice, and is killing people off to make sure he gets his grant. Scully shows Mulder a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum of a compound isolated from a pinprick in both the campus security guard's and Dr. Yonechi's hand--totally unidentified, totally unknown. On a hunch, Mulder heads to Nichols' lab where he and Scully meet Lisa Ianelli. Looking at the NMR spectrum, Lisa is shocked--she says that it is a catalyst, a rapid-freezing agent, allowing living tissue to be deep-frozen and survive. But then Lisa drops a big surprise--the compound doesn't exist yet; it only exists in computer models, and couldn't even be synthesized for another 5-10 years.

After revealing the death of the frozen Dr. Yonechi and the circumstances of his death, Lisa speculates that Yonechi may not be dead yet. Lisa has Yonechi's body warmed in a heating bath and an attempt is made to restart his heart. Amazingly, Yonechi comes back to life. Unfortunately, his body begins rapidly overheating and he bursts into flames. After Yonechi is charred to a cinder, Lisa speculates that the catalyst was unstable and could catalyze heating as well. Lisa leaves, saying that she needs to talk to Jason; riding across town on a bus, the old man is seen just a few seats behind her. When Lisa gets off the bus, the old man follows. Lisa notices that she is being followed.

After a few attempts to lose the old man, Lisa finally corners him and confronts him. She says that he's the one who killed Lucas and Dr. Yonechi. The old man grabs her and says that he can kill her too, saying that he specifically "came here" to kill her. Pressing to know who he is, the old man's face suddenly softens and he walks away.

Lisa calls Mulder and Scully, and they meet her in downtown Boston. She recounts her attack, confirming that the police sketch of the old man matches that of her assailant. Scully reminds Lisa that she could be held accountable if Jason is tried and convicted of murder and she knows anything. Under pressure, Lisa admits that she personally falsified data to get the grant, and that Jason is covering for her. Scully thinks that the old man is working to protect Lisa--but Mulder can't understand why the old man would threaten Lisa as well if that were true.

Just then, a police officer walks up to Mulder, saying that a hotel has seen the old man, and that he's living in one of their rooms. Investigating the room, Mulder and Scully find signs of recent habitation, but no old man. Scully finds Yonechi's flight information on a pad of paper, and Mulder finds a picture of Yonechi, Jason, and Lisa celebrating something--and Mulder speculates that it was an event that never happened. He thinks that someone has time-traveled back to change the past, and the photo was taken 5-10 years in the future, when the freezing compound was synthesized. The old man is the time traveler, trying to stop Jason from getting his grant--hence he was trying to save Lucas, and was also killing of Jason's collaborators. Even further, Mulder thinks that the old man is none other than an aged Jason Nichols. He suggests showing the photo to Lisa and asking her if it was ever taken.

Shortly after Mulder and Scully leave, the old man returns to his hotel room. Gasping for breath and sweating heavily, he injects himself with the same needle-device he used to kill Yonechi, and suddenly feels relief. Just then, Lisa walks in the open door and calls out, "Jason?" Jason unfolds the tale, saying that Lisa made it all possible. The old Jason explains that "thirty years ago, ten years from now," Lisa will meet a scientist who has found tachyons--particles that can travel faster than light, but only at absolute zero. He says that Lisa will have a revelation, one "so remarkable that it will change the course of history." He says that he came back to kill Lisa, but that he couldn't bring himself to do it. Lulling Lisa closer to him, old Jason stabs Lisa with the needle and she immediately begins to freeze.

Mulder returns to the police station to bail young Jason out of jail; he tells Jason about Lisa's condition and that she's currently in the heat bath warming up, back at the MIT biology lab. Showing him the photo, Jason reports that neither he nor Lisa have ever met Dr. Yonechi; but Mulder has had the photo analyzed and has verified its authenticity. Jason has a hard time buying Mulder's theory, but his scientific training convinces him that Mulder may be right. Mulder reports the current scientific musings that time travel may be possible--but would be lethal in the presence of heat or extreme gravity. He thinks that Jason's freezing compound has a practical application in time travel, and that old Jason is trying to wipe the team out to prevent time travel from being developed in the first place. Jason wonders why old Jason would want to stop time travel.

When Jason runs his hand across the scanner to gain admittance to his lab, the security man tells him that he's already checked in--Mulder and Jason both realize that Jason is in the building. Mulder has Jason go up to the cryo lab, where doctors are trying to revive Lisa, while he goes to look for old Jason. In the cryo lab, Lisa is successfully revived and kept functioning by keeping her in the temperature bath.

Mulder heads up to Jason's lab, where he meets one of Jason's research assistants. When the assistant tries to pull up some of Jason's files on his compound, the files are gone--totally destroyed. Scully calls on the phone to report Lisa's condition, and Mulder learns that young Jason has not arrived yet. In a computer lab, young Jason finally confronts the old Jason. "I figured this is where I'd go to stop myself," he says.

Young Jason wants Lisa back. The old Jason says he cannot understand the horror that "we" helped to create--"a world without history, a world without hope." The old Jason has lived in that world, and doesn't want it to be. Young Jason wants to know how to go back, so he can save Lisa, thinking her dead; just then, Mulder arrives, locked out of the room by heavy glass doors. Mulder shouts out that Lisa is alive. Young Jason goes to open the door for Mulder; then, old Jason comes up behind him, stabs him with the freezing needle, and says, "It's better that we never were." Young and old Jason struggle, and the old one bursts into flames, consuming both of them in the blaze. Mulder is unable to break through the glass in time to help.

As Lisa is taken to the hospital, Scully informs Lisa of Jason's death. Mulder arrives. He quotes part of Scully's own senior thesis to her--where she speculated that there are infinite universes, but only one possible outcome for each. Mulder takes this to mean that old Jason's attempts to stop himself will fail, and the future will unfold the same regardless. In the end, we are left with a shot of Lisa, hard at work on the computer, striving to perfect the freezing compound.

We open on a hospital in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where Amanda Nelligan is being wheeled into OB/GYN for delivery of her baby. As a nurse asks her where the father is, Amanda states that he's not from around here--in fact, he's from another planet. The baby is born in record time, but there's a twist, much to the doctor's shock--the baby has a tail. And all the doctor can say is, "Oh Lord, not another one."

Mulder and Scully are on the road to Martinsburg the next day. Mulder wants to investigate the birth of children with vestigial tails. Scully says that it's uncommon, but Mulder says that five cases in one town is more than a coincidence. Interviewing Amanda, Mulder asks her about the father being from another planet. Further probing reveals that she thinks the father is Luke Skywalker. Realizing she's probably nuts, Scully asks if Luke had a lightsaber. Amanda says no, but says that she's seen Star Wars 368 times.

Scully does a little DNA analysis and finds a startling fact--all five children with vestigial tails all had the same father. Mulder notes that all five women went to the same OB/GYN, and four of them had received artificial insemination treatment; thus he suspects the doctor. Mulder and Scully arrive at the office of Dr. Alden, just in time to find him in confrontation with the four families with tailed children. The families are outraged that the father's sperm was not used. Alden is at a loss and claims his innocence. He suggests that there is an alternate possibility: his artificial insemination technique never actually worked and that the mothers got pregnant on their own.

While the confrontation continues, Mulder begins snooping around the doctor's office. In one room, he encounters a maintenance man, Eddie Van Blundht, and notices a stump on the lower part of his back. Mulder asks Eddie if he can ask a few questions; Eddie replies affirmitavely and then takes off running. Mulder quickly catches up and tackles him. Five paternity tests reveal that Eddie is the father of all five of the tailed children. Van Blundht makes a point that his name is spelled wrong on the police reports, because they missed the silent "H" in his last name.

Van Blundht, feigning innocence, says that maybe the women were just attracted to him. Yet he is unwilling to explain why none of the women who had tailed babies remember him. Mulder, for once, is at a loss as to why. Scully thinks that Van Blundht used a "date rape" drug to seduce the five women. Later, while Van Blundht is being processed at the police station, he suddenly morphs into the cop who's taking down his information. The cop is so shocked that he can barely react when Van Blundht hops up and breaks a vase over his head.

When the deputy is found knocked unconscious the next morning, he can only remember that it wasn't really Van Blundht, but himself. Mulder immediately suspects that Van Blundht is capable of changing his shape at will. Scully thinks a simpler answer is that Van Blundht and the cop looked alike, and after having stolen the cop's uniform, it would be a piece of cake to pass as him. Mulder's theory, however, can explain how four women could have sex with Van Blundht and never have realized it, thinking it was their husbands all along.

Mulder and Scully head over to the Van Blundht residence to look around. On the way in, Mulder asks Scully who she would be if she could be anyone. She replies herself, but Mulder says that's a cop-out, so she rethinks and says Eleanor Roosevelt, which Mulder also finds boring. He speculates that maybe what other people think of us makes us who we are. At the door to the Van Blundht residence, the agents meet Edward Van Blundht Senior, Eddie's father. Eddie Senior is quite shocked to learn what Eddie Junior has been up to. Poking around, Mulder notes that Eddie Senior was once a circus sideshow act; Eddie Junior had his tail removed as a child. Eddie Senior objected, saying the tail was all he had going for him--"otherwise you're just small potatoes."

Eddie Senior uses Mulder's name in conversation, and Mulder realizes that he has never given Eddie Senior his name. Eddie Senior then bolts off, and Mulder realizes they're talking to a morphed Eddie Junior. Eddie Junior busts into the house of one of the women he got pregnant, morphed as the father. The wife is surprised to see her husband home early; in a panic, Eddie bolts into the bathroom, closes the door, and morphs back into himself.

Continuing to poke around the Van Blundht residence, Mulder finds the body of Eddie Senior stuffed in the attic, covered with quick lime. Meanwhile, Eddie has found himself deep in trouble as the real father returns home. The wife is totally confused, having just seen her "husband" go into the bathroom moments ago. Just as the real husband is about to force the bathroom door, Eddie morphs again and steps out--as Fox Mulder.

Later, at the medical center, Scully begins an autopsy on the body of Eddie Senior. Scully has not found a cause of death, but did find striated muscle tissue all over his body--which could explain the "morphing" activity. As Scully is explaining what a scientific find the discovery of the intact body is, Mulder accidentally breaks the tail and then tries to cover it up before Scully notices. Mulder goes off to visit Amanda Nelligan again--because she's the only unmarried woman Van Blundht went after.

Mulder arrives at the hospital, and upon being shown a picture of Van Blundht, she immediately recognizes him. She went out with Van Blundht throughout high school, but eventually broke up with him, saying that he was a loser with no ambition or direction. Under further questioning, Amanda says that Eddie has some good qualities, like his love of Star Wars. Mulder won't reveal his reasoning for asking about Eddie, saying it's "official FBI business." He contgratulates Amanda and offers her a flower before leaving. As Mulder steps into the hallway, we see none other than Mulder walking up to the nurse's station to ask for Amanda. And the "Mulder" who just talked to Amanda quietly and quickly walks away.

The real Mulder walks in and quickly picks up that Amanda just talked to him. He then gets a phone call from the distraught couple whose bathroom Eddie hid out in. They want to know when Mulder will let them back into their bathroom, since he said the police were going to dust it for fingerprints. They also want to know why Mulder wanted to borrow a suit. Mulder immediately pieces together that Eddie is masquerading as him. He asks Amanda, "I was just here. Where did I go?"

Mulder asks a nurse where he went, and traces Eddie to the locker room. Mulder pulls his gun on an unsuspecting worker in the locker room and cuffs the man, along with another who just steps out of the shower--Dr. Alden. Mulder calls Scully on his cellular phone and tells her to get to the hospital. All of the sudden, Mulder is jumped by Eddie, who can only say, "You're a damn good lookin' man."

Scully arrives to find a very confused Mulder apologizing for locking up two innocent men and holding a cold pack to the back of his head. He says he thinks there's really no case here anymore--"I think the only thing that's here is small potatoes." As they walk away, we cut down to the hospital basement, where Fox Mulder is locked in a room and shouting for help.

Mulder continues shouting for help, and we see that Eddie was kind enough to leave him a sandwich and a can of soda. Back in Washington, "Mulder" and Scully go over their field report with Skinner. Skinner berates "Mulder" for misspelling the word "Bureau" twice in his report. Scully reports that Eddie Senior died of natural causes, and that Eddie Junior has been entered into the National Sex Offenders database. Scully heads off to continue looking over Eddie Senior's unusual muscular structure, and "Mulder" heads into Mulder's office, after spending a few minutes fumbling for the right key.

"Mulder" kicks back in Mulder's chair and nearly topples himself. Spending a few moments looking around, all he can say is, "Good night! This is where my tax dollars go?" Finding Mulder's driver's license, he heads to Mulder's apartment, and immediately asks, "Where the hell do I sleep?" "Mulder" checks his answering machine and finds a message from Langly about some conspiracy ("geeks for friends") and a phone sex line. "Mulder" then practices flashing his badge and drawing his gun, pretending to be the cool FBI man.

Later that night, Scully is at home working when there's a knock on her door. Standing there is none other than "Mulder," carrying a bottle of wine with him. Initially a little hesitant, Scully pops open the wine bottle and explains that she's been continuing to work on Eddie Senior's autopsy. "Mulder" explains that he and Scully never really "talked" much, to which Scully agrees. A few hours elapse. "Mulder" and Scully are sitting by the fire, finishing off the bottle of wine and Scully is relating a funny story from her teenage years. Scully admits that she's seeing a whole new side of Mulder, and even that she likes it. "Mulder" asks if Scully wishes she could do it all over again, differently. Scully asks "Mulder" if he would, and "Mulder" leans in to kiss her. Just as they are about to kiss, the real Mulder busts the door open. Shocked, Scully pushes "Mulder" away and he morphs back into Eddie.

A month later, Mulder goes to speak to Eddie in prison at Eddie's request. He's been given a muscle relaxant so that he can't shapeshift anymore. He tells Mulder that the situation is funny--he was born a loser, but Mulder is one by choice. "You should live a little. Treat yourself. God knows I would, if I were you."

Leaving the jail, Scully tells Mulder, "I don't imagine you need to be told this, Mulder, but you're not a loser." "Yeah, but I'm no Eddie Van Blundht either, am I?"

The story opens at a mail routing center in Desmond, Virginia. One of the workers, Jane Brody, tells her friend to cover for her while she goes to take a smoke break. While Jane is sitting in a bathroom stall puffing away, a huge swarm of bees suddenly emerges from the sink. When Jane finally notices the bees, she tries to swipe them away, but they sting her until she dies. A few minutes later, her friend goes into the bathroom and finds Jane's bloated body--but no sign of the bees. Later that night, Assistant Director Skinner pulls up pictures of Jane's corpse and deletes them. When he opens the door to leave, we see that he is in Fox Mulder's office.

Skinner returns home, takes his phone off the hook, and then leaves. He proceeds to the crime scene, the bathroom where Jane's body was found, and carefully removes all the evidence, including a cigarette on the floor and traces of a sticky orange fluid seeping down from the walls. Skinner then breaks into the county morgue and steals Jane Brody's body, narrowly avoiding detection by the night watch. He takes Jane's body to a large chemical plant and then stuffs it into a furnace. In his final act, Skinner goes to the Desmond police station, masquerading as Agen Fox Mulder. He checks out a tray of evidence from the Brody case and swaps a vial of blood with one he brought with him, forging Mulder's signature to gain access.

As Skinner is leaving the police station, he encounters Detective Thomas, who e-mailed pictures of Jane Brody's body to Mulder. Skinner, pretending to be Mulder for Thomas, says he hasn't found anything worth investigating, even as an X-File. Skinner returns home, strips off his clothes, and dumps them all in a garbage bag. He changes into new clothes, puts his phone back on the hook, and goes to take out the garbage bag--only to run into an agitated Fox Mulder. Skinner feigns innocence, saying he took his phone off the hook so he could sleep. Mulder, meanwhile, has been trying to call Skinner all night, having discovered that the pictures of the Brody's body from his e-mail were deleted. He then reports something that Skinner didn't know--Detective Thomas has been murdered execution-style, presumably by the same man who masqueraded as Mulder to gain access to Brody case evidence. Mulder wants Skinner's help on the case because Scully is in the hospital; her oncologist is concerned that her tumor is growing.

Later, in a parking garage, Skinner meets with the Cigarette Smoking Man (CSM) and one of his associates. Skinner is outraged that Detective Thomas was killed, refusing to be a party to murder. CSM replies that Thomas was killed because Skinner "failed to neutralize a potentially compromising situation." Skinner wants to cancel the deal, but CSM counters that "if a man digs a hole, he risks falling into it."

Skinner wakes early in the morning with a phone call from Mulder, who is distraught to discover Jane Brody's body missing from the morgue and the blood samples were switched. Mulder says that FBI ballistics experts have identified the gun that killed Detective Thomas as a SigSauer P228--the standard FBI sidearm. Walking over to his desk drawer, Skinner discovers that his gun is missing. Skinner then calls CSM and demands to know if his gun was used to murder the detective. CSM says that Skinner is in no position to do anything about it. Skinner then demands to know why Thomas was killed. CSM counters that he was killed as part of the bargain to save Agent Scully's life. Skinner then threatens to turn state's evidence and expose CSM if Scully dies.

Deciding to play on both sides of the fence, Skinner heads back to the postal center in Desmond and begins snooping around the bathroom where Jane Brody was found. Breaking one of the walls open, he finds a huge network of honeycombs behind it. Skinner takes a portion of the honeycomb to Dr. Peter Valedespino, an entomologist, for analysis. Valedespino examines the material and finds some larvae that he may be able to hatch to help identify the bees. Valedespino, in parting, wonders if the case is related to "that other case"--since he was contacted several months ago about killer bees by Fox Mulder.

We open on a committee meeting at the FBI. Scully comes in to speak before Section Chief Blevins. She explains how she was assigned to the X-Files four years ago to debunk the work of Fox Mulder. She further goes on to say that she is here to report on the "illegitimacy" of Mulder's work, and how over the years he became a victim of "his belief in the biggest of lies."

Story note: during the credits, the closing tag line reads "Believe The Lie" instead of "The Truth Is Out There."

We then switch to the Yukon Territory in Canada, where two scientists are flying by helicopter to meet an expedition. The scientists meet their guide at the base camp, and giddy with excitement, head off for the summit. They reach their site around nightfall and meet up with the other members of their team. Finally, the source of the excitement is revealed--what appears to be an alien corpse buried in the ice. Back in the committee room, Scully explains how she and Mulder were drawn into this story, a conspiracy to cover a bigger lie.

In flashback, the Scully family gathers at Margaret Scully's house for dinner: present are Dana, brother Bill Jr. (fresh home from seaside duty), and a surprise guest for Scully--a priest, Father McCue. Over dinner, McCue explains how he feels awkward being there, but that Scully's mother requested he talk to Scully. McCue knows that Scully has drifted from the church, and he thinks that faith can be valuable during a personal crisis; Scully appreciates the concern, but hasn't felt the need for faith. Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call for Scully. Mulder is on the other end. He says that he's been contacted by a Professor Arlinsky, who has made an extraordinary discovery in the Yukon. Torn between staying with her family and leaving at Mulder's insistence, Scully chooses to leave.

The two meet up at the Smithsonian, where Arlinsky works as a forensic anthropologist. In his office, Arlinsky shows the agents pictures of the alien in the ice--perfectly preserved for over 200 years. The body was discovered by a Canadian geodetic survey team and one of Arlinsky's associates, a man named Babcock. Mulder suspects a hoax, but Arlinsky feels the setup is far too elaborate for a hoax--and he has ice core samples to prove it. Not trusting the goverment, Arlinsky wants Mulder's help getting the body out for verification of authenticity.

Scully has no real opinion of Arlinsky's evidence. She can't see how proof changes anything for Mulder, since he already believes; Mulder counters by asking Scully how she would change if she were given proof of God's existence. Scully says that it probably couldn't be proven. Mulder asks hypothetically if it were, wouldn't it be better to have proof than to go on believing the lie. Unwilling to follow Mulder, Scully does agree to have Arlinsky's ice core samples examined. Back in the committee room, Scully explains that some of her reluctance may have resulted from having just learned that her cancer had metastasized.

In the Yukon, Babcock's team continues to work to remove the alien body from the ice in one big block. In his tent, Babcock is seen loading a pistol, unwilling to trust the men he's working with. Just then, one of the workers notices what appears to be a casting channel for pouring water in; but Babcock thinks the angle is entirely wrong. Leaving Babcock behind, the trail guide, Rolston, descends the mountain alone.

At the American University paleoclimatology lab, Scully speaks with a Dr. Vitagliano, who seems to think that the ice core is authentic. Vitagliano has, interestingly, noted the presence of what appears to be hybrid animal/plant cellular material in the ice matrix. Source unknown, Vitagliano is interested in investigating further, to which Scully readily assents.

That night, at the Yukon camp, an unseen figure moves through the camp with a shotgun, firing into tents and killing off the workers. The following morning, Mulder arrives at the base camp with Arlinsky, and they discover that the guide, Rolston, is not there. The base camp is totally deserted. Mulder and Arlinsky choose to head up the mountain alone; not far from the top, they discover Rolston's bloody body on the trail--shot to death.

Scully returns to the lab to meet Vitagliano that afternoon, and he isn't there. There is however, a mysterious looking man apparently collecting something from one of the lab benches. He promptly excuses himself. Looking over at the lab freezer and finding the door ajar, Scully realizes that the man had no place in the lab and goes chasing after him. She follows him into a stairwell, where she is suddenly jumped and thrown down a flight of stairs.

As night falls, Mulder and Arlinsky reach the summit to find the base camp wrecked and the alien body apparently missing. Looking around the tents, they find Babcock badly wounded by a shotgun blast. Fortunately, Babcock had suspected trouble and buried the body under his tent.

The next morning, Scully's brother Bill meets her at the hospital with a change of clothes. Bill hasn't told Mrs. Scully what happened. Scully explains herself and insists that she's fine. Bill knows, however, that she's not fine--their mother told him about her cancer. Scully wanted to keep it to herself, because it was so personal. Bill can't understand why she continues to work; she needs to take responsibility for the people in her life. Scully becomes angry, countering that just because she hasn't told all doesn't mean she isn't taking responsibility. Bill wonders where Scully's loyalty really lies--perhaps to Mulder. "Well where is he, Dana? Where is he through all this?"

Elsewhere, Mulder and Arlinsky have had the body flown to Washington, D.C. and then unloaded in a warehouse in the city. Arlinsky slowly thaws the body in warm water and prepares to have it dissected. Going through the autopsy, Arlinsky and Babcock quickly discover that the body is clearly not human--missing fingers and toes, gray skin, black eyes, viscous insides.

Later, Scully meets with an FBI fingerprint specialist, who has lifted prints from the stairwell where Scully was attacked; the attacker is successfully identified as Michael Kritschgau, formerly of the Army, now working in research at the Pentagon. Scully goes to the Pentagon, where she intercepts Kritschgau while he's leaving work. Kritschgau runs, but Scully calls him out and finally is forced to hold him at gunpoint to get him to stop. Kritschgau explains that if he's arrested he'll be killed--by the same people who gave Scully her cancer.

Back in the warehouse, Arlinsky is done with his preliminary exam, and while final proof still awaits, he's convinced that the body is truly extraterrestrial. Mulder gets a phone call from Scully, who wants him to speak with Kritschgau. Back in the committee room, Scully tells how Kritschgau systematically explained to her how she and Mulder had been deceived. Scully convinces Mulder to come and meet with Kritschgau. Seconds after Mulder leaves the warehouse, another man enters with a shotgun ready. The shotgun man asks Babcock how his wound is, to which he replies he's fine. The assassin guns down Arlinsky, and Babcock confirms for the shooter that Mulder is now a believer.

At Scully's apartment, Mulder listens to Kritschgau's story: intelligent life in the universe is a carefully orchestrated hoax. Kritschgau says the whole thing was concocted by the military during the Cold War to divert attention from its activities; he says he has DOD records dating back to the 1950s to confirm his story. When pressed, Kritschgau confesses that his motivation stems from his ailing son, who became sick after serving in the Gulf War. He says the government has so many lies to cover that the only way they could do it is to create even greater lies. Mulder's entire life, including his sister's abduction, was carefully concocted, as were thousands of UFO sightings (secret military aircraft) and bizarre biological forms (all explainable by science)--and the bogus alien body in the ice.

Mulder counters that carbon dating would reveal the alien body to be a fake, and Kritschgau says that the body has assuredly vanished by now--Mulder was only meant to see it and believe the lie. Not trusting Kritschgau, Mulder returns to the warehouse with Scully to find the alien body gone and Arlinsky lying on the floor dead--as is Babcock. Scully is firmly convinced that Kritschgau is right--all the evidence supports his claim, including the chimera cells found in the ice cores. Mulder, for his part, has seen too much to stop believing; he wants to know what Kritschgau said to convince Scully. And then Scully drops a bomb--the men behind the hoax gave Scully her cancer to make Mulder a believer.

That night, Mulder watches tapes of old hearings on intelligent life in the universe on TV, sullen, angry, and crying. Back in the committee room Scully, herself near tears, finishes her story. In the morning, she was called by the police to Mulder's apartment. She sadly reports that Mulder "died late last night from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head."

To be continued...