Página PrincipalInternal dating: Takes place immediately after Patient X, though no dates given for either. Episode aired 8 March 1998
"Dear Son.
"I hope this letter finds you well. I get reports of you from time to time...I know these letters come as a surprise. You must wonder about me....But time is passing quickly. I fear... I remind myself of a Navajo story. Twin war gods come to their father, seeking magic and weapons to eliminate the monsters of the world. My hope is the same for you, and that we might reconcile the differences between us.
"Your Loving Father."
The boy reaches the cabin, and is handed the letter in a red envelope. He reads the address, struggling over the words, "Federal Bureau of Investigation."
The credits roll: Resist or Serve
Ruskin Dam, Pennsylvania EMT teams swarm over the bridge, carrying away bodies, searching for those still alive. Mulder arrives, looking frantically for Scully. As he wanders over the bridge, Skinner approaches him and tells him she has been found, and is in vasogenic shock, with slight burns to her face and arms. She is about to be air-lifted to a hospital.
Agent Spender approaches Mulder and Skinner, asking if his mother has been found yet.
In a well-lit room, Marita lays in a coma. WMM speaks with a doctor, who says it does not look good. When Marita's eyes are open, black swirls cover her eyes, signs of the black oil that has infected her. Overhead, members of the Consortium gaze down at the scene.
When Scully wakes in the hospital, she is dazed, unable to remember what happened to her, and how she got burned. TV coverage of the scene at Ruskin Dam plays on the TV in Scully's room, and she stares at it uncomprehendingly.
"Is any of this coming back to you?" asks Mulder.
"I was there? Doing what?" says Scully.
In the hospital hallway Mulder is met by Agent Spender, who says his mother was not found, just her wheelchair. Mulder tries to reassure Spender that his mother will be found, but the young agent angrily demands that Mulder leave her alone. "Is that too much to ask?"
Aboard the Russian ship Uroff-Koltoff, WMM talks with a handcuffed Krycek. He says Marita has the boy. "Your alliance with her was as misguided as ours. But it appears she was unaware of the consequences of her deception." He congratulates Krycek on being clever enough to infect the boy, then says the boy is dead, "victim of another mysterious holocaust."
"Then you've got no choice but to deal with me," Krycek says.
"I'm afraid there's no deal to be made," WMM replies. "...If the boy was your trump card, why infect him, unless you could also cure him, with a vaccine developed by the Russian. One that works. It would mean resistance to the alien colonists is now possible."
Wiekamp Air Force Base. An alien craft crashes, burning on impact. Two figures come away, one alive, dragging a dead one. He is stopped by soldiers from the base.
A recovering Scully is visited by Mulder, who shows her a photo of Ruskin Dam. Scully shakes her head. "Mulder, I have never been there. I couldn't tell you how to get there, let alone drive it."
Mulder tells her that none of the other survivors can remember what happened, either. He also informs her that Cassandra Spender was there, and that he's taken X-Rays of the bodies and found implants. He believes the implants act as a homing device, drawing the people to the sites. Scully replies that it doesn't explain why they would want to kill her, or why she should survive. It comes down to who made the chip, Mulder says.
It was found in a military reserach center. "Our government made that chip, implanted it in your neck as part of a secret military project...that truth I've been searching for? That truth is *in* you."
Scully is quiet for a while. "Mulder, when I first met you, you told me your sister had been abducted by aliens. That that event had marked you so deeply that nothing else mattered. I didn't believe you, but I followed you, on nothing more than your faith that the truth was out there. Based not on fact, not on science, but on your memories that your sister had been taken from you. Your memories were all that you had."
"I don't trust those memories now," Mulder says.
"Whether you trust them or not, they've led you here. And me. But I have no memories to either trust or distrust. And if you ask me to follow you again, to stand behind you in what you now believe, without knowing what happened to me out there...Without those memories, I can't. I won't."
Emotionally, Mulder asks, "If I could give you those memories, if I could prove I was right, that what I believed for so long was wrong..."
Scully interrupts him. "Is that what you really want?"
At a meeting of the Consortium, a photo is passed around of the captured alien from Wiekamp. WMM explains he is a rebel, resisting the alien colonists. He has performed self-mutilation of his face, insuring he will not be infected by the black oil.
"What good is this knowledge, without the vaccine?" asks the First Elder.
WMM says they have the vaccine. Developed by the Russians, stolen by Krycek, given to him. With it they can now fight the colonists.
The vaccine is injected into Marita.
Scully and Mulder visit Dr. Werber and Scully is hypnotized. She begins remembering what happened on the bridge. She grows upset, and Mulder reaches out and takes her hand, calming her.
There was fire, and the faceless rebels came, killing everyone they met on the bridge. Overhead, a ship filled the sky, and the people gazed at it, awestruck. Cassandra Spender was abducted, lifted into the ship in a beam of light.
When she awakens, Mulder is stunned. He does not want to believe Scully's story, and in a meeting with Skinner he explains it as a common abduction fantasy. Scully herself does not remember the events on the bridge, but has listened to a tape of the session with Dr. Werber. Skinner finally says he has a problem, that he must make a report, and that right now paranormal phenomena appears the most plausible explanation of what happened. Disgusted, Mulder leaves.
Marita is checked, and the black oil still swirls in her eyes. WMM says the alien rebel is someone to collaborate with, for the time being.
It is too late, the First Elder says. The alien colonists want him back, and he has already made a deal to give him to them.
Scully enters Mulder's basement office to find Agent Spender. He shows her a videotape of himself at age eleven, hypnotized and telling a common abduction story. He was lying, Spender says, told to lie by his mom. She told him the story so many times that he ended up believing it himself--"I believe it absolutely. It became a kind of truth"--never realizing the story was only a cover for his father leaving the family and ruining his mother.
"Why are you here?" asks Scully.
Spender doesn't trust Dr. Werber and his hypnotic process. "It's like having a dream, then pretending it was real." He adds that if Scully went through the process, he hopes she distrusts what came out of it.
Mulder enters his apartment to find a note on the floor reading, "Things are looking up." As he looks up, Krycek ambushes him, knocking him to the ground.
"You must be getting slow, Mulder. I can beat you with one hand," Krycek taunts.
"Is that how you like to beat yourself?" Mulder mocks. Krycek raises his gun, and Mulder adds, "Are those my last words? I can do better."
Krycek tells Mulder he has to listen, to believe him. That he must take action, or "you and me and five billion other people will go the way of the dinosaur. I'm talking planned invasion, the colonization of this planet by an extraterrestrial race." Mulder laughs at him. Krycek says that Skyland Mountain, the site in Kazakhstan and Ruskin Dam are all "alien lighthouses," the scenes of struggle, of resistance.
"I was sent by a man, a man who knows as I do, that resistance is in our grasp." One of the rebels is being held captive, however, "and if he dies, so does the resistance." After a searching look, Krycek kisses Mulder on the cheek, then hands him his gun. "Good luck to you, my friend," he says in Russian, then leaves.
At Wiekamp AFB, the Bounty Hunter scales the fence, dropping over the edge.
Scully arrives at Mulder's apartment. She has been for a long walk, and has done some thinking. She is not so sure about the contents of her hypno-regression tape now. "I've reconsidered that I may have been wrong about what I believe happened." "I've been doing some reconsidering of my own," Mulder responds. He hands her the note from Krycek. On the back are the words, "Wiekamp Air Force Base."
At the base, Mulder and Scully are stopped by the guard at the gate, who refuses to allow them in. Mulder makes up a story about a lab contamination and the guard goes into the shack to check on it. A truck pulls up to the gate from inside the base, driven by Quiet Willy (though we earlier saw him dead a the dam). Scully recognizes him, but is not sure from where.
The gate opens, the truck goes through. The guard comes out, and Mulder has climbed onto the back of the truck.
Ducking cautiously under the tarp sides of the truck, Mulder enters the back. A metal booth stands alone, and when he peeks inside, Mulder sees a morpher, his features sewn shut.
The truck stops, and the driver morphs. He is the Alien Bounty Hunter. He enters the truck. Mulder hides behind the booth. A brilliant light floods the truck from overhead. Mulder comes out from behind the booth and sees both the Bounty Hunter and a shadowy figure. He fires his gun.
At Consortium headquarters, Marita is pronounced cured.
Military figures arrest Mulder and take him back to the car. He cannot clearly remember what he has seen. Shaken, he covers his face with his hands.
At the FBI building, Skinner tells Agent Spender he has a high patron somewhere, but that he should know Agent Mulder has opened an X-File on his mother. Spender leaves, and is handed a letter in a red envelope from the mail cart.
In the mountains of Quebec, the little boy returns the letter to its sender, apologizing. Stricken, the Cigarette Smoking Man gazes at the letter, stamped, "Return To Sender."
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