Página PrincipalInternal dating: No date given, but must be July 1994, if it is to be between Little Green Men (after July 5th) and Duane Barry (August 7th).
On a Russian ship just off the coast of New Jersey, a hapless seaman is sent to investigate a blockage in the sewage system. Needless to say, he is attacked by something that pulls him into the water.
Mulder is still working on his wiretap duty, the X-Files still being closed. Suddenly he is ordered to fly to New Jersey to investigate a body found in a sewer. Skinner gave the order, he learns to his surprise.
Mulder climbs into the sewer and is shown the body. He takes one look then leaves, asking them to send the body to the FBI, care of Skinner.
Mulder insists on talking to Skinner, even though he is told Skinner is unavailable. Skinner comes briefly to the door and Mulder is hostile, complaining about being "jerked from one meaningless assignment to another." Skinner invites him in, where Mulder discovers the room is full of important-looking FBI people having a meeting. Skinner asks him to tell everyone why he thinks the New Jersey homicide case in "meaningless." Mulder says it looks like a simple drug-land case - a waste of the Bureau's time and man power. "Given your recent history, you are not one to judge what is or isn't a waste of the Bureau's man power," Skinner tells him. Mulder begins to justify his work on the X-Files, but Skinner brusquely reminds him the X-Files are closed and he is to carry out his new assignments to the best of his ability.
Mulder is sitting on a bench down on the waterfront at night. Scully comes up. "Is this seat taken?" she asks him. "No, but I should warn you - I'm experiencing violent impulses," he says. She says she's armed and will take her chances. She says he's heard what happened with Skinner. "Sometimes it just gets so hard to smile through it when they ask you to bend down and grab your ankles," he says. She reminds him that he's never really tried to fit in. "No, I've been thinking a lot about that lately," he says, telling her he's been thinking of leaving the Bureau to pursue his paranormal work somewhere. She suggests he goes back to the Behavioural Sciences Unit at Quantico. "They don't want us working together, Scully," he says, "and right now that's the only reason I can think of to stay." She offers to help him with the case he's on, by doing the autopsy. "I know what you're trying to do, Scully," he says, but he thinks the whole case is just an exercise - an excuse to humiliate him. "There's nothing to is," he says. "There's a dead body, isn't there?" she asks.
Scully performs the autopsy on the body. There is a tattoo on his arm. When she opens him up, something horrid and slimy pokes out of the liver. It is like a large fluke worm.
In Newark, New Jersey, a sanitation worker is attacked in a sewer. His friend manages to pull him out but there is a large and strange wound on his back and he complains of a bad taste in his mouth. He tells Mulder he thinks it was a python or something like that, but the wound on his back looks likes nothing they've seen before.
While Mulder is in New Jersey, Scully calls him about the parasite she found and then, just after, an anonymous man (whom we later discover is X) calls him. "You have a friend at the FBI," the voice says.
Mulder visits Scully at Quantico. She shows him the fluke worm. They are quite common, she says, though this one is rather unusually large. Even so, it couldn't have killed him, and there is no other obvious cause of death. Mulder shows her a picture of the wound on the sanitation worker's back. She says this is just like the sort of wound that would be made by a flukeworm's scolex, although far far too big. They debate it for a bit, and, after he suggests that the man was killed by a very giant flukeworm, she laughs. "Mulder, I...." she says, then stops. "I'm sorry. It felt like old times then for a second."
As Mulder is about to go, he turns to her and says, "Look, Scully, I don't know who you shared our conversation with the other night, but I'd prefer it if you didn't try to launch a campaign for me." She says she didn't talk to anyway. He tells her about the call he got saying he had a friend at the FBI, but she assures him she wouldn't betray a confidence. They look at each other in silence.
The sanitation worker is brushing his teeth over and over. When he spits out the toothpaste blood comes with it. Just afterwards, in the shower, he starts gagging and a worm like the one Scully found comes out of his mouth.
Mulder gets a guided tour of the sewage plant (fun!). While he is there, a worker sees something moving in the water and calls the foreman. Together they isolate the thing, which is like a giant man-sized flukeworm.
Scully researches flukeworms on the computer. While she's doing this, someone puts a magazine under her door, though there is no-one in the corridor when she looks. From this she learns of the incident on the Russian ship, and, given this clue, identifies the tattoo on the body she autopsied as being in Russian.
The flukeman thing is confined in a psychiatric hospital. It has no sex organs, just like fluke worms, but also has man-like characteristics.
Scully tells Mulder about the magazine under her door. "I guess you do have a friend in the FBI," she says. She then says it's his decision what he does, "but I hope you know that I'd consider it more than a professional loss if you decided to leave."
Skinner reads Mulder's report, while Mulder shifts nervously in his chair. To his surprise, Skinner says everything is in order and makes no comment about the unusual nature of the suspect. Skinner says he already knew about the suspect and, while he does think it's odd, this meeting is simply to evaluate Mulder's work. Mulder looks uncomfortable. Skinner tells Mulder that the flukeman is to be given an psychiatric evaluation as a murderer, but Mulder insists it shouldn't be treated as a man but as a creature. Skinner is adamant, saying it has killed two people (the sanitation worker having died). As Mulder gets up to go he says "You know, you had a pair of agents who could have handled a case like this. Agent Scully and I could have been able to save that man, but you shut us down." Skinner agrees, saying it should have been an X-File. "We all take our orders from someone, Agent Mulder," he says, looking awkward.
The fluke man is strapped to a gurney and put into a van, ready to be transferred to an institution. The driver starts feeling edgy and calls for back-up, then pulls up and looks into the back of the van. It is empty, and he climbs in. We then hear him screaming, but can't see what has happened. The flukeman then heads for the toilets and lurks there.
Next morning a tanker comes to empty the toilets, and, from the lump that we see in the pipes, we are to assume that the flukeman is transferred to the tanker, ready to head back to the sewage plant.
The dead driver and the empty van are found. While Mulder is there, X calls him, saying only "Success in your current assignment is imperative. Reinstatement of the X-Files must be undeniable." After he's finished talking, Mulder somehow works out that the flukeman is on the tanker.
Mulder goes to the sewage plant and wait for all the tankers to come in and empty their load. When Scully calls Mulder tells her he was "playing a hunch", but won't tell her his reasoning, saying it's "stupid." She tells him her latest theory, which is that the fluke creature is looking for hosts to lay its larvae in.
The flukeman is spotted deep within the system, right near the sea. Mulder and the foreman rush there and go down (another suit ruined). They attempt to close the grille over an overflow pipe that leads to the sea, but the foreman slips and falls in the water. Something grabs him and pulls him under. Mulder jumps in and manages to pull him out. Seeing the flukeman trying to escape through the overflow pipe, he pulls the grille down and the flukeman is chopped in two.
Back at the waterfront bench, Scully comes up to Mulder and asks "is this seat taken?" "No," he says, "But I should warn you - I may reek a bit of the sewer." She asks him what happened in his meeting with Skinner - that is, what he's decided about leaving. He repeats what X told him about the possible reinstatement of the X-Files.
Scully gives Mulder the lab results on the half of the flukeman that remained. She says it was probably something created from radiation near Chernobyl, as the ship where it all started was once used in transporting contaminated stuff from there. "Nature didn't make this thing, Mulder. We did."
In the sewer, what's left of the flukeman floats in the water, its eyes open. It's alive.
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