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ORIGINAL AIR DATE:September 10th 1993
EPISODE NUMBER:1X79
RATING:****
Summary
The episode opens with a shot of a girl running through the woods at night, she is tripping, falling. Suddenly, there is a bright light, a vortex of leaves swirling.
A sillohette of a figure appears at the top of a hill, the light behind him. The light increases in intensity, filling the screen. The next day, plainsclothes police men are examining the
body. Suddenly one man tells the others to turn her over, which they do. He identifys her as Karen Swanson, she graduated with his son, Billy. Apparently, she is not the first, he says,
sounding discouraged, "Not another one"
There's a woman walking through an office, she identifys herself at the desk as Agent Scully. She enters a smaller office, with several men in it. She sits
down in front of a desk, one of the men welcomes her and asks her about her past. She tells him a bit about her past, she graduated from medical school and went streight to Quantico. Another man
asks her if she knows an agent Mulder, she says yes, by reputation only. He tells her a bit about his background, she tells him some more. She says he had a nickname at the acadamy, "Spooky". Back
to the first man, he asks her if she knows anything about 'the x-files', she says that she believes that they are paranormal cases. The man says yes, agent Mulder investigates them, she is asigned
to him, to write reports on him, about the validity of his work. She reads between the lines, saying "Am I to understand that you want me to 'debunk' the x-files sir?" Then, you see a man in
the background, leaning on a filing cabinet and smoking a cigarette. Scully leaves the office, and goes down to the basement, where she knocks on a door marked 'Agent Mulder'. She enters the office,
and her attention is immediately drawn to the back wall, which is cover with pictures, newspaper clippings, etc., about paranormal phenoma. She greets Mulder, who is looking at slides, he is defensive
and sarcastic, but she chooses to ignore that, and remain upbeat. Mulder apparently knew she was going to be assigned to him, he has read up on her background. Still being somewhat sarcastic, he
shows her slides of the girl in the woods that we saw earlier, and gives Scully background information on the case, how everybody in the girls graduating class is being killed in the same manner. Mulder
focuses on two small mosquito bite-like marks on her back, asking Scully what she thinks of them. She says that the marks look like animal bites, he couters by showing her a slide of the chemical makeup
of the substance found by the girls body, asking her if she knows what it is. She doesn't know, says it look organic. Mulder asks Scully if she belives "in the exsistance of extraterrstrials," which
he think caused the girls death. She says she doesn't, and gives him a long scientific speech about why. He tells her that they're leaving for Oregon in the morning to investigate this case.
Mulder and Scully are on a plane to Oregon, Scully is reading newspaper articles about the case and Mulder is lying down, sleeping. An anouncement comes on for every one
to buckle their safety belts, they're now making their descent. Suddenly, the plane is shaken by excessive turbulance. Scully grips the armrests of her seat, and Mulder wakes up and says "This must be
the place" Mulder and Scully are now in a car, Mulder is driving and eating sunflower seeds. Scully says that the case has already been looked at, and tells him some details about it that the gleaned
from her reading on the plane. Mulder is, as always, sarcastic. Suddenly, the radio goes wild, flashing from statio to staion, fuzzy sound, the clock's flashing. Without saying a word, Mulder pulls the
car over, gets out and paints an orange X on the road with spray paint. Scully is just sitting there, thinking he's insane. She asks what that was all about, but Mulder is evasive. They arrive at a
graveyard, and prepare to exhume the body. Before they can do so however, a man pulls up and jumps out of his car, telling a girl (Presumeably his daughter) to stay there. He demands to know what
they're doing, and fordids them to exhume the body. It is revealed that he is Dr.Jay Nemmen, a medical examiner. They accuse him of malpractice, and his daughter finally suceeds in pulling him away.
While the body is being exhumed, Mulder tells Scully that this boy, one Ray Soames, died of exposure on July 7th, while he was missing for only seven hours. Suddenly, the coffin breaks loose, and rolls
down the hill, breaking open at the bottom. In it is not Ray Soames, but a short, alien-like body.
Scully is doing an autopsy on Ray Soames's body, while Mulder takes pictures. Scully says that it's simian, Mulder thinks otherwise. Mulder demands that she do a full
workup and series of tests on the body, including x-rays. Scully is in her hotel room, typing up a report on her autopsy from dictated notes. She writes that there was an metal implant in Soames's nose.
Mulder knocks on the door, and says that he is going for a run, would she like to come with him. She declines, and goes back to staring at an x-ray showing the implant in Soame's nose. It's the next day,
and Mulder and Scully are talking with a doctor at the Ramon County State Phsyhciatry Center, where two of Ray Soames's classmates, Billy, the Sheriff's son, and Peggy, have ben living since a car crash.
Ray Soames used to be a patient there, and the doctor is giving Mulder and Scully the low-down on him. Mulder and Scully go into the ward where Billy and Peggy are, Billy is in a waking coma, and Peggy
is in a wheelchair. Peggy is reading to Billy, and when Mulder asks to examine her, she goes ballistic, and gets a nosebleed.She falls out of the wheelchair, and Mulder sees that she has the marks on her
back. Out in the hallway, Scully demands the truth from Mulder, noteing that all the kids were found the forest. Mulder says the Peggy was abducted by aliens, and Scully says that's crazy. Later, at night,
Mulder and Scully are in the forest, looking for clues. Scully sees some ash on the ground, and bends down to pick it up. When she looks up, Mulder is gone. She reaches for her gun, and goes looking for him.
She hears noises, and heads towards them, thinking it's Mulder. There's a light at the top of a hill, and a figure -not Mulder- sillohetted in it, like in the beginning.
Scully tells the figure to drop the weapon, it's the sheriff. Mulder comes to back her up. The sheriff says they're trespassing, and demands that they leave, which they eventualy do,
ducking under the police line, and driving off. As they're driving down the road, Scully shows Mulder the ash, she says that the kids all died in a cult sacrafice, and that the sheriff is hiding the truth.
Suddenly, Mulder's compass goes wild. Mulder looks at his watch, there is a bright light, and everything goes in slow-motion. The car goes dead, and it's all over. Mulder looks at his watch, it's now nine
minutes later, they've lost nine minutes! Mulder gets out of the car, Scully follows him. Lo and behold, there's that orange X Mulder painted on the road two days ago! Scully can't accept that they've lost
nine minutes, time, she says, is a universal invariant. As they're both standing on the road, argueing, the car mysteriously starts by itself. Back at the motel, Scully is typing up her case report when the
power goes out. She decides to have a bath by candle-light, and , as she is getting undressed, she notices two marks on her back, like the ones on the victims. She throws on her dressing-gown, and goes to
Mulders room, where she shows him the marks. It's a tense couple of moments while he examines the marks, but finally he pronouces them nothing more than mosquito bites. Filled with relief, she colapses into
his arms. They lie down on the beds, and talk. Mulder tells her of his sister's disaperence, that she just dispeared without a trace, there were no facts. It tore his family apart. He tells her of his history
in the Bureau, that he profiled killers, and helped to aprehend them. Then he found the X-Files, he read all the cases he could find, he was fascinated by them. But someone was blocking the information, and he's
only been allowed to continue with them because he's made conections. He says that he went to a regresion hypnotist, to find out the truth behind his sisters abduction. He says that, through hypnosis, he was
able to recall a presence in the roon, a light, his paralysis. He says that nothing else matters to him, that this is as close as he's come to finding the Truth. Just then, there's a phone call, it's a woman,
saying that Peggy's dead. Mulder and Scully drive to the scene of her death, she was run over by a truck, the truck driver says that she just ran in front of him. Scully is looking at her body, she sees that her
watch stopped at the same time they lost nine minutes. They go back to the motel, only to find that it's on fire, all the evidence has been completely destroyed. As they are watching the fire, Teresa Nemmens comes
over and asks them for help. They all go a cafe, and Teresa says that sometimes she wakes up and finds herself in the woods, with no idea how she got there, and that all her former classmates have had the same
experience. She says that her father demands that she say nothing about, this, and that he says he can protect her, but she thinks that she's going to die. Suddenly, her nose starts to bleed, and just then, her
father appears, and drags her away, saying tht he'll keep her safe. Scully says that they [The sheriff, Jay Nemmens, Teresa, etc.] know who the murderers are. Mulder wonders what is in the other graves, so they
go to the graveyard to check. There, they find that all the graves concerning them have been dug up and emptied.
Mulder and Scully are in the graveyard, talking about what they've found out. Mulder says that Billy is the murderer, that time stopped and something took control of him, so he took
the others to the forest. That the marks are from experiments that somehow mutate thir bodies after death, explaining the strange remains of Soames. They are both laughing, and yelling out the answers and solutions
to this case. They leave the graveyard, and go to the hospital where Billy is, to see him. Mulder questions the nurse, she says that she was watching TV when Peggy was killed, she didn't notice anything strange. Meanwhile,
Scully is examining Billy. She finds on his feet the same ash that she found in the woods earlier. Out in the hall, Scully is getting carried away, she has theories that she's telling to Mulder, but he brings her back
to earth, saying that she will have to write all this in her report. They go back to the forest, and hear a scream. They start to run in the direction that the scream came from, but Scully gets knocked down by the sheriff,
who points his gun at Mulder and tells him to lie on the ground. Mulder doesn't, and asks the sheriff how long this has been going on. He cracks the sheriff, finally, and the sheriff runs to Billy, who's kneeling down,
with Teresa. The sheriff knocks Billy down, but he gets up again, you see the mark on his back. Suddenly, all the leaves swirl in a vortex, there's a blinding white light, and Scully appears. When it's all over, Billy hugs
his father. In F.B.I. headquarters, Billy is undergoing regression hypnosis, he says that he and his classmates were having a grad party in the woods when a light came and took them away to be tested. He was ordered to gather
the others, the orders given by the implant in his head. The tests failed, and all the evidence had to be destroyed. Mulder, Scully, and some others are watching this, Mulder and Scully share a look at the end. Scully leaves,
to report to the men. She tells the men everything, and they, naturaly, think she's insane, been spending too much time with Mulder. She gives them the implant from Ray Soame's nose, the one piece of evidence that wasn't
destroyed in the fire, and leaves. In the hall, she passes the Smoking Man, who's going into the room. It's 11:21 at night, Scully is lying in bed. Mulder calls to say that the paperwork is gone, and that they need to talk
tomorrow. She repeats the last bit to herself, quietly. You see the Smoking Man walking down an isle in, presumably, a warehouse. He stops, pulls out a box from one of the shelves, and takes a small plastic storage box out
of it. He puts the implant Scully gave the men in a slot in the box, with others of the same. He walks down the isle and leaves, shutting the door behind him. A sign on the door identifys the place as the Pentagon.
EXECTUTIVE PRODUCER
CHRIS CARTER
Review
Having watched this at the beginning of the fourth season, I find it somewhat hard to judge it accuratly, knowing exactly what will happen to them over the next three-and-a-half years.So I will
do a sort-of comparison between then and now in my review. I have to say that my favorite scene was when they had just lost nine minutes, and were arguing about it in the rain. Scully just coudn't give up all her scientific knoledge and
accept it, and Mulder could. Now, Scully is less of a skeptic, she still has trouble accepting most of Mulder's ideas, but she has opened her mind more to the paranormal. Towards the end of the episode, though, she thought
that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and was saying some fairly non-scientific ideas, and getting a bit carried away with it, forgetting about her report. It took Mulder to bring her back to earth, he had gotten to like her, and
could see that they might give her another assignment if she got too carried away, he was thinking about her even when she wasn't. The somewhat infamous scene, when she comes into his room, all worried about the bites, which CC
says is to set the mode for the relationship, well, I think it worked. (That doesn't stop me from hoping, though!) I got the impression then that the relationship at that moment more like a brother-sister one, or prehaps a
father-daughter one, then a romantic one, really.It was a nice moment at the end, when Mulder says to Scully, I'll see you tomorrow, and she repeats it to herself, realizing that she will see him tomorrow, and that this is
what her life will be like from now on. All in all, it was an excellent episode, and really set the tone for the rest of them.
ALL DONE
BYE BYE
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