Página PrincipalInternal dating: Just after the end of Gethsemene - but long enough for Mulder to grow sideburns, apprently. Also, the phone records analyzed by Holly seem to show the whole thing is set in October. Odd.
"I have held a torch in the darkness, to glance upon a truth unknown, an act of faith begun with an ineloquent certainty that my journey promised a chance, not just of understanding, but of recovery. That the disappearance of my sister 23 years ago would come to be explained, and that the pursuit of these greater truths about the existence of extraterrestrial life might even reunite us. A belief which I now know to be false and uninformed to the extreme. My folly revealed by facts which illuminate both my arrogance and self-deception. If only the tragedy had been mine alone. It might have been easier tonight to bring this journey to its end."
The phone rings and when Mulder picks it up, Michael Kritschgau tells Mulder he had been followed, that Mulder is being watched. Horrified, Mulder looks up and sees a camera in his ceiling. When he runs to the apartment upstairs he sees a man attempting to burn evidence, a TV screen behing him showing Mulder's living room. While Mulder stomps out the fire, the man lunges for a shotgun. The door closes and a shot rings out.
The credits roll: All Lies Lead to the Truth
Scully arrives home from the warehouse only to find Mulder in her bedroom.("Mulder. What are you doing? Why are you sitting in my bedroom in the dark" she asks, rather sharply, after he announces his presence with a mumbled "Keep going, FBI woman" as she begins to undress. "It was too crowded in my apartment. I couldn't sleep," he replies.) He tells her about killing the assassin Ostelhoff, and says the body is now in his apartment.
He shows her the ID card that belonged to the killer, and refuses Scully's suggestion about going to the FBI for help, saying that the military and the FBI are both involved. ("This hoax, your cancer, everything - it doesn't just lead back to the military - it leads right back to the FBI.") He shows Scully the phone records Ostelhoff was trying to destroy, with the same number on it over and again, a call made to the FBI switchboard. (Scully: "That would mean that for four years we've been nothing more than pawns in a game, that it was a lie from the beginning. Mulder, these men - you give them your faith, and you're supposed to trust them with your life.") Mulder asks Scully to lie, to say the body is his, buying them both time to try to reach the truth about the hoax, and the men behind Scully's cancer: "as they lie to us, we can lie to them. A lie to find the truth."
Later that morning, Scully identifies the body in Mulder's apartment as being him. As she does so, Mulder makes the following voice-over: "Let the truth be known, though the heavens fall. The web of lies entangling us can now be connected back to the very institution which brought us together. The fact supported by a Byzantine plot executed by someone inside the FBI who, if named, could be tied to the hoax meant to destroy me and the terminal disease inflicted on Scully. In four years, I have shared my partner's passionate search for the truth, and if my part has been a deception I have never seen her integrity waver or her honor compromised. But now, I ask her to lie to the people lying to us - a dangerous lie to hide the truth, to find the men that would be revealed as its enemy, as the enemy within."
As she is leaving she meets Skinner in the hallway. He demands to know if it is truly Mulder, if she can be sure as the face was blown away. She says she saw Mulder earlier - that he was wearing the same clothes. He informs Scully that she is being called in by Blevins to ascertain what happened last night. "He believes you have information you haven't come forward with."
At the FBI, Scully meets with Blevins, Skinner sitting silently off to the side. Blevins refers back to their first meeting in the same room, four years ago, and says how Scully has become "very close" to Mulder. He wants information about Kritschgau and what he told her and Mulder, and tells Scully that she will have to appear before a joint FBI committee he has called. Skinner shows Scully a picture of Kritschgau, taken by the surveillance camera over Mulder's apartment, asks if this is the man. Trapped, she assents.
Mulder goes to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, using Ostelhoff's card to get past security. Kritschgau meets up with him, tells Mulder that using Ostelhoff's card will get him onto Level 4, a place even Kritschgau does not have access to. (Mulder: "Level four clearance.. that means I get to dine at the officer's club?") On Level 4, Kritschgau says, is everything, including what Mulder wishes most, a cure for Scully's cancer.
The Cigarette-Smoking Man goes to Mulder's apartment, somber, gazing long at the bloodstain on the carpet. He picks up a picture of young Fox and Samantha, and a lone tear courses down his cheek. He discovers the camera, and leaves, distraught.
At the burearu, Scully calls Holly, now working in Communications. Holly informs Scully that the phone number Ostelhoff repeatedly called is an Executive branch extension, able to reach any of the top administration at the FBI, including Skinner.
At the D.O.D., Kritschgau tells Mulder that Level 4 is a biological quarantine, containing DNA from nearly everybody born since 1945. He goes on to tell Mulder about the hoax, that the military encourages UFO stories, then assiduously denies them, thus feeding the American public's need for "bogus revelations". "The U.S. Military saw a good thing in '47 when the Roswell story broke. The more we denied it, the more people thought it was true," he says, explaining that the government always needed a good cover for its own military projects. Alien abductions are actually people being taken by the government, experimented on, an ongoing project.
Mulder refuses to believe, saying, "But I've seen aliens. I've seen these things." Kritschgau answers, "You've seen what they wanted you to see. The line between science and science fiction doesn't exist any more. This is about control, of the very elements of life. DNA - yours, mine, everyone's." The alien body Mulder found (in Gethsemene) was designed to be so good that no-one would discover the hoax. Mulder says that Scully would, but Kritschgau says it was intended that Scully wouldn't be alive to see it.
Mulder accuses Kritschgau of going along with the hoax, of giving Scully cancer, and Kritschgau replies that his son is dying, that he has paid the price. He hopes there is a cure for his son as well as one for Scully. Mulder goes into the Level 4, and Kritschgau is detained by two soldiers.
The Cigarette-Smoking Man meets the Elder at a deserted racetrack, demanding to know why he wasn't informed of the surveillance on Mulder - why he was "left out of the loop" when they need his "expertise". Angrily he says, "I've always kept Mulder in check. I put this whole thing together. I created Mulder." The Elder tells CSM that Mulder committed suicide, that they underestimated his fragility. CSM haughtily replies that he has never underestimated Mulder. "I still don't."
Having been called by Dr. Vitagliano at the Paleo-Climatology lab about the ice core samples, Scully arrives there. The doctor shows her the chimera cells, cells which have begun mitosis, the process of creating new life. He cannot identify the organism being formed.
At the D.O.D., Mulder enters a room containing apparent alien bodies like the one he found in the ice, and witnesses experiments being conducted on unconscious civilians - women with swollen stomachs like the image he had of Scully in "Ascension". Desperately seeking her cure, he does so with the knowledge that finding it will be proof that he has believed in a lie from the start - "I had come here looking for answers hoping not only to lay bare this conspiracy against the country and the men behind it but to finally learn the truth about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now with what I've heard my beliefs seem more and more impossible. The possibility of a cure for Scully somewhere inside these walls is my only hope but if I might find it and somehow save her the very existence of such a cure would mean with certainty that I had believed in a lie from the start."
With Dr. Vitagliano's help, Scully does a blood test at the lab, comparing her DNA to that of a virus found in the growing organism that came from the cells in the ice core sample. She hopes to match the two DNA samples, thus proving that her cancer came from an experiment performed on her during her abduction.
While in the lab, Skinner arrives, and Scully confronts him angrily, demanding to know why he is there - "Why are you following me? Is this more dirty work you're doing for the DOD?". Skinner tells her that he has the pathology reports on the body in Mulder's apartment, that he knows she is lying. Lying, he continues, can only compound the consequences. He demands to know why she is lying, and Scully cries, "The truth!" She goes on to explain that she is seeking the truth of her abduction, of what was done to her, of her cancer. Skinner says he is afraid for her, that if she goes on record during the committee as saying these things that he cannot help her. Scully retorts Skinner is using her, using her against herself, and she will have none of it.
Back in the lab, Scully continues to work, looking for "hard and undeniable evidence of the connection between the conspirators and the cancer which has now metastasized in my bloodstream" She muses with the following voice-over - "The cruelest ironies are those consecrated by the passage of time, chanced and occasioned by shocking discovery. I had joined Agent Mulder because of my background in the medical sciences. My assignment was to question his work, to debunk his investigations, and rein him back into the FBI mainstream. Now, as fate would have it, I am calling on these very same skills to prove that he has been the target of a scheme orchestrated by someone close to us in the FBI, someone we have trusted above all others, involved in a highly organized plot to keep a dangerous secret from the light of day."
Eventually, Scully makes a match between the two DNA's. She has finally obtained her proof - "proof extracted from this tiny organism that could blow open a conspiracy of global consequence."
(More Scully voice-over: "If my work with Agent Mulder has tested the foundation of my beliefs, science has been and continues to be my guiding light. Now I'm again relying on its familiar and systematic methods to arrive at a truth, a fact that might explain the fate that has befallen me. An investigation that began without, now turning within. Taking cellular material from the unidentified life form and isolating a virus contained within it, then matching the DNA of that virus with that which I believe has caused my cancer, I hope a picture will develop - a picture that might confirm my darkest suspicions about the source of this disease invading my body in hope of obtaining evidence that its cause is not without blame, even though its cure remains unknown. If science serves me to these ends it is not lost on me that the tool which I've come to depend on absolutely cannot save or protect me, but only bring into focus the darkness that lies ahead.")
Wandering underground, Mulder discovers a secret room contaning evidence boxes, and a detailed filing system on everyone born since 1945. Cards in the files link up to the evidence boxes, and Mulder pulls Scully's file, pointing him to a box containing several vials. He takes one, and although he seeks out the card for Kritschgau's son, it is blank. As he leaves the D.O.D, the CSM watches him leave, and prevents anyone from stopping Mulder.
The committee meeting. Scully goes through the motions, proclaiming Mulder to be dead. Immediately afterward, Skinner walks in, bearing a folder containing the pathology report. Before he can say anything, Scully stand, pulls out the proof she has gotten. She makes accusations about her cancer, her abduction, about the hoax designed to lead to her and Mulder's demise, pinning it squarely on "someone in this room." But before she can show the chart with the matching DNA, her nose beging to bleed and she collapses. Skinner catches her, and fading, Scully can only whisper, "You..."
Mulder takes the vial he has stolen to the Lone Gunmen and has them analyze it. While he watches the analysis come up on the computer, the three men exchange looks. Sadly, Byers informs Mulder that the substance is "nothing more than de-ionized water."
To Be Continued in Redux II.
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