Página PrincipalInternal dating: No dates given. By air-date, ought to be November or December 1994, but the month-long quarantine at the end of Firewalker messes this up. Irresistible suggests that the dating in this section of the second season should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Excelsis Dei convalescent home, Worcester, Massachusetts. Michelle Charters, a nurse, puts the patients to bed, cutting off the fight on television they want to watch. One of them, Hal, gropes her, and she puts him in restraints. After leaving the room, she rebukes Gung, an Asian orderly, for telling them they could watch the whole fight. He says the doctor says they're getting better, but she dismisses this.
Michelle is emptying the room of a dead inmate when the bed races across the floor, pinning the door shut. She is thrown on the bed and restraints wrapped around her wrists, although no-one is in the room. She is seen screaming, as if being raped.
Mulder comes into the office to find Scully watching a video. "Whatever tape you found in that VCR, it isn't mine," he says. "Good," she replies, "because I put it back in that drawer with all those other videos that aren't yours." "This definitely isn't mine," he says, seeing the bruised face of a woman on the screen. Scully explains that the video shows Michelle Charters, seen in the teaser, who claims to have been raped. The medical report backs up her story, but no-one believes her nonetheless, since she claims her attacker was invisible. Mulder says he has many X-Files on such cases, but tends to be suspicious of them, believing that the trauma of rape has led women to blank out the face of their attackers. Scully says she's been in the office since 6am reading the files, and tells him this case is different since the victim is sure she knows who the attacker was.
They visit Michelle, who accuses Hal Arden, the inmate seen in the teaser. Her accusation is based both on the fact that he's made advances to her before, and because she recognised the smell of him. She insists that she's not making anything up, and neither would she repress the memory of a face.
Mulder and Scully visit Hal, who laughs at the accusation. "I'm 74 years old, and have plumbing older than this building," he says, opening his towel and giving them a look. "Thank you for sharing," Mulder says. Hal asserts that his "advances" to Michelle were always harmless, and laments this "sex harassment fad" that stops men speaking their mind. He asks Scully, whom he describes as a "very pretty woman" if she would be offended if he wanted to express his affection. Scully and Mulder exchange a look, and Hal apologises to Mulder for stepping on his toes. Mulder looks taken aback, stammering a little as he tries to get back to the point. Hal once again says how ridiculous the charge is, but says if, when his is a ghost, he can go round having sex with pretty nurses, then "Lord take me now."
Scully asks Mulder what he thinks. "About the guy's plumbing?" he asks. He then says he thinks the case is a huge waste of time - an "unsubstantiated phenomenon", "A substantiated crime," Scully adds.
Mulder and Scully talk to the hospital administrator, who days that, due to lack of funding, the Nursing Home now only uses a few wings, and no longer has a resident medical staff. A local doctor, Dr Grago, visits 3 times a week, though, and they still have a good reputation in the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease, using the doctor's special treatment.
Another resident, Stan, rebukes Hal for being indiscreet to the FBI. He takes a pill, which he's obviously stolen from someone. Hal asks for another one too, but Stan says he can't handle it, and Hal threatens him.
The administrator shows Mulder and Scully Michelle's long list of alleged work-related injuries, filed over the past months, and clearly doesn't believe any of them.
Hal is found choking to death. Scully tries to revive him, but he dies. The doctor arrives, saying Hal's death is a "set-back". He says he was one of a group of Alzheimer's patients he was treating with an experimental course of treatment - Depronil, an enzyme inhibitor. Scully says she's read about it, but also that it has little effect. The doctor agrees, but says these patients seem to be responding well. Before the drugs were administered, Hal could barely string two words together.
The orderly, Gung, finds Stan taking a pill and tells him to stop, saying too much would be bad for him.
The doctor shows Mulder and Scully some other very much improved patients, including Leo, an artist. They talk to him, and he denies that the doctor's medicine has anything to do with his improvement. After the inmates a taken off to bed, Scully looks at the picture Leo was drawing. It shows strange ghost-like figures in a landscape.
Scully wonders if there's a connection between the rape and the patients' improved conditions. She puts forward various theories, including that it could be the building itself causing things. "Are you saying that the building's haunted?" Mulder smiles, "Because if you are I think you've been working with me for too long." Scully points out a smell in the building, and wonders if there's some sort of fungal infection or something, causing dementia, violent behaviour and delusions. "I think you're looking too hard, Scully, for something that's not there," Mulder tells her, saying he thinks Michelle made the whole thing up to get out of job she hated.
Leo tells Gung that he "needs more", saying it's not working properly, not like for the others. Gung refuses. After he's gone, Leo tells Dorothy, his friend, that it will be okay. Stan has some more hidden away, and he thinks he knows where.
Stan's daughter comes to take him to live with her, but he refuses, despite begging to live with her a year ago. She then talks to Mulder and Scully, telling them about the amazing change in her father.
An orderly, seen earlier being cruel to the residents, sees Stan steal something, gives chase, and plummets off the roof, pushed by an invisible entity. He manages to cling on by his fingers and Mulder rushes to the roof and tries to save him, but he falls and is killed. Mulder points out that Stan was present at both the orderly's death and Hal's death, but the doctor says it's impossible that Stan could have climbed onto the roof.
Scully finds Dorothy speaking angrily at invisible entities, refusing to go into her room as they are there. Dorothy then sees strange human-like figures behind Scully, and tells them to get away from her.
The doctor finds traces of a poison - ibutenic acid - in Hal's post-mortem. Scully points out is wasn't in lethal doses, but was enough to cause hallucinations, such as Dorothy's. Returning to talk to her, they come across Leo, who's filled a whole wall with strange pictures. Mulder looks wonderingly at them, then asks the doctor about the Asian orderly, Gung.
Mulder goes to the basement to look for Gung, finding instead a locked room full of mushrooms, being grown in neat rows of trays. Digging beneath them, he finds a missing orderly, dead, buried under the mushrooms. Gung denies murder, but admits he was feeding the mushrooms to the patients, to "make them feel better." In his country, he says, families respect their elders, rather than sending them away to die. Here, he says, the orderlies treat the residents worse than dogs. The mushrooms are used by his own people to enable them to talk to the sprits of their ancestors, and the spirits in this place are very angry. "Something has gone very wrong," he says, and the dead are getting revenge for their ill-treatment.
Gung takes them to the room where he dries the mushrooms and makes them into tablets, but all the pills have been taken. It's now Mulder's turn to believe there's something odd going on, believing Gung's explanation, but Scully thinks it's merely hallucinations, coupled with a dash of poison which killed Hal.
Stan's daughter finds him swallowing handful of tablets, and watches in amazement as Dorothy rushes around shouting at invisible spirits. Hearing screams, Mulder and Scully rush to the scene. Mulder arrives in time to see Michelle thrown across the bathroom by an invisible force, but the door locks before Scully can get there. The bathroom begins to flood. Scully and Gung desperately try to turn off the water main, but the handle's too stiff. Meanwhile, Stan goes into convulsions, trying in vain to reach for more tablets. The doctor tries to treat him, but he dies, and, at the exact moment of his death, the bathroom door bursts open and a great flood of water fills the whole corridor. "They're gone," Dorothy says, smiling. "They're all gone."
Scully writes her report. The nursing home is under new management, treatment stopped, and Gung deported. All the patients have suffered relapses and are unable to make statements about what happened..
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