1×14 – LAZARUS
by foxestacado
Recap by Slippin’ Mickeys
Maryland Marine Bank, 5:55pm. Scully opens up a briefcase on a bank countertop, all business. “Relax, they’ll be here,” she says to an antsy looking man in a suit and trench coat behind her. He casually approaches her. “The bank’s gonna close in five minutes,” he says. “Sure it wasn’t a bogus tip?” Scully asks him, casually filling out a form like she’s a bank customer. The antsy looking man in a suit and trench coat is decidedly acting like he’s not a bank customer, but rather an FBI agent who’s there to make a huge bust. Which, if you couldn’t tell, is exactly what he is. “No, it’s real. I’ve been on this case long enough, I know the difference. Besides, I can feel it. I can feel them. I’m inside their heads.” Sounds like FBI guy picked the wrong X-Files agent for backup. “Just as long as you keep yours,” Scully says kind of like a mom, looking at him meaningfully. Aw. Scully’s pretending he’s Mulder. “Message received agent Scully,” he says, smiling and rueful, “loud and clear.” He’s definitely not pretending he’s Mulder. FBI guy, whos name we learn is Agent Jack Willis, checks in with HQ via one of those clear earpieces with the squiggly cord. Scully closes her briefcase. There’s a GUN inside!
Outside in what I can only assume is a back alley near the bank, a–I’m not going to lie–badASS late model muscle car is parked. Inside, a man loads a shotgun, all-business. His driver is a severe looking broad dressed all in black with really curly bangs coming out of her black knit cap. Oh, girlfriend. We all learned not to perm our bangs by seventh grade. She’s staring at the bank’s entrance, twitchy. Her gunman notices. “What are you, nervous?” He asks incredulously. “No,” she answers, “I just don’t want our luck to run out.” He puts his arm around her and says “Baby, you are my luck.” Oh, girlfriend. We learned not to fall for that one by grade nine.
“And whenever I look up at the stars,” he continues, looking up at the stars through the dirty windshield, “I know you’re going to be looking up at the same ones.” He totally stole that from An American Tale. She fingers the 3 day beard growth on his chin and moons back. “Same ones, baby.” God. Has she learned nothing in her life? She should have gone to my high school. Gun Man then grabs her and they make out, the camera zooming in on an anvil-icious tattoo of a dragon on his forearm. “You make every day like New Year’s Eve!” He tells her as he pulls away. If that means she makes it so he’s passed out by nine every night with runny mascara and a stupid paper hat, she’s not invited to my next party.
Lock and load. He busts into the bank with a scary-looking hockey mask over his face and yells the usual “everybody down!” rigamorole. In a pointed moment, he shoves the gun in Scully’s face and she sinks down on the ground as well. Agent Willis is up by the tellers and takes to his knees. The terrified bank workers start filling up the bags. Scully and Agent Willis make eye contact and both draw their weapons. Willis yells his name “Dupree! Drop the gun, FBI. DROP THE GUN!” Dupree is focused on Willis and doesn’t drop the gun. We see Scully make her way toward him from the other direction. Dupree makes like he’s going to drop the gun, but then DOESN’T! He totally shoots Willis! Criminal! Scully drops him. All that shooting in an X-Files episode and Mulder didn’t get shot once.
In the Emergency Room, a nurse drapes the sheet over Dupree’s face. Scully’s a good shot. One table over, the doctors are working on Willis—they’ve been working on him for a long time. Scully’s there. “Come on, Jack,” she says, in a voice that’s usually reserved for Mulder. The doctors tell her that he’s been flatlined for over twelve minutes. The nurse wants to give up, and the doctor asks her if she wants to pronounce time of death. (Is that legal? I don’t think a nurse can pronounce.) Scully’s having none of it and tells them that she’s a doctor (seriously, at first when the doctor asked if the nurse wanted to pronounce, I thought he was directing the question at Scully, which would have been just MEAN) and to go up to 400 like now, lady, did you hear what I just said? Nothing. Shocked again. Again, nothing. But this time, when Jack’s body arches from the shock, we see Dupree’s dead body arching in the background at the same time. It’s creepy and really cool. Nothing. Again. Jack arches, dead Dupree arches (and his tattooed arm falls out from beneath the sheet.) Aaaand, they’ve got a rhythm. Jack is back! Scully is happy. And Mark Snow’s Creepy Crawly String Plucks of Doom play on as we pan in on dead Dupree’s tattooed arm. Credits.
Bethesda Naval Hospital, two days later. Jack’s hooked up to a ventilator but suddenly comes awake. He pulls out the tube and leaves his room, stealth-like. In another room, he takes clothes that aren’t his and puts them on. A nurse enters and he winds up some medical tubing like he’s going to kill her but she leaves the room without noticing him. How very un-FBI-like of him. Suddenly, he has a vision. It’s of Agent Jack Willis shooting him! It’s from Dupree’s POV! Jack looks in a mirror, feeling his face like “is this really me?” Do you get it yet?
Morgue. Jack pulls Dupree out of the freezer and stares at him. Then, he pulls out Dupree’s left hand and forces it up, stiff from rigamortis—the sound while he’s doing it is totally gross. Thanks, foley guys. He tries to pull the wedding band from Dupree’s finger and when that doesn’t work, he reaches for some scissors. Ew.
Later in the morgue. Mulder walks in. Hi Mulder! God, he looks young. He sounds even younger. Scully’s there, looking over a file. She asks if they have any word of Willis. Mulder says that they don’t; he’s not at home and hasn’t checked in with the office. Mulder heard something on the way down about a mutilation? Scully takes him over to the body and shows him Jack’s handy-work with the scissors. They lifted prints, and they’re Willis’s. Mulder exposits that Jack has been chasing this Dupree guy for over a year, and Scully exposits that yes, he’s been living the case—it was all he ever thought about, talked about. An FBI agent totally obsessed with a case? That must have been really weird for you, Scully.
Scully goes on to say that she thinks this is some kind of PTSD, but to Mulder, that wouldn’t explain why he vanished. He asks about Dupree’s partner—one Lula Phillips, who was serving time for manslaughter in the prison where Dupree was a guard. Charming. Lula was released one week before the robbery of another bank in Maryland. At that robbery, an elderly teller was killed for not putting the money in the bag fast enough. Charming, as ever. It seems Warren Dupree and Lula took turns robbing banks—one robbing while the other drove getaway. They killed seven people and got away with close to $100,000. Which Mulder thinks is a lot of money now that Lula doesn’t have to split it with Warren. Scully’s all “fat chance, we’ve put her picture all over the news.” Bummer for Lula. I like spending money, too. Mulder reads that they were married last year and jumps to the conclusion (as he’s wont to do) that this was no necrophiliac mutilation, but that Willis “sliced and diced those fingers to get at the wedding ring.” Mulder says “sliced and diced” a lot on this show.
Casa de Lula y Warren. Jack breaks in and starts looking around for Lula like he knows the place well. Do you get it yet? We hear a plane fly close overhead and Jack mutters “baby, baby, baby.” Cut it with the “babies,” please. His arm is bugging him and he pulls up the sleeve to reveal… WARREN DUPREE’S TATTOO!
Back in the LBO with the fingerprints they lifted from Dupree’s body. Mulder says that it’s clear that Willis was using his left hand. Scully’s not sure where Mulder’s going with this (oh, season one Scully, aren’t you precious), but Mulder shows her the EKG strip that was recording Willis’s heartbeat when they revived him. There appear to be TWO heart beats! Both men were technically dead at the same time, and while Scully is all “but we resuscitated Willis,” Mulder is all “you resuscitated his body,” and Scully’s all “oh brother.” Mulder: “Two men died in that room. You brought one back. The question is, which one?”
University of Maryland, Department of Biology. They’re talking with a professor about near-death experiences, who tells them that half the adults out there who have had near-death experiences cannot wear a watch—that the increased electrical activity within their bodies renders their watches inoperable. He goes on to say that people come back from the experience profoundly changed. (Doesn’t he mean profoundly charged?) More than just shocking themselves on door handles, I guess–that they sometimes have increased psychic abilities and an increased zest for life. The rare negative effects are windows after death and before re-life that the body is vulnerable—he tells the story of a pilot friend of his that crashed and remembers floating over his own body and then feeling a great need to return to it; afterwards waking up in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, the only survivor. Hey, that happened to Skinner! Anyhoodle, soon after that the visions started. Visions of making love to his wife in places and ways that he didn’t remember. Hey, that happened to Skinner! Sort of. If the pilot’s wife was a succubus. Turns out one of the passengers on the plane had been having an affair with the pilot’s wife. The cheating dead guy’s consciousness survived through the pilot. Scully doesn’t buy this near-death body-switching shit.
While she’s expositing this, we find out that she and Jack dated for a year—he was her instructor at the Academy. Mulder’s kind of intrigued and I’m kind of worried a bit about Scully’s daddy issues. Scully remembers that she and Jack even had the same birthday, that they used to celebrate it together, but that Jack always found it so hard to unwind. Mulder wonders if she thinks he’s predisposed to this kind of psychotic episode, and Scully Scully’s that she finds that a lot more probable than his body being inhabited by Warren Dupree. Word.
Back with Warren/Jack (whom will henceforth be known as Whack). Whack is looking eeeevil and breaks into a guy’s apartment, cramming a gun in the guy’s face before the guy can sit up in bed. “You’re such a creature of habit, Tommy,” Whack says, to which Tommy says “Who the hell are you?” Oh, Tommy. He’s Whack.
Whack demands to know where Lula is, who apparently is Tommy’s sister. Tommy says that he was just waiting to see her on the news, and over on the Tubey, Lula’s mug appears, though the sound is busted (kind of like the boards sometimes). Not that it matters though, because Whack is all caressing the screen which is just gross and weird. I mean, I love both my boyfriend and my TV to the ends of the earth, but I’m not about to start fondling my TV screen, even if my boyfriend’s face is on it. I mean, A) … and B) Windex for Electronics is expensive, yo. Whack turns off the television moony-eyed, and proclaims to Tommy “I miss her so bad.” She’s why he came back, he says. Everywhere he looks, he sees her. Hey! Whack had a flash-forward to Gethsemane! Tommy points out that he’s bleeding—to which Whack replies that even ugliness is beautiful because of her. Which, not to cut on the actress that plays Lula, but, would explain a lot. Whack gets all beautiful on Tommy and accuses him of selling them out to the FBI and then… shoots him.
Crime scene: Tommy’s apartment. Mulder and Scully are there, along with fellow FBI agents and local cops. Mulder asks if the television was on when they found the body. As Mulder is about to dust the TV for prints, Whack shows up and starts giving the cop at the door attitude. Scully steps in to mediate and Whack flashes to her shooting him back when he was just Warren in the bank. I have to tell you, Whack (the character, and the guy playing him for that matter) is a great actor. Scully is up in his grill asking him what happened and where he’s been and he plays it like a pro. It’s funny—this actor (a classic Vancouver H!ITG) chews the shit out of the I-love-Lula scenery, but at everything else, he’s smooth as glass. In any event, he convinces Scully that he’s fine and to let him back on the case. They head back into the crime scene and sure enough, Mulder found a print on the TV that wasn’t the victim’s.
In the FBI shooting range, Whack is filling a paper target with holes as Mulder approaches. Whack tells him that he’s just trying to get recertified so they’ll give him his weapon back. Mulder tells Whack that he came down there because he thought that Whack might want to sign Scully’s birthday card, which Whack does. Clever, Mulder.
Back down in the LBO, Mulder slips the card onto the desk in front of Scully and she earnestly tells him that he’s two months early. Poor Scully. She hasn’t learned yet that Mulder only likes to celebrate her birthday every five years and then only with Hostess pink cream puffs and singing waiters. Mulder tells her that he had Willis sign it and that he signed it with his left hand, and if he remembers correctly, don’t Willis and Scully have the same birthday? Scully gets pissy that Mulder tested him, but Mulder tells her he did so only after finding out that the finger print evidence from the Phillip’s murder was missing—that someone stole it before the lab had a chance to test it. Scully’s all “and you think Willis took it,” and Mulder is all “I’m not even sure that Willis is really Willis.” Mulder asks Scully if she can’t at least accept the possibility that sometime during Willis’s near-death experience some kind of psychic transference occurred. Scully asks Mulder if he can’t accept the possibility that this isn’t an X-File. Oh, X-Files follow him around like forlorn puppies, Scully. But this is season one and you don’t know that yet. Scully reminds Mulder that despite having PTSD Willis passed both of his reinstatement tests—psychological and physical—and that just because someone forgets a birthday doesn’t mean he’s being possessed. She has a cute little sassy Scully moment where she tells Mulder that when she was studying for her medical boards, she forgot her birthday too. Mulder then has a decidedly non-cute sassy Mulder moment (I call it non-cute because when Mulder does it, he comes off as kind of a dick) where he asks if she forgot how to sign her name, too. He shows her an old signature of Willis’s and then the signature from the birthday card—they’re totally different. Scully chalks it up to stress.
Whack is at his desk looking through photos of the bank robbery—his old dead body and that mug of Lula they had on TV. He gets a phone call—it’s a tip from some landlord that thinks he saw Lula—Scully catches up to him in the bullpen and asks him about the missing print—he was carrying the evidence bag. He snips that he doesn’t know anything about a missing print, but that he’s about to close the biggest case of his career, and is she coming with him or what? Scully looks skeptical (surprise!) but joins him.
At another crappy apartment building, Scully and Whack arrive at the manager’s apartment door and ask him about the tip, showing him a picture of Lula. The manager tells them that she arrived two days ago and paid the first and last month’s rent in cash. Scully tells the manager to go back into his apartment and stay there. As they’re walking down the hallway to Lula’s new place, Scully double checks with Whack that he called for backup, because shouldn’t they be here by now? Whack is all mad—they should have been here ten minutes ago! He almost has ME convinced and I’ve seen this episode. Just then, Lula comes out of a stairway door, a load of laundry in her hands. Whack’s face lights up and they give chase back from the way Lula came—the building’s basement. Whack is desperate to find her, and he and Scully split, searching every nook and cranny. In the boiler room, Lula jumps Scully, knocking her weapon out of her hands. The have a pretty manly girlfight and Scully totally flips and cuffs her. There are a couple of seconds there where Scully’s straddling Lula that probably got some fanboy screen pauses. I’m just saying. Whack catches up and tosses another pair of cuffs at Scully. Scully reminds him that she already cuffed her, but Whack tells him that they’re for her. See what I mean about the fanboys? Anyway, Scully is shocked! Shocked! And kind of a little resigned to her fate. She also looks pissed.
You know who else looks pissed? Lula. Whack gets down on his knees and pulls another couple of “babies” on her and then tries to wipe some shmutz off her face with his thumb and some spit. She tells him to keep his stinking hands off of her. I have to say—even if I DID recognize the guy as my husband—which Lula clearly doesn’t—I would been totally grossed out by that too. I don’t even like my mom doing that.
Back at Warren and Lula’s old place, Scully is cuffed to a radiator, coming to. Off screen we hear Whack telling Lula that he’s weirded out too! This isn’t his face! These aren’t his hands! And I was totally hung WAY better! Okay, maybe not that last part. Whack tells Lula to ask him something that only he would know. He rattles off her birthday and her favorite color (April 7, and red). In the room with them, Lula is clearly weirded out, but asks him a question anyway: What did they do after they got married? Whack goes all smarmy and says “Right after?” Gross. Then he goes on: “We went down to the beach, I took out my buck knife and I sliced open my palm. Then I slit open your palm…” And now we both have matching scars! And Hep C! He grabs her hand and holds it to his. “We let the blood drip down in the water.” Lula’s caving a little, you can tell. “Then what did you say to me?” She asks. “I said, ‘This is so we can be married in all the oceans of the world,’” Whack says, which is kind of sweet and also kind of creepy. And also, sharks, dude. Yikes. He goes on. “And then I made you a solemn oath, to NEVER take this ring off my finger, ever.” He takes Dupree’s ring out of his pocket and jams it on his hand. “This is just too weird,” Lula says, stepping back for a breather. Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what the story editor said when he got the first draft of this script. “I can’t believe it’s really you.” “Don’t worry, baby,” Whack says, coming up behind her and nuzzling her neck, “it won’t make any difference in the dark.” EW.
Mulder and an FBI agent that’s been working the case with them come down the steps after talking with Lula’s building manager, who’s harping about getting his reward. Other FBI guy, who’s bald pate makes him look a lot like my high school Physics teacher (so I’ll call him Agent Bufe) tells the guy really dismissively that they’ll call him. Hee.
“Now I’M worried,” Agent Bufe says, as they exit the building, “12 hours with no word. Why’s her car still sitting out front? Why didn’t Willis call for backup?” “Because it wasn’t Willis who answered the hotline,” Mulder answers, about to make another friend in law enforcement. “What do you mean? You heard the recording, that was Willis’s voice on the line.” “Forget it, Bufe,” Mulder says, cutting his losses. Poor Mulder. “Plus which,” Bufe goes on, pointedly, “the manager just ID’d Scully and Willis.” “I said forget it, Bufe,” Mulder repeats. Back at the car, Bufe asks Mulder if this is one of his X-File theories. Mulder tells him that it doesn’t matter what he thinks, they’re still after the same thing. Like you never could have said THAT to Scully in nine years, Mulder? Geez.
Mulder’s phone rings. It’s the FBI operator transferring a call. “Guess who, ace?” It’s Whack. Mulder immediately asks about Scully, demanding to talk to her. Whack says okay and puts the phone to Scully’s ear just long enough for Mulder to say “Dana, are you okay? Dana?!” I can’t help it. The ‘shipper inside me squees when Mulder and Scully call each other by their first names. For them, it’s just so… intimate. Until you put a “Dearest” in front of it, and then it’s just gross. Whack pulls the phone back and then hangs up. Scully tells Whack that Bureau policy won’t let them negotiate. She keeps calling him “Jack” which really pisses him off. She keeps at it, though, telling him his name, where he was born, reminding him of who he is. Whack shakes it off, spouting out that his name is Warren James Dupree and that he was born in Clament Falls, Oregon, in “the year of the rat.” I don’t have a Chinese restaurant placemat in front of me—is that like, ’52?
Scully won’t relent. “We spent a weekend up at Pine Barrens. You taught me how to fish through the ice.” You mean ‘ice fishing,’ Scully? Maybe it’s that I grew up on a lake in the far north where we do a lot of ice fishing, but that part has always bugged me. Anyway. “It was your parent’s cabin, Jack, try to remember. We drove up in a snowstorm.” Whack flashes for a split second on a snowy windshield, winding up a snow-covered mountain road.
“Don’t think I didn’t see what you did,” Whack says, icy. “I was like a little slip of paper up there on that hospital ceiling.” He gets in Scully’s face. “I saw everything.” Scully asks what he saw. “You left me to DIE on that hospital table while you saved your friend!” Scully “you ARE my friend!”’s him. “He was gone already,” Whack says meanly, “I watched him go. I just watched him slip away down that long black tunnel.” He puts a gun in Scully’s face, but she calls him by his name and tells him that he won’t shoot her. Lula saunters in then and tells him to take it easy, they can’t kill her yet. She’s their ticket.
Whack gets up and swipes the soda that Lula was drinking from her, drains it, asks her if there’s anymore. Lula tells him that he just drank the last of it. A light bulb flashes over Scully’s head and she asks him how much soda he’s had. She goes on to tell him that Jack Willis is diabetic which means that Whack is diabetic and that too much sugar in the system could lead to hypoglycemia. “Hey,” Lula says, “maybe that’s why your stomach’s bothering you so bad…” Scully cuts in that abdominal pain is the first sign of an impending diabetic coma and that he needs insulin. It seems to only piss Whack off (hee), but my dad has Type 1 diabetes and that’s some scary shit, yo. Like when you find him passed out in the hallway and you have to pour orange juice down his throat and hope he doesn’t choke and that you’re still going to have a dad in ten minutes… But enough about my horrors, let’s get back to Scully’s. She’s had lots more of them than me. Still cuffed to the radiator, she huffs out tears of frustration and helplessness. I guess I can relate to that, too.
J. Edgar Hoover Building: Mulder is listening to Willis’s taped notes on Dupree and Lula. Cut to: The Find Scully Task Force. Mulder is in front of a rough, fairly blank map of Baltimore, highlighting the cross streets where a drug store was just robbed and then highlighting the area around it where he thinks Scully might be. Agent Bufe asks if he’s missing something. Mulder refrains from making a bald joke (and so do I) and tells them that insulin and syringes were just stolen from said drug store and that Jack Willis is diabetic. Agent Bufe, surprisingly, and rather awesomely takes this as good intel and asks some other agents to get a Census report to find out how many households they might be dealing with. When we pan to the map, you can see an airport marker and just about nothing else.
Back at Warren and Lula’s, Scully has been freed and dumps out the insulin and syringes on a table—Whack is laid out next to her on the couch, clearly out of it, mumbling about his legs going numb. Scully tells him to hold on, when out of nowhere, Lula swipes at the insulin in Scully’s hand and pulls a gun on the both of them. Scully tells her that without the medicine, he’ll die. Lula doesn’t seem to care. (Then why the eff did she go and steal it in the first place?) Lula turns the gun on Whack. “You still haven’t figured it out, have you?” She asks him. “Figured what out?” I just want to point out right now that Lula is wearing a beret. It really has nothing to do with the scene or the recap or anything, but how often do you see people wearing berets? Lula: “It wasn’t my brother who set you up.” “You?” Whack asks sadly. “Yeah,” she says, “me. How do think I got away so clean, huh? The minute you set foot in that bank, I was outta there. I got the money and I got rid of you. At least I thought I did.” Man, she is a stone cold bitch. A stone cold bitch in a beret, which I think makes her even bitchier. She stomps on the insulin, breaking the vial and dooming Whack to death. Okay, I take it back, that made her bitchier.
Find Scully Task Force: The phone rings. Once they’ve got it all set taping, Mulder picks it up.“ Listen carefully,” Lula says. Mulder wants to know where Willis is. Lula replies that he’s laying around there somewhere. Mulder wants to talk to Scully. Lula won’t let her talk. Mulder tells her that they won’t deal unless they know Scully’s alive. Lula can only assure him that she is. “Listen to me,” Mulder says, turning away from the other agents, his voice pinched and angry, “you lay one hand on Scully and so help me God…” I love that. Duchovny plays it perfectly. Mulder turns away from the other agents like he doesn’t want them to hear what he’s about to say—he probably knows that threatening a hostage-taker during a negotiation is a HUGE no-no, but he doesn’t give a damn and does it anyway. I think that’s what made this show so great. Just a few episodes into Season 1 and you could tell that Mulder and Scully really, really loved each other. Not in a romantic way yet, I don’t think, but in a …family way. Like, in the way that if you saw someone picking on a friend of yours, you’d get upset but may not do anything that would get you in trouble—on the other hand, if you saw someone picking on your little sister, you’d be hard pressed not to march over there and rip their fucking throat out. They may not always get along, but they’re family, dammit. Lula: “If I were you, I’d stop talking and start passing around the collection plate. Because if you ever want to see Scully again, it’s going to cost you a million dollars.” She stresses the amount kind of like Dr. Evil, but in a non-ironic way. Aw, early 90’s and your high-value dollar, you’re so cute. “Have it by this time tomorrow,” Lula says, peaking out the curtains as we hear planes zooming overhead, “I’ll tell you when and where.”
“We got it!” an agent says, “it’s a 202 number!” Mulder and Bufe run over to the dot matrix printer it’s coming out on (OMG! Even cuter than the high-value American currency! Dot matrix!). Mulder grabs the paper, but quickly balls it up and tosses it away. “Forget it,” he says, “it’s Scully’s cellular number. They’re using her phone. We can’t trace it.” Tell that to the Patriot Act. (Not the same thing I realize, but man, that Patriot Act really steams me.)
Later, Mulder and a Bureau audio tech are listening to the recording of Lula’s call. They’re working on getting rid of the voices and isolating the airplane sounds. The tech tells Mulder he can even tell him what altitude the plane is at within a few hundred feet. Awesome. Back with the rest of the task force, Bufe (whom by now I’m guessing is running the op) tells everyone to take a seat, that Mulder’s got something. Another agent snarks “what, an alien virus, or new information on the Kennedy assassination?” Shit, dude, wait until Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man and you’ll get both! Bufe sticks up for him, “Mulder’s all right,” he says, “pay attention and you might learn something from the man.” This like, never happens again. I think the show was trying to make it up to the FBI after Squeeze made all the X-Philes kind of hate any FBI agent who’s names weren’t ‘Mulder’ or ‘Scully.’
Mulder enters. Remember that airplane on the map (like the ONLY thing on the map other than some squiggly lines and the word BALTIMORE)? Well, at that airport, take-offs run north-to-south, so Mulder pens in the area on the map where Scully might be. Roughly 1,000 households. Mulder thinks with everyone they have at their disposal they should be able to canvas the entire area in about 3 hours. The agents hop-to and go about doing that. On their way out Mulder reminds them that this one is important to him so do it right, huh? Aw.
Warren and Lula’s house/dump-by-the-airport: Whack is laying in the corner near where Scully is chained to the radiator. He rouses himself a bit from his diabetic stupor and asks Scully if there was snow. He says it kind of sweetly, and makes me feel kind of sorry for him. “Yes, Jack,” Scully says, urging him to remember, “there was lots of snow. It was December. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving.” I bet there wouldn’t be snow there these days, that time of year. Global warming is a real bitch. Whack remembers a red stove and Scully yeah’s him. There was a wood-burning snow right in the middle of the room. He’s starting to remember himself. It’s almost as if Jack is coming back. Suddenly, Whack slumps and then flashes to the bank. He’s both Willis and Dupree. Scully despairs—she’s lost him. When she looks over, he morphs into Warren Dupree for a split second. She’s weirded out. (Don’t worry, Scully, you’ll get used to that!) There’s a knock at the door; Lula grabs the gun and answers it. It’s a bible salesman. Man, salesmen never go door-to-door anymore. She tells him to go to hell and as he walks away, he speaks into his jacket; “target sighted.” WOO! The FBI always gets their man.
Back in the house, Whack is dead. Scully blames Lula, tells her it’s her fault. Lula drops her wedding ring in Whack’s lap. She doesn’t give a damn. She even gets down on her knees and taunts his corpse. Which… turns out to be not such a good idea, as Whack wasn’t actually dead and seizes the opportunity to grab Lula’s gun out of her belt. He tells her that she was why he came back.
Outside, all kinds of undercover guys and snipers are trying to get a bead on Lula inside the house. Mulder and the other FBI guys converge and get ready to storm the place. Remember that cool clear earpiece thingy with the wiggly cord that Willis had in the beginning of the episode? The ones you always see the CIA agents wearing in the movies? They must be expensive and the prop department must only have one of them, because Mulder and all the other agents are now wearing these crappy black things that look like Walkman earbuds. Anyway, they’re ready to go in.
Lula suddenly loves him again! She unconvincingly puts the ring back on and tells him that she has insulin in the other room-she’ll go get it! Whatever, lady. Whack tells Lula that that place he was telling her about (I’m guessing the bright light when he died) was beautiful and that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Then he shoots her. DAMN! Whack!
The FBI seize that moment to storm the place. Mulder busts in and finds Scully cuffed to the radiator, she calls to Jack, but Jack is gone. And just when no one is looking, Mark Snow’s Creepy String Plucks of Doom come in and Dupree’s tattoo magically disappears from Willis’s arm. I bet Scully wishes they came off that easily.
Back at the Hoover building, Scully is cleaning out Willis’s desk. Mulder brings her Willis’s watch which he got from the morgue. Scully gave it to him for his 35th birthday. Willis didn’t have any family, but there was a kid he was a Big Brother to that Scully’s going to go see tomorrow. She asks Mulder what she should tell him. He tells her to tell the kid the official story: “Fugitive Lula Phillips died yesterday in a shootout with Federal Agents, which also resulted in the death of Special Agent Jack Willis, killed in the line of duty.” Scully wants to know what she should tell herself. Mulder then just says goodnight and starts to walk away. Um, okay. Peace out, dude. Before he’s through the door though, Scully notices that Willis’s watch has stopped. At 6:47pm. Mulder reminds her that that was the exact time that Jack went into cardiac arrest at the hospital. Scully asks him what it means and Mulder only tells her that it means what she wants it to mean. Which kind of sucks, because I think she really needed something from Mulder here and didn’t get it. We fade to black. Don’t worry Scully, your show’s finale did the same thing to me. I really needed something from it, but I didn’t get it and it just faded to black.
And there you have my recap. Ending on the same depressing, sour note as the episode itself. Woo!
Recap by Slippin’ Mickeys