Via Negativa

Awwwwww yeah: due to some graphic violence, viewer discretion is advised. How this episode can be more graphic than the one in which Scully's neck gave birth to a massive banana slug, I shudder to think.

Night. Middle of Nowhere. Literally: we don't the Non-Hip, Non-Squiggly Font of Location introduction. Inside a car, a man sleeps in the driver's seat, his head propped up against the window. He's cute. In fact, I'm getting desperate, so he's very cute. If I had a beer in me, he'd be cute enough to eat. If you know what I mean. And I think you do. Cute Enough To Eat wakes with a start when some other, less cute dude raps smartly on the car window. CETE looks even cuter when he's awake. He rolls the window down. "Damn, Jim! You fell asleep? We're on a stakeout, man!" whines Less Cute Exposition Fairy Dude. I'd like to take this moment to comment that I like to preface everything I say with the phrase "damn, Jim!" Seeing as my father is named Jim, this caused no end of trouble in my youth. CETE rubs his face. "I guess. I dunno," he exhales. Wow, give this guy a promotion. Less Cute Exposition Fairy Dude moves the plot along by commenting that the door of the house they're staking out is wide open. CETE looks at him blankly. Pretty outside, stupid inside. My favorite flavor. Hee. Not really. I like them pretty outside and painfully intelligent with a mean streak and heavy dose of selfishness inside, if the past serves as an indication. "You better check it," Less Cute Exposition Fairy Dude spits. "Before you wreck it," I finish for him. CETE stumbles out of the car.

LCEFD and CETE approach the house, a ramshackle old Victorian. Under the street lamp, CETE is not nearly as snackable. In the squad car, he looked a bit like Ethan Crane, a blandly good-looking, yet terminally idiotic character in my favorite PBS program, Passions. This week, Sheridan is buried alive! Anyway, out of the squad car, CETE looks less like Ethan Crane and more like SpongeBob SquarePants. SpongeBob and LCEFD peer around the doorway of the house. "Looks like they left," SpongeBob says. LCEFD shines his flashlight around, finally alighting (literally! See what I did there?) on a series of footprints in the hallway floor. Bloody footprints. "This can't be!" hisses SpongeBob. Painted on the wall above one of the inside doorways is an eye. The house I grew up in -- where my parents and sister still live -- has an artist's studio over the garage, where, legend has it, Norman Rockwell painted Gary Cooper. But over the years, the people who lived in the house let their kids ("damn dirty hippies," according to our neighbor down the street) use the studio as a rec room ("for their acid trips and reefer sessions," ibid.), and when we moved in, it was painted all crazy-ass, including (and this is where my point finally arrives) a big creepy eye on the door to the bathroom. Shout-out? Asked and answered, baby. Asked and answered.

SpongeBob and LCEFD enter the house. SpongeBob peers around a corner. And, suddenly, he's cute again. Cute, and utterly horrified by what he sees. The room is furnished with two rows of single camp beds. On each of the beds is a person. A dead person. A dead person in a pool of blood, with a big old gash between his or her eyes. Yes, that is grosser than the banana slug. And the credits haven't even rolled. SpongeBob struggles not to lose his lunch as LCEFD comes around the corner. "They're all dead," he breathes. LCEFD looks unperturbed. There is a noise directly above them, which LCEFD trips off to check out.

SpongeBob follows the bloody footprints into the Room of Death.

LCEFD squeaks towards the stairway, walking past an open doorway. A large scythe -- you know, the kind Death carries? -- rests in the doorjamb. He hears something behind him, turns on his heel, and points his gun toward the doorway.

Back in the Room of Death, SpongeBob hears gunfire. He races to the hallway, where he finds LCEFD lying in a pool of his own blood, natch, his head all gory and mangled. SpongeBob looks first disgusted, then horrified, as he looks up to a man towering over him, scythe in hand, glaring evilly. The man with the scythe? He has three eyes. The extra one is in the middle of his forehead, like the mythical Third Eye of which one reads in Eastern literature. He brings the scythe down.

We go to credits.

Falls Church, Virginia. 3:26 AM. House of Doggett. The ringing of the phone. The answering of the phone. The hunky t-shirted chest of Doggett rolls over, as Scully huskily apologizes for waking him. She tells him that Skinner just called her regarding "a situation." She borrows the crown of the exposition fairy and explains that Skinner had two agents surveiling a religious cult in Pittsburgh, and that one of them is dead, along with all of the cult members. She weakly tells Doggett she can't accompany him to investigate: "something unexpected" has come up. "You all right?" Doggett asks, gruffly, yet sensitively. Sigh. Scully assures him half-heartedly that she is fine. "I'll see you later?" Doggett asks, in a very familiar tone. Affirmative. The hanging up of the phone. The panning out of the camera on Scully, as a hospital nurse approaches, and tells her that the doctor needs to see her right away. Scully looks pale and downtrodden. Nothing will ever go well for her, will it? Ever. Her family life sucks: her sister is dead, her mother is never around, her brother is a jackhole. Her romantic life blows: she certainly never has a date, and if she was getting booty, she ain't anymore, because the giver has been abducted by a bunch of alien bounty hunters. Her professional life? She works for the most derided branch of the FBI, has an office in the basement and has just gotten a desk after seven years. Her health? Cancer, weird shit embedded in her neck, infertility, and now this crazy-ass pregnancy alien baby thing. And if she can't even carry the crazy-ass alien baby to term, after all of this? Moses, smell the roses!