Página PrincipalInternal dating: No dates are given anytime during the episode. Scully and Mulder discuss the start of her time with the X Files as four years ago. Episode aired May 1997, if that's any help, but "Redux", which overlaps with this episode in terms of events, seems to take place in October.
A few hours later, Dana Scully pushes her way past a crowd infront of Mulder's apartment. A Detective Rempulski from the Alexandria Police Department brings her into Mulder's living room. There is a dead body under a sheet between Mulder's couch and coffee table. The detective pulls back the sheet and Scully confirms the unseen body is "him".
A few hours later, Scully enters a conference room full of FBI staffers. The meeting is being run by Scott Blevins, the man who assigned Scully to the X Files several years ago.
Scully begins to tell her story. She was assigned to the X Files to provide an "analytical perspective" on Mulder's work. "I come here today", she tells the gathered staffers, "four years later to report on the illegitimacy of Agent Mulder's work. That it is my scientific opinion that he became over the course of these years a victim; a victim of his false hope and of his belief in the biggest of lies."
The Credits Roll: BELIEVE THE LIE replaces The Truth is out There.
(Note: The episode is told largely in flashback with Scully's commentary to the meeting attendees framing events.)
Two archaeologists, Babcock and Arlinsky, are helicoptered onto the St. Elias Mountains in the Yukon territory in Canada. Meeting up with a guide named Rolston, the three climb from a base camp to a mountain peak. It is cold and everything is covered with snow and ice. As the trio gets to the archaeology site, there is a frozen alien in a huge block of ice and a team of archaeologists with a second camp.
Scully tells the conference that Arlinsky shared and knew of Mulder's beliefs. Arlinsky duped Mulder "by an act of scientific slight of hand".
Going back several days, Scully is at a dinner party thrown by her mother. It is an elegant affair with candles, wine and a maid answering the door. Bill Scully arrives in his dress blue. He gives his sister a big hug and asks if she got his birthday card. She jokes that she did, once a decade she usually does receive a card from him. He asks about her health but she says she's fine. The family priest, a Fr. McHugh, arrives just after Bill.
Dinner is a fun event. Bill is the life of the party telling jokes. Scully is in a corner between her brother and Fr. McHugh. When Bill leaves the table to get more wine, Scully is confronted by Fr. McCue. Kind to a fault, Fr. McHugh encourages Scully to return to her faith, to return to the church. Mrs. Scully has told him that she is sick and the church, Fr. McCue believes, will be a great source of strength in her time of need. Scully explains that she is being treated for her cancer, she has inner strength and has not felt the need to return to the church. With her doubts, she feels returning to the church when she is ill is hypocritical.
In the kitchen, the phone rings. Bill calls to Dana. It is for her - - Mulder. Arlinsky is back from the Yukon and wants to show Mulder something. Mulder wants Scully to join him for the interview. Scully, obviously uncomfortable with a disapproving Bill standing next to her, agrees to meet him at the Smithsonian.
At the Smithsonian, Mulder promises to apologize to Bill and Mrs. Scully. He explains that Arlinsky is a forensic anthropologist who was the victim of a UFO photo hoax a few years ago. Mulder says Arlinsky has a new discovery.
Arlinsky shows Mulder and Scully slides of the Yukon alien. Mulder thinks its is a hoax -- the body is in too good a shape. Arlinsky disagrees, saying that in this area of the world, quick freezing would have been quite common. He took ice core samples as proof. Each sample is from one side of the Alien's ice block.
Arlinsky is positive this is the proof he and Mulder have been looking for -- a real alien. Mulder is skeptical. Arlinsky is pushing Mulder to go public with the info -- he will finally have his proof. Mulder wants to know what Arlinsky's motives are. Arlinsky tells Mulder he wants credit for finding it. Scully is largely disinterested.
As they leave the Smithsonian, Mulder wants Scully's opinion, but she doesn't have one. This is Mulder's "holy grail", Scully tells him, not hers. Mulder seems bothered by her lack of interest. This may be the scientific proof that has eluded them for so long. Scully says her "last dying wish" isn't to prove that aliens exist. The proof will not change Mulder's beliefs -- he already believes -- and she's not interested in the rest.
Mulder tries another track, asking her if someone could prove God exists, would it change her beliefs. "Only if it had been disproven", Scully replies. Mulder asks her if she accepts the possibility that God is a lie. Scully tells him that she really doesn't think about things like that, or if they can be proven.
"But what if it could", Mulder presses, "is the knowledge worth seeking or is it easier just to go on believing the lie.". Scully shrugs off Mulder's questions and tells him she won't follow him to the Yukon. Mulder didn't expect her to -- he just wanted her to check if the ice core samples were real.
Back to the conference room, Scully tells them what she couldn't tell Mulder at that point. Her cancer has metastasized and that doctors have told her short of a miracle, the cancer will spread aggressively. Blevins looks like someone hit him.
Returning to the flashback in the Yukon, Babcock starts loading his gun. When Rolston asks why, Babcock says with Rolston going down the mountain to get Mulder and Arlinsky, Babcock wants protection. He doesn't know the other anthropologists and wants to make sure this isn't a set up.
One of the archaeologists cutting the alien out of the wall notices an anomaly in the ice. The anomaly could be three things -- an air bubble, a weakness in the ice or a pour spot where water could have been piped in to create the alien in the wall. Since the anomaly is in a strange spot, they eliminate the last idea and continue the cutting.
At the Paleoclimatology Lab at American University, Scully has the ice core checked by a Dr. Vitagliano. It is old ice, according to Vitagliano, despite jet fuel dirt in the ice. More interesting to Vitagliano is Chemaras in the ice. Chimeras are non-human, non-animal, non-plant cells. They are organic hybrids without known sources. Scully asks him to investigate the cells.
That night in the Yukon, all the archaeologists are going to sleep, including a nervous Babcock. As soon as Babcock turns off his light, a gunman appears. The gunman goes from tent to tent at the site and kills all of the men. Babcock tries to escape but is shot as well.
The next morning Mulder and Arlinsky arrive at the base camp. They are looking for Rolston but he is not there. A look at the tents show the camp has been abandoned for several days.
Mulder and Arlinsky decide to go to the dig site -- there is only one trail up and back. They hope to meet Rolston on the way up. They do. He has been executed at mid mountain.
Back at the American University lab, Scully finds a rather burly man leaving Vitagliano's lab with the ice core. She chases him into a stair well. The two have a rather violent fight on a landing, with the burly man punching and throwing Scully into the wall. He winds up pushing her down a flight of stairs. She is injured.
Mulder and Arlinsky get to the dig site. They discover the dead. As Arlinsky runs to the alien, he sees it has been removed from the wall. Mulder is visibly disappointed. Arlinsky doesn't understand how anyone found the dig -- they did not tell anyone about the alien. Mulder thinks the radio at he abandoned base camp could have been intercepted.
Mulder hears groans. Babcock is alive, just wounded. He tells Mulder and Arlinsky that they buried the alien before they all went to sleep that night. It is hidden under some snow near the tent.
Scully is getting dressed in a hospital room. The back of her shirt has several blood stains. Her face is bruised from the beating she took on the stairwell. Bill Scully arrives with a clean blouse for his sister. When Scully asks why Bill came instead of her mother, Bill says he took the call and decided not to tell their mother. Scully tells him, unable to look him in the eye, that she was luckily not hurt when she was thrown down the stairs. She is OK:
BS: You're not OK Dana. I know about your cancer.
DS: I told mom not to tell you.
BS: Why:
DS: Because its very personal. Because I don't want your sympathy.
BS: (Amazed) You think you can cure yourself. (Concerned) Mom tells me you've gotten worse. That your cancer is in your blood stream. What are you doing at work getting knocked down and beaten up. What are you trying to prove, that you're going down fighting?
DS: Oh, now come on Bill.
BS: Do you know what Mom is going through? Why do you think I didn't tell her when they called?
DS: (Angry and finally looking him in the eye) What *should* I be doing?
BS: We have a responsibility, not just to ourselves but to the people in our lives.
DS: Hey, look, just because I didn't bare my soul to you, or to Fr. McHugh, or to God, it doesn't mean that I'm not responsible to the things that are important to me.
BS: To who? To this guy Mulder? Well where is he Dana, where is he through all of this?
Scully thanks him for coming, takes the clean blouse and changes in a nearby bathroom.
Mulder, Arlinsky and a bandaged Babcock return to a factory/lab in South East DC with the alien. Arlinsky plans an autopsy. Mulder fights for carbon dating. Arlinsky tries to blow Mulder off but Mulder says carbon dating is the only way to prove this is not a hoax.
A fingerprint from the stairwell leads Scully to her assailant. He is a former officer now working as a civilian in the Department of Defense named Michael Kritschgau. Kritschgau is stationed in Sethsburg, VA.
The alien is x-rayed and autopsied. It is hairless with four fingers and three toes. It has large black eyes without lids. Its internal organs are unlike any humans, despite a heart and lung like cardio-pulmonary system. Babcock is taping the autopsy, Arlinsky performs it while Mulder watches.
Scully waits for Kritschgau outside his office. When she spots him entering his office parking lot, she drives him into a corner using her car. He flees. She chases on foot. As he tries to drive off, she tells him he's under arrest. Scully is able to stop his car by pulling her gun.
Kritschgau apologizes for attacking Scully. As Scully starts to arrest him, he begs for mercy, saying his arrest would lead to his death. Scully wants to know who would kill him. "The same people that are trying to kill you. The people who gave you your cancer."
Back at the lab, Arlinsky tells Mulder of all the tests he plans to run. Mulder's phone rings, its Scully.
As she recounts to the conference, Mulder helicoptered the alien off the mountain, drove it in a refrigerated truck to Southeastern DC. Now, she tells the group, Mulder had is proof -- proof of aliens, proof of Samantha's abduction.
Blevins interrupts, asking Scully if Kritschgau convinced her otherwise. "He told me a story, ", Scully replies, "which detailed point by point the systematic way Agent Mulder had been deceived and used and how I, as his partner, had been lead down the same path, losing a family member due to my allegiance and contracting a fatal disease which I was being told was engineered by the men who were responsible for Agent Mulder's deception." Blevins wanted to know if Mulder believed Kritschgau's story. Scully tells the room that she was only able to introduce the two.
As Mulder leaves the lab to meet Scully, the mountain gunman enters the building. The gunman surprises Arlinsky by asking if Babcock is OK. When Babcock confirms he's fine, the gunman executes Arlinsky. For some reason, there is a long shot of Arlinsky's expensive sneakers. The gunman asks Babcock if Mulder believes. When Babcock says yes, he is executed as well.
Mulder meets with Kritschgau and Scully in his apartment. Kritschgau tells Mulder everything he's worked for over the last four years were lies. When Mulder asks how Kritschgau knows this, he explains that he ran the disinformation campaign for the military for the last 10 years. He tells Mulder that the military has propagated the aliens scenario to keep up the arms buildup even with the end of the cold war.
Mulder is suspicious of why Kritschgau is coming clean now. Kritschgau wants to expose the lies for his son, who is sick from the Gulf War. "The lies are so deep.", Kritschgau tells Mulder, "The only way to cover them is to created something more incredible."
"They invented you.", Kritschgau tells Mulder, "Your regression hypnosis therapy, the story of your sister's abduction, the lies they fed your father. You wanted to believe so badly, who could have blamed you."
Mulder comes up with tons of reasons not to believe Kritschgau -- alien sightings, alien biology -- but Kritschgau has logical reasons against these things. When Mulder mentions the alien he found, Kritschgau's response is devastating, "Meticulously constructed out of bio materials, created through the hybridization of differentiated cells -- what are called Chimeras. Frozen into place over the course of a year using sediment that would bear out its age through a small channel in the rock above."
Mulder defends the discovery, saying if it was a fake, carbon dating would provide proof. Kritschgau tells Mulder there will be no carbon dating, he was only intended to see the alien, to bring the alien to the public's attention.
Mulder tells Scully the man is a liar but Kritschgau tells Mulder to check out the alien himself, it is already long gone.
Mulder and Scully go to Arlinsky's make shift lab. Just as Kritchgau told them, the alien's gone. Scully finds Babcock in the defrosting tub while Mulder trips over the dead Arlinsky.
M: What we had here was proof, there is no way it could be anything else.
S: No Mulder, more tests needed to be run.
M: The ice core samples checked out. If it hasn't been tampered with, how can the body within be a fake.
S: The molecular materials in the ice core were a direct match for what this man Kritschgau described. Hybrid cells -- Chimeras within the Matrix.
M: (Angry) Do we know those cells are not extraterrestrial?
S: (Angry) Mulder everything this man described you can't just guess at the details. I am sorry but the facts here completely overwhelm any theory you have against them.
M: The facts overwhelmed by the lies that support them.
S: Mulder, the lie here is the only you continue to believe.
M: (Yelling) After all I've seen and experienced, I refuse to believe it is not the truth.
S: (Angry) Because it is easier to believe the lie.
M: (Incredulous) What the hell did that guy say to you to believe his story? S: He said the men behind the hoax, behind these lies, gave me this disease to make you believe.
Mulder storms out, leaving Scully alone in the lab.
He returns to his apartment, watching the alien life documentary on TV, crying quietly.
Near tears herself, Scully tells the meeting that she got a phone called from the police this morning asking her to identify a body. She tells them she ID'ed the body. "Agent Mulder," she tells them, "died late last night from an apparent self inflicted gunshot wound to the head."
The episode ends -- no "to be continued".
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