Página PrincipalInternal dating: None given. Episode aired 1 March 1998
The credits roll: The Truth Is Out There
U.N. forces arrive at the site in Kazakhstan, headed by Marita Covarrubias. She is confronted by Alex Krycek, demanding to know who she is. Her U.N. credentials are no good in Russia, Krycek sneers. He has no time for Marita. He has found the other boy hiding in the woods and ascertained that the boy saw what happened.
America. M.I.T. A conference is being held, and Agent Mulder is a panelist. The subject of discussion is a woman named Cassandra Spender, a wheelchair-bound woman who claims to be a multiple alien abductee. She says the aliens will come back for her.
Debate rages about the woman's truthfulness, and finally Mulder speaks up.
"...This woman presents no good or credible testimoney apart from the feel-good message she promotes...I think that if you prepare people well enough to believe a lie, they'll believe it as if it were true. And if you tell them a big lie, like there are aliens from outer space, much more than a small one, they'll believe it. And if you suggest to them that these aliens are doing bad things to them, the power of the suggestion will be to make certain people believe that the psycho-pathologies and neuroses they are suffering from can now be attributed to that."
"Are you discounting belief in extraterrestrials?" asks one of the panelists.
"No," Mulder replies. "I just question mindless belief."
He goes on, laying the blame for this "mindless belief" squarely at the feet of the government, accusing them of using us to perpetuate their own schemes.
He is met with stares of disbelief and contempt. Clearly Mulder will never be popular with his peers.
After the conference breaks up, a man from the audience hails Mulder. Dr. Heitz Werber, the man who performed the hypno-regression on Mulder that made him remember what happened to Samantha. Mulder is not happy to see him, especially when he learns that Dr. Werber is Patient X's--Cassandra Spender's--doctor.
"You seem to have abandoned something you believed so completely in," the doctor says.
"I've come to distrust a lot of things," Mulder answers. "...I don't think you understand. There's just too much evidence that it's all been a lie. The conspiracy is not to hide the existence of extraterrestrials, it's to make people believe it so completely that they question nothing."
In the Tunguska gulag, Krycek beats the boy, Dmitri, until he tells Krycek what he saw. Countermanding other orders, Krycek has the boy subjected to the black cancer test, then hangs the doctor in charge.
Dr. Werber brings Mulder to meet Cassandra Spender, who is quite happy to see him. It was reading about his heroism with Duane Barry that gave her the courage to step forward, she says. Mulder is disconcerted by her words. "Whatever it is you're afraid of, I suggest you check yourself out of here and start living your life."
"Now is not a real good time," Cassandra says. "Now is a time of war and stress among the alien nations. The different races, they are in upheaval. I will be summoned to a place, just like Duane Barry," she insists.
Mulder cannot dissuade her. "Cassandra, there was a time when I would have believed what you're saying without a doubt."
"There is no doubt, Mr. Mulder," Cassandra counters. "I know what I've experienced." But there is a problem, she adds, different forces at work. Mulder must know, because he is the only one who can stop it.
"I'm not," Mulder says sadly, then leaves.
Krycek smuggles the boy Dmitri out of Kazakhstan on the Uroff-Kolstoff Star of Russia ship. He brings the boy water, but does nothing for his injuries, which now include having his mouth, eyes, nose and ears sewn shut.
At the FBI, Scully is met in the hallway by Agent Jeffrey Spender. He is ill at ease, but finally tells her that Mulder is investigating a woman who claims to be a multiple alien abductee. That woman is his mother. He wants to make sure nothing of her story gets out, for his own sake, and his future at the FBI. "I'd like to build a reputation here, not be given one," he says. Scully, who understands that sentiment perfectly, agrees to keep it quiet.
Marita briefs the Consortium on what she saw in Russia, meeting with them at their headquarters in New York. She tells of the burned bodies, which were the result of no fire or chemicals she is familiar with. There was no relationship between the dead, but she found implants on two of the corpses.
The First Elder and the Well-Manicured Man are disturbed. Group abductions are fifteen years down the road, according to the aliens timetable, if they can be believed. WMM suspects foul play somewhere.
"I don't think this was planned," Marita says. "Something, or someone set this in motion. An act of war, against us and our plans." She informs the Consortium that Alex Krycek was there, that he knows what happened, that he captured the boy from the site.
The Consortium are displeased. "What does he want?"
And the phone rings. Krycek, calling from New York. He speaks to WMM, "You've been working on a vaccine, against the black oil."
"Unsuccessfully, you know," is the reply.
"Yeah, well, I figure you and your buddies must have been busy while I was gone."
"Our experiments continue."
"I'll take them, and everything you've got," Krycek asserts.
"In exchange for what?"
"The boy."
"Why is that in our best interests?"
"Because with what he knows, you aren't going to need any vaccine."
In DC, Scully enters the basement office and tosses a newspaper at Mulder. "Shouldn't that be my picture next to that headline?" she jokes. The photo of Mulder is accompanied by the quote, "All this conjecture about little green men--false, dangerous, delusional."
Scully asks if his sudden reversal has anything to do with Cassandra Spender. Mulder, doodling across his photo, says Spender is proof that the truth he has sought is the truth of a madman.
"Well," Scully says, "I guess I'm done here. You seem to have invalidated your own work." She goes on to say that Jeffrey Spender talked to her, and that he is of the same opinion as Mulder about his mother. She scans the newspaper article, then pauses in shock, seeing that Cassandra was abducted from Skyland Mountain, and that she has an implant in the base of her neck.
A shaken Scully goes to visit Cassandra, who recognizes Dana dimly, but doesn't know from where. Scully begins talking, saying that Jeffrey approached her, and that she is betraying him by coming, but she is here for personal reasons.
Cassandra's eyes widen. "You're feeling it too, aren't you? Here--" she leans forward and touches the back of Scully's neck. "You wake up at night knowing you need to be somewhere, but you don't know where it is, like you forgot an appointment you didn't know you had."
"That's not why I'm here," Scully says. She tells Cassandra that she shouldn't remove the "thing" in her neck, without consequences, that she herself became ill.
"I'd never dream of removing it," Cassandra says proudly. "I want to go. Wherever it is."
Atop Skyland Mountain, dozens of people converge. As in Russia, faceless men emerge and set them afire, killing them all.
The following morning Mulder and Scully meet at the crime site. In answer to Mulder's questions, Scully says the bodies are so badly burned they will have to be identified through dental records. "Mulder, why are you tiptoeing around the obvious? We're on Skyland Mountain, right back where it all started."
"And you think this is related to your abduction from the same place?"
"You can't deny the connection," Scully replies.
At Consortium headquarters, Marita and the others watch the news footage of the bodies being removed in bags from Skyland Mountain. She says it is the same thing she saw in Kazakhstan.
"I don't like being kept in the dark on this," the First Elder says angrily.
"Someone's gone to great lengths to sabotage our work," says WMM. They have to find out who and stop him or her before "the colonists intervene." He nods to a quiet man sitting in the corner, the same man who shot CSM, who leaves the room.
Mulder and Scully visit Cassandra, who is watching the news in tears. "This is not supposed to be happening," she says. The people killed were her friends; she knew them. "It's not supposed to be happening. Not like this." She turns to Mulder. "You have to do something about it?"
"What would you like me to do?" asks Mulder. Jeffrey Spender opens the door and sees the two agents. Unhappily, he waits for them to leave, then turns to Scully. "I asked you to leave her alone."
Cassandra called them, Scully explains. "She knew some of the dead."
"Of course she did," Jeffrey says. "They used to be in the same ridiculous cult she was in."
"There you have it," Mulder says softly. There is no triumph in his voice.
The three agents leave, and Quiet Willy, the man from the Consortium, enters Cassandra's room.
On board The Star of Russia, Marita confronts Krycek. "You think you can pull this off, don't you?" Krycek stalks forward and grabs her. They kiss hungrily, and Marita whispers to him, calling him "Alex."
Scully is wakened from sleep. She stares out her window, one hand stealing to the back of her neck. A faraway expression crosses her face.
Krycek comes back for the boy, only to find him gone. He turns around, and WMM faces him, a gun in hand. "Where's the boy?" WMM demands.
The next morning Scully enters the office. Mulder is already there, and he tells her he has been going over the initial pathology and forensics from Skyland Mountain. He shows her three X-rays from victims chosen at random. All have implants at the base of their necks. Of the three victims, none had cult connections, but two belonged to MUFON, and were being treated for a depressive disorder, believing they would be called by aliens to be abducted again.
They were led to Skyland Mountain, Mulder says, "by the same government that put the implant in you." The implants are homing devices, used to track the government's test subjects, or stage what people would believe are group abductions.
"But they weren't abducted," Scully says. "They were led to their deaths. And for what purpose?"
"I don't know that yet," Mulder replies.
Although it costs her, Scully speaks up. "You know, Mulder, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to rule out what Cassandra Spender has to say."
Mulder's phone rings. It's Marita, calling from a pay phone with Dmitri sitting in her parked car. "You were at Skyland Mountain," she says. There was a similar incident in Russia--she was in Kazakhstan. The two are connected. "I have someone who knows it. I have him with me now."
In the car, Dmitri begins pulling at one eyelid.
Marita tells Mulder to meet her at the pay phone and wait for her, for her instructions. She looks up and sees Dmitri standing outside the phone booth, black oil oozing down his face from his eyes. She gasps, and the phone connection is broken.
When Mulder looks up, Scully is gone. He arrives at the pay phone, but there is no sign of Marita. Black smears are on the glass and the phone hangs off the hook. Mulder uses the phone to call Cassandra Spender's room. Her son Jeffrey answers. Mulder explains he is looking for Scully. Spender says she isn't there, nor is his mother.
Night: Ruskin Dam. Scully arrives and parks her car. She joins dozens of other people on a bridge over a river, all gazing upward peacefully. She sees Cassandra, who holds out a hand, smiling. Dmitri is there as well, one eye now open, black streaks on his face. A light begins arcing across the sky.
Flames erupt on one end of the bridge, and from them step the faceless men, one of whom is recognizable as the Alien Bounty Hunter. Scully seems to recognize him, for she falls back in fear. Screams fill the night.
To Be Continued...
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