The Gift

Right after Malcom in the Middle, Fox shows a preview of the upcoming episode of The X-Files. In said preview, Doggett testily asks Scully if she knows why Mulder never filed a report for...something or other. She eyebrows. Enjoy that, because it's basically all the Scully we get tonight. Oh, and that scene? Not even in the episode.

Cue the very irritating thonk thonk thonk piano music. Cue the pouring rain. Cue the swish swish of windshield wipers. Cue someone's hands -- very obviously not at ten and two, people -- white-knuckled driving through the rain. Cue shot of car hurtling through the rain. Cue torrents of rain splashing into puddle. Rain rain rain rain rain. Kiss the rain. An FBI-approved product-placed Sensible Car pulls up in front of an equally sensible yet charming house in what the Non-hip Non-Squiggly Font of Location Introduction dubs Squamash Township, Pennsylvania. Conveniently (for Chris Carter at least, who I think filmed this episode with no idea of where he was going to slot it, chronologically, and then later just decided to toss it in for sweeps, despite the fact that it makes no sense here), there is no date or time stamp. The thonk-y Suspenseful Piano becomes the Mournful Foreboding Oboe of Unaverted Tragedy.

A man -- his face out of camera range -- gets out of the Sensible Car, gun in hand. He walks toward the house, the front door of which is artfully decorated with a pagan symbol painted in what looks like red paint, but, because this is The X-Files, must surely be blood. This camera angle -- whereby we, the audience, are looking at things from the POV of someone very short standing right behind the Faceless Man -- is really irritating. We're right in the Faceless Man's ass, and not in a good way. I feel like some kind of midget pimp, and the Faceless Man is my ho. Also, the Steady-Cam is making me sick.

The Faceless Man enters the house with nary a knock on the door or a polite greeting. The residents -- for whom I could easily concoct clever names, but won't, because they're in this entire episode and we find out their actual names (Marie and Paul) soon enough -- look askance. Marie, clad only in her nightgown, and some very unfortunate stringy brown hair, does the patented "no, please, gasp gasp heave" victim routine. The shadow of an unusual creature -- some kind of man/beast hybrid, it looks like (yes, again) -- appears on the wall. Faceless Man draws his gun. The creature stares back, pitifully. He looks remarkably like Kevin, the oldest son on Mr. Belvedere, gone horribly wrong -- we're talking both a serious need for orthodontia, and the very unattractive plastic skin look that happens when the make-up artist has screwed up matching the latex of the bloody plastic mask face to the actor's actual skin. Some more gasping, some more sobbing, some more heaving. A shot rings out. Blood splatters on the wall. There's a loud thunk as Kevin falls to the ground. Marie sobs some more, and throws herself into her husband's arms. He looks suitably grossed out.

The Faceless Man leaves the house. Conveniently, this moment has been shot from inside the car, and the swish-schwacking windshield wipers obscure his face. The Faceless Man heaves the car door open, plops inside, and sets the gun down on the passenger seat, although he doesn't let go of it. The camera focuses on his hand -- and it's so Mulder's hand, y'all. The camera travels up his arm, to his face. Bingo. Mulder stares at the gun. He looks a little deranged. He gazes out the windshield at the house, sets his jaw, reverses out the driveway and splashes down the road.

Credits. Welcome back, Duchovny, you magnificent bastard.

Daylight. A similarly Sensible Car sails down the highway, Doggett at the wheel. Lost in thought, Doggett does the Eye-Narrowing Face of Remembering. Scully's voice comes floating out of the ether to say, "Mulder was dying. It's right here. For a year, he was going to doctors." Um, like he wouldn't have gone to her, first, if he was having brain problems. Or like she wouldn't have noticed that something was wrong with him. Very rarely does something go wrong with someone's brain without any symptoms whatsoever, and if Mulder were having problems speaking, or complaining of headaches, surely Scully, a medical doctor, would have had an inkling that something was wrong. Does no one watch ER anymore? Doggett flashes back to the season premiere, as Scully tearfully shows Mulder's medical records to an ashen Skinner. Something else I can't buy? That Scully automatically accepts these medical records -- presented to her by a source that's not totally reliable, no less -- as fact. Medical records can be falsified. I mean, look what they did to Ethan's birth certificate on Passions, making him look premature, and, thus, the heir to the Crane fortune, and not the illegitimate son of Sam Bennett, the world's stupidest police chief, when, of course, he is the result of Sam and Ivy's forbidden love, conceived on her wedding night to another man. Doggett sighs, and flashes back to yet another moment from the season premiere, a discussion he had with Scully:

Doggett: How well did you really know him? How far would Moooolder go?
Scully: How far would he go for what?
Doggett: The truth. His truth.
Scully: Eyebrow.

Back behind the wheel, Doggett furrows his brow. The flashbacks continue as he remembers when he promised Scully that, despite their personal differences, he's committed to tracking Mulder down. In the flashback, Scully dully gazes out at him from her seemingly constant stint in a hospital bed. In the present, Doggett grits his teeth, makes his determined look, and speeds into Squamash. Still no time or date stamps.

Doggett's Sensible Car pulls up in front of the Squamash Sheriff's Station in a cloud of sand and dirt. The sheriff peers shiftily out of the window, peeking through the venetian blinds. Doggett blusters into the door, the very picture of manly determination. Sheriff Shifty makes a comment about Doggett's driving up on a Saturday and possibly wasting his weekend, which I suppose is the extremely tenuous reason that Scully is absent -- Doggett's doing this on his own time, while she's enjoying her weekend, probably watching Lifetime and crying because she's about to be an unwed mother and no one even cares. Doggett exposits that Mulder paid a visit to Squamash last spring (not "last night," as some people on the forums misheard -- understandably so, because Doggett's accent is weaving in and out like the town drunk on a two-lane highway), to investigate the case of a missing woman, one Marie Hangemuhl. "She wasn't exactly missing, and he wasn't exactly investigating," Sheriff Shifty spits, rummaging through his file cabinet. He explains that Marie never even left her house, and that the report of her disappearance was a false one. He further exposits that the only reason Mulder even knew anything about the case was because Marie's sister "got all excited about nothing" and contacted the FBI. Shifty hands Doggett a pile of files and offers him a Danish. Doggett breaks with tradition and refuses. Shifty eyes him, briefly, and wonders why he's so interested in such a non-case. Doggett explains that he's not interested in the case; he's interested in the agent. "Agent Mooooolder disappeared last May," he explains, but he made a second, return trip to Squamash a week before that happened. "What for?" Shifty wonders. "That's what I want to know. It's my job to find him," Doggett sniffs.

Because he's helpful like that, Shifty drives Doggett over to Paul and Marie Hangemuhl's place. In the time-honored way of vague law enforcement officers everywhere, Doggett announces that he'd like to ask Paul and Marie "some questions." Paul gets all shirty, and calls Marie over. She looks -- to put it bluntly -- like shit. Doggett outlines the Mulder/Hangemuhl case, just in case the Hangemuhls forgot what happened that one time the guy from the FBI visited them and shot something in their living room. "This again?" Paul's peeved that this case hasn't been dropped yet, but simmers down when Shifty explains that Doggett's far more interested in Mulder than he is in their little paranormal problems. Paul's like, never mind, then. Doggett settles in for a nice, long interrogation, and wonders what Paul and Mulder talked about.

We whoosh into flashback mode, which is primarily marked by a lighting change -- everything looks a little more golden. Because these memories? They're golden. They light the corners of my mind. Perched on the same sofa that Doggett currently occupies, Mulder rubs his temples vigorously -- because, you know, his brain is falling out, or something. "You told your sister you were going to disappear, Mrs. Hangemuhl. Tonight." He looks up wearily and squints. Because his brain hurts. "'Leave,' not 'disappear,'" Paul corrects him. "I'm talking to your wife!" Mulder reminds him. "It's what he said," Marie mutters, following party line. She fabricates some half-assed explanation as to why she said anything to her sister at all. "There's no crime here," Paul huffily interrupts. Mulder ignores him, and hypothesizes that Marie wasn't going anywhere, but that someone was coming to get her. "And still is," he concludes. Tight close-up on Paul. "We had a fight. We patched things up. That was the end of it," he spits.

They patched something up, Doggett seems to be thinking, as he spies what look like bullet holes in the Hangemuhls' living room wall. He barks that Mulder visited them on Saturday, May 6th. Marie and her stringy hair and under-eye circles guesses so. Marie, concealer is your friend. "Did you see Mooooolder again?" Doggett wonders. The Hangemuhls exchange guilty looks, and swiftly whoosh to a flashback of the gunshots. "No," Paul lies, "he never came back." Doggett informs Paul and Marie that Mulder's cell records prove otherwise. They look at their toes. Noting a dialysis machine in the corner of the room, Doggett butts into the Hangemuhs' personal physical problems, and asks about it. Paul solemnly informs him that Marie is in end-stage renal failure and a very sick woman. She looks away, as Doggett nods sympathetically. He asks her about the "thing" that Mulder thought was coming after her. "I just told my sister I was afraid of the stories. I didn't mean --" Paul interrupts his wife to ask Doggett whether Mulder was "sick in the head." Doggett looks grim, no doubt thinking about Mulder's rotting brain, and the fact that he was, in fact, literally sick in the head. Allegedly. Ah, irony. "What stories?" Doggett wonders. "An Indian folk legend about a creature that lives in the woods," Paul explains. Oh, that one. Paul informs Doggett that Marie talked herself into thinking that that the creature was going to eat her. "Eat her?" Doggett furrows his brow. "Alive," Paul elaborates calmly.

Out by the car, Shifty is so so sorry that Doggett wasted his Saturday. Doggett, lost in his own world, wonders if the Hangemuhls own a gun. Shifty doesn't think that they do. Doggett informs Shifty that he noticed three bullet holes in the Hangemuhls' living-room wall, but he doesn't want to go back and ask them about it.

Back in Virginia, Doggett picks the lock to Mulder's apartment, and lets himself in. I'm extremely confused about when this episode is supposed to have taken place. It's got to be prior to some of the more recent Monster of the Week episodes, because otherwise the pregnancy scenario makes no sense. On the other hand...why the hell are they fucking with the chronology like that? What's that you say? Sweeps? Word. But this episode must take place fairly shortly after Mulder's disappearance, because, despite the fact that his place is extremely dusty, it hasn't been rented out to another tenant. And I doubt anyone would be paying the rent on Mulder's apartment for eight months. Unless Scully is doing it. Or Skinner. But wouldn't they dust for him? You know, sadly. Polishing the coffee table with their tears? I mean, if they were still holding out hope that he'd come back. Someone's been feeding the fish, at any rate. Doggett himself dumps a whole pile of fish food into the tank. That was a nice moment. And then Doggett ruins my nascent goodwill toward him by trashing Mulder's apartment, going through his desk and dresser drawers, pulling shoeboxes out from under the bed and just pouring their contents (photographs, I think) all over the floor, going through his trash (this has got to be right after Mulder's abduction, because the trash doesn't seem to be that disgusting). It's really rather rude. If you're going to snoop, at least put things back in order. It's also interesting that Doggett is wearing gloves. Why does he care if he leaves his fingerprints? He's in charge of finding Mulder, after all, isn't he? Doesn't looking for clues in Mulder's apartment fall onto his list of things to do, in that case? Why am I trying to apply logic to any of this? Anyway, Doggett finds a small gun taped to the underside of the kitchen sink. He looks at it, perplexed. Then he bursts into flames. Okay, not really. I just like thinking about that.