4×08 – PAPER HEARTS
by foxestacado
Recap by Lurkey
Oh, Paper Hearts, how I love you. Maybe it’s odd, that this is one of my absolute favorite episodes, because it actually defies most of the conventions we’ve come to expect from an X-File. It has only the subtlest hint of the supernatural; it flirts with the mytharc, and then turns it on its head and encourages us, and even Mulder, to doubt it entirely. On the other hand, it’s absolutely crammed with layer upon layer of self-referential nods to previous episodes and plot threads, and it gifts us with a singular moment of nakedly emotional character development that absolutely blows the doors off as far as I’m concerned. And, finally, it features the worst, best kind of monster: not an alien, not a mutant or manbat or garbage golem or exploding pustule person. Just…a guy. A creepy, cruel, sick and batshit crazy guy, just one of the everyday monsters that we don’t recognize when they walk among us. It’s perfect, and it destroys me every time.
It occurs to me, belatedly, that this episode is not exactly rife with the chuckles. I’m all snarked up with nowhere to go: dammit. Carrying on.
Night, Mulder’s apartment. Mulder’s sacked out on the couch, but he opens his eyes suddenly and looks up at the ceiling, where there’s a little red laser dot like that from a pointer or one of those laser cat toys. Or a gun sight. Considering how many times Mulder et al have been or will be shot at, in his pad, he doesn’t seem the least bit perturbed. Used to it, probably. He watches as the dot spirals around the ceiling and glides down the wall, where it flickers suddenly into a word: FOLLOW. Mulder rises and obeys, as the dot slides away across the floor. Speaking of cat toys, Mulder, there’s this adage? About cats and curiosity? Maybe you should—Mulder? Hey? Aw, screw it.
Outdoors, at what a sign tells us is the entrance to Bosher’s Run Park. The dot lingers on a white El Camino parked nearby, and flashes the words MAD HAT. Buh? Mulder trots along after it in his Seinfeldian getup of jeans, t-shirt and very white sneakers as the dot wavers into the woods. It slithers down a tree trunk and Mulder creeps up, hypnotized, to see a very gray-faced little girl in flowered jammies, lying on the ground. The dot pauses on the motionless little girl’s chest, flares into the outline of a heart—and then the child sinks silently beneath a swirling carpet of leaves. Yikes. Mulder thinks so, too, gasping awake back on the couch.
In quick succession we see him look up the park address in the phone book, and then pull up at the entrance and repeat his jog into the woods, this time accessorized with his flashlight and leather jacket (yay, to both!). He kneels and parts the fallen leaves with his hands…and we fade into daylight, where a forensics team is carefully digging and sifting the area while Mulder paces and micromanages around them. Pretty, pretty Season 4 Scully calls out to him, arriving with her pretty, pretty Season 4 hair looking longer than I remembered it; it’s brushing her collar. Mulder’s got the floppy bangs going on. They are both a whole lot of pretty juuust on the verge of needing a haircut. Scully asks for the bullet: he’s called for a forensic excavation at 5 a.m. on a Sunday? Mulder hedges, admitting that he’s been having a recurring dream about the little girl; Scully’s just warming up her dubious look when one of the crime team calls them over. They’ve exposed a little skull, buried in the dirt. The ridge of bone around the nasal cavity is shaped like a tiny, perfect, upside-down heart. Credits.
Back at the park, Mulder explains how his dreams led him right to the little girl’s body. The team’s still digging, and still not fast enough for Mulder, who snaps on the latex and impatiently scrapes the dirt away from the child’s chest. He knows the killer’s M.O.: “She was strangled. He used an eight-gauge electrical cord. He took something from the body post-mortem, a trophy: a piece of fabric cut from her clothes in the shape of a heart….John Lee Roche. He killed 13 eight-to-ten-year-old girls.” In the mud we can see the cutout, now. “This makes fourteen,” Mulder says grimly.
LBO. Mulder presents Roche’s file to Scully and coughs up a truly humongous wad of exposition on Roche’s case: ten victims found by 1990, the earliest from 1979, all abducted from their homes. Scully flips through the sad, sad, snapshots and dorky-sweet school photos of the little girls. Mulder explains that Reggie Purdue (aww, Reggie!) brought him into the case to profile Roche—a vacuum cleaner salesman who traveled the East coast, pitching his wares and simultaneously staking out his victims in their own living rooms. “VICAP named the case ‘Paper Hearts’ because of the trophies the killer took,” Mulder says. Which…I don’t get, actually. There’s no paper involved! I suppose “Flame-Retardant Poly-Blend Fabric Hearts” doesn’t roll as nicely off the tongue. Whatever. It’s also not like we can call Reggie and ask him, Mulder. No, no, sorry…you ‘re feeling bad enough already.
They got Roche to confess to 13 murders, but they’d never found his trophies, the hearts. It’s bothered Mulder since—did they really add up to 13? “I guess they didn’t,” he notes sadly. Scully has a theory, namely that Mulder’s kept this case in his head for so long that he sorted out the fourteenth victim in his sleep. “You said it yourself once…that a dream is an answer to a question we haven’t learned how to ask. You did good work, Mulder. Let’s identify this girl so we can put her to rest.” Mulder’s not comforted.
Autopsy bay. Mulder suffers mutely, sitting next to the tiny, tiny skeleton on the table. The little girl’s filthy pajamas lie beside her bones; stitched to the front is a handmade pocket embroidered with a dollar sign. Scully enters with the I.D.: Addie Sparks, missing from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania in June, 1975. Mulder knows that’s not good: Roche started way before they thought he did. With trepidation, Scully wonders if Mulder’s up to verifying the child’s identity with her folks. He thinks so, yes.
Norristown, Pennsylvania. Nice neighborhood, beautiful day; we can hear kids playing, out of sight. Mulder and Scully knock, and one Frank Sparks opens the door. Scully identifies herself and her partner, and Mr. Sparks freezes: he knows why they’re there.
Inside, he takes the dirty scrap of fabric from an evidence bag. “This was for the Tooth Fairy,” he says of the little pocket, fighting back tears. This actor does a tremendous job, here—this man is plainly still shattered, twenty-odd years later. Addie’s mother has passed away, never knowing the fate of her little girl. “You do this full time, telling people this kind of news?” Mr. Sparks asks. No, Scully tries to assure him. “It’s not a good job,” Mulder notes. We all know he’s talking to himself. Bad dog, no biscuit.
“I used to think…that missing was worse than dead because…you never knew what happened,” Mr. Sparks chokes out. “But now that I know…I’m glad my wife’s not here. She got luckier.” The camera closes in, slowly, tight on Mulder’s miserable face. “How many more people like me are you going to visit today?” Mr. Sparks knife-twists. “Were there other victims you didn’t know about?”
Walking back to the car, Mulder flashes back on the El Camino in his dream. It’s Roche’s car, sold at auction when he went to prison. He doesn’t have the hearts with him in the Big House; maybe they’re still in the car? “Don’t you think the car might have been searched at least once already?” Scully asks. “Not by me,” Mulder tells her.
Hollyville, Delaware. The current owner lets our duo into the garage where he’s been customizing the Camino. “Honest-to-God serial killer owned my car? For real?” he asks, a little too delightedly, because he is a dumb dumbass who has clearly never suffered a loss in his doltish life. Punk. Mulder ignores him and he and Scully hop in and start groping all over the inside of the vehicle. Not each other. Patience, y’all. Mulder whips out a knife, a Leatherman I think, and without preamble slices open the seat upholstery stem-to-stern. Eek. My sister collects and restores classic cars; I think this scene would make her pass out. “Helpin’ him detail,” Mulder shrugs when Scully gives him a look. No hearts. Scully gets out to check the underside of the car, and that’s when Mulder realizes the Camino’s camper shell is missing.
Cut to the dipshit owner’s backyard shed, from which Mulder drags the camper shell in a frenzy, sliding on the fallen leaves. He dumps it upside-down, yanks off the plastic tarp and starts stomping around frantically on the quilted upholstery; Scully wisely hangs back a little. Mulder finds the lump he’s looking for and rips the lining from the frame: there in a well of the camper shell is a hardcover copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ew. Whatever you may think about Lewis Carroll and his relationship with the real Alice Liddell, I personally have always found that book creepy as hell. The baby that turns into a pig? Criminy. Meanwhile…I’ve also long thought that the original Tenniel illustrations, little Alice with her stern, sharp profile, look rather like our Scully, actually. So disgruntled, always, with all the kooky whimsy. Ju st me? Okay.
Anyway. “Mad hat…” Mulder mutters. “Mad Hatter.” Together he and Scully riffle through the book, and there are the hearts, tucked between the pages. Scully identifies Addie Sparks’s PJs. They count. Fourteen…fifteen. Sixteen. Ohhhhh, shit.
Prison. Mulder and Scully check their weapons with the guard station, Mulder stooping to remove the gun from his ankle holster as well. That’ll be important later. They’re ushered into the prison gymnasium, where Roche is shooting solitary hoops.
Okay, kids, John Lee Roche is played by Tom Noonan, who is number two, right behind Nick Chinlund as Donnie Pfaster, on my list of Actors Whose Portrayals Of X-Files Villains Will Prevent Me From Accepting Them In Any Other Role Ever Again for the Rest of Our Mutual Lives. Seriously. I saw Noonan in some indie move, once, where he played a lovelorn guy looking for romance in the personals, and I swear I spent the whole time convinced he was going to lure some lady friend back to his place and then brain her with a cast-iron skillet. He’s also like six foot five, freakishly tall. Whoa: a quick stumble ’round the Internet reveals that he also played the “Tooth Fairy” serial killer in the 1986 movie “Manhunter,” part of the Hannibal Lecter triptych and chock-full of FBI profiling. Is that an in-joke, do you think? This episode is layered like an onion. I’ll spare you my doctoral dissertation.
Anyway… seriously, y’all. Pfaster versus Roche: it’s a very close race. In some ways, I find the character of Roche more frightening. I mean, Donnie is obviously a complete freak from the get-go. You get a look at him, you run for your lives! But Roche…man. Roche is smart and genial and completely vile; he abducts and molests and strangles little girls, he messes with people’s heads, and he relishes every second of it. It’s fucking terrifying.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Roche blithely greets Mulder; he’s nonplussed by our agents and their discovery of Addie Sparks, but he perks up when Scully says they’ve also found his 16 souvenir hearts. Why did he only claim 13? Spill it, Mulder suggests. “You’re in here for life, you’ve got nothing to lose,” Scully points out. “I got nothing to gain,” Roche shrugs. Mulder suggests that Roche might gain a little human decency, but Roche ain’t interested. “I understand you take this very personally, Mulder,” Roche notes, and, you know, whoa, what’s that about? Roche offers a deal, spinning the basketball on one finger. He’s one of Hell’s Globetrotters. “Sink one from there, and I’ll tell ya,” he says. He flips the ball to Mulder and the camera pulls back from them in a nice unbroken shot as David Duchovny easily drops in a rimless three-pointer, swish. I wonder how many takes they did? (Oh, David, hush, I’m sure it was just the one, you stud. Call me.) Mulder looks fractionally proud, for just a second, before Roche snots “You trust a child molester?” and strolls off the court. “You bring me my hearts and give ‘em back to me, I’ll tell you everything you wanna know,” he says. Well, he was so very forthcoming just two seconds ago; I can’t see how anything could go wrong here.
LBO. The hearts are laid out on Mulder’s desk, evidence-bagged, 14 of them labeled with the girls’ names. I have to say, whoever did the set design or set decoration or whatever you call it, putting together the hearts, it’s brutally effective. They’re so familiar, with their Holly Hobbie, Lanz-of-Salzburg calico patterns, their visible flannelly texture. I had jammies exactly like that in the 70s. It’s devastating. Mulder slumps over the hearts at his desk, wearing his glasses (!!), but only for a moment before taking them off and rubbing his eyes wearily. He puts his head down to rest for just one second—and suddenly there is that damn red dot again, dancing on the office wall. It slithers under the door, and Mulder goes after it, blinking foggily.
And whoa: he opens the door, emerging from behind its Fox Mulder, Special Agent nameplate…and into the Mulder living room, Chilmark, Massachusetts, 1973. It’s the scene of Samantha’s abduction, as we saw it in “Little Green Men” in Season 2, when it unfolded in Mulder’s nightmare. Watergate news on the tube, Stratego, eight-year-old Samantha on the floor. “Fox, it’s your move,” she tells him.
Grown-up Mulder in suit and tie drifts into the room. I love how Duchovny plays it here, dreamily repeating the lines that you know Mulder’s rehashed in his memory a thousand thousand times. They bicker over the television, Samantha calls him a buttmunch, yadda yadda. Was that particular insult in vogue, in the Nixon era? I always thought it was an invention of Beavis and Butthead. No matter. Mom and Dad are at the Gallbraths’, they left him in charge. (Do you suppose the Mulders and the Gallbraths ever spoke again, after that night? Worst Tupperware party denouement ever.) The power goes out, and Mulder knows what’s coming. He tells Samantha to run. It’s a lot easier for him to reach his father’s gun this time—and wow, that is truly a horrible 70s buffet/hutch that would not have looked the least bit out of place in my parents’ house, yikes—but still he freezes when the door swings open. This time, though, instead of the spindly silhouette of a possible alien, it’s Roche, in a badass 70s suit and retaining a little more of his hair. He strides into the room with a ghastly grin. Samantha screams for Fox. Mulder, lurching awake in his office, screams for Samantha. He looks with dawning horror at the two unidentified hearts. Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear.
Interrogation room at the prison. Mulder stands, clearly agitated, when Roche comes in and sits fussily at the table. “Did you bring me my hearts?” he asks. Mulder’s twitching like a crackhead. What did Roche mean, about him taking this personally? “Where were you in 1973? November. Twenty-seventh of November,” he asks. Roche…smiles. Shudder. He readily admits he was on the Vineyard, and sold a vacuum cleaner to Bill Mulder, for Teena. (Nice gift, dear, I’m sure that really made a dent in your marital issues.) An ElectroVac, Duchess or Princess model. “He had a really hard time choosing,” Roche notes. I’m going to take that indecisiveness as having implications about old Bill’s two kids, too. “What do you know about my sister?” Mulder rasps. “You bring me my hearts, and maybe I’ll tell you more,” Roche replies. And Mulder loses his shit completely and belts him one, right in the cho ps, knocking Roche out of his chair scrabbling onto the floor. It’s a hell of a punch.
The guard bursts into the room. “This man…this man hit me,” Roche whinges. The guard gives him the stink-eye, finally sneering “I didn’t see it.” Nice cover, dude, after rushing in there to break up the non-fight that you hadn’t noticed. Ehh, it’s Roche. I’ll give it a pass. But Scully won’t: the guard steps aside to reveal her standing in the doorway, looking grim indeed. She saw it, she says darkly. Busted.
Moose and Squirrel pedeconference in the hall. Mulder knows that Roche took Samantha, now, he’s sure of it, saw him right there in the house. Scully storms after him, all “yo, DREAM.” They’re really hauling ass down the corridor. Mulder flips the “dream is an answer to a question” line back at her, naturally. I also want to note, here, that Scully is sporting a dark red, wasp-waisted suit that I am mostly sure is gorgeous, but might almost swerve over the line into odd…I can’t decide. Oh, Vancouver. I really missed the colored suits, after they moved to L.A. and Scully got all glamorously severe. Scully thinks that Roche just looked up some pertinent Mulderfacts on the Internet, like the rest of us. Mulder’s vulnerable, Roche is toying with him, Scully’s worrying her ass off, but it was just a dream. “My last dream came true,” Mulder points out miserably. “Scully, do you believe that my sister Samantha was abducted by aliens? Have you ever believed that?” Ooh, ouch. Scully, chagrined, can’t meet his eyes. “So what do you think happened to her?” Mulder probes. He doesn’t know what to believe, any more; he’s just desperate to find out. He stalks away. Eventually, huge-eyed and pensive, she follows.
Greenwich, Connecticut. Mulder’s klonking around in his mom’s basement. He doesn’t seem to have announced his arrival, as she calls out to him from the stairs. It’s probably like three in the morning, Mulder, damn. Don’t make me regret which kid I surrendered to the multinational evil conspiracy! He’s sorry for waking her; she’s fine but would like to know what the hell he’s up to. Mulder whips out the anonymous hearts, but Teena doesn’t recognize them, or understand why exactly her son is brandishing them in her face. Her memory isn’t what it was, after her stroke. Eventually Mulder stops badgering her and soothes her in a hug. Aw. He’s very sweet-faced here. I always thought Rebecca Toolan was remarkably well-cast, too; she really looks like she could be his mom. They share those Slavic eyes. Mulder rubs her back, and has just one more qu estion: “Dad never bought you a vacuum cleaner, did he?” Well, yes. It’s in the storage area under the stairs. Mulder gets in there and flings jingly boxes of Christmas décor aside (unless, as some have speculated as to Mulder’s religious affiliation, those are actually trimmings for the Hanukkah bush) and pulls out the squat, avocado-green ElectroVac Princess. Shit, shit, shit.
FBI, Skinner’s office. Skinman! He’s yanked Mulder off the Roche case, for gettin’ too close and goin’ too far and takin’ it too personally and all the other Mulderly behaviors we’ve come to know and love. Mulder, Scully and Skinner here demonstrate a masterful volley of accusatory glances and excuses and bargaining requests that culminate in Skinner’s weary acquiescence. He orders Mulder to tread lightly, and Scully to keep Mulder on a very tight leash. From your lips to God’s ear, Scully thinks. You can tell in this scene that Skinner is in one of those cycles where he has frigging HAD IT with the both of them. Just how much hot rogue-agent bickering in his office can one man be expected to take? Lord, beer me strength, Skinner thinks. Actually, beer him a Scotch, if you’re getting up…?
Prison interrogation room. Roche demurs; he’s not talking if Mulder’s gonna hit him again. This time Scully’s there at the table, too. If Roche had any sense he’d know who to be more afraid of here, I think. She leads with her right, Roche. Mulder wordlessly slides the two anonymous hearts across the table; when Roche begins fiddling with the baggie zipper Mulder’s quick to grab his wrist: “No. You don’t get to touch ‘em.” Damn straight. I shudder some more. Mulder demands names, and Roche dicks around: “I think you know one of them already,” he simpers. “Prove it,” Scully bites out. Roche smiles slightly, evilly, and starts spooling out details of the night Samantha was taken. He claims to have been watching them from the window. “If that’s true, tell me where my sister is,” Mulder barely rumbles.
And Roche plays his hand: “Pick her out,” he says, indicating the hearts. “You choose the one that was your sister, and I’ll tell you where she is. Come on, it’s a fifty/fifty chance. Either way I’m giving you a victim.” The tension is so high I have to pause and get up and walk around the room. Mulder chooses, and Roche toys with him a little more: is he sure? Scully slaughters him a thousand times with her eyes. Roche relents, all smiles. “It’s a good choice,” he says.
Cut to the woods, in what the tag tells us is Forks of Cacapon (??), West Virginia. On a big graffiti-tagged boulder are etched the words “MAD HAT.” This must be the place.
Okay, sit up straight, you guys, because this is, I think, my favorite moment of emotional development, and Scully’s character evolution, in the whole series, hands down. It’s a direct callback to a similar moment in Season 1, in the episode “Conduit”. In that episode, searching for a missing girl, Mulder and Scully come across a shallow, hasty grave in the woods. Mulder, already having gone all obsesso about the case and plainly associating it with his sister, gets down and starts hucking boulders off the grave like a madman…and Scully physically grabs his arm, hard, to restrain him. She yells at him to stop, points out that he’s disturbing a crime scene. She’s a by-the-book girl, S1 Scully; she sympathizes with Mulder’s pain, sure, but There Are Rules.
Compare/contrast to now. Mulder crouches beside the inscribed rock and starts digging, barehanded. He’s glassy-eyed, panting…pretty well round the bend at this point. Scully hovers beside him, and so, so gently she touches his shoulder and urges him to wait. They can get a team in there to excavate. “Let somebody else do this,” she pleads. Mulder’s having none of it. “Help me, Scully,” he begs, raw-voiced.
And she does. Without another word, she gets down on the ground and puts her perfect manicure in the mud next to him. Side by side, they claw at the dirt. And oh, it just kills me, you guys. Mulder’s lifelong grief has tormented and isolated him; that’s never been in question. What we see here, though, is how deeply it’s affected Scully, in just a short time—how much it’s humanized her. Their respective losses have bound them together over the years, but this, I think, is where we see what that’s meant to Scully. Here are the lengths to which she’s willing to go, for Mulder. Excuse me a sec—something in my eye. All that digging—I think Mulder and Scully have stirred up the dust in my living room, right through the t.v.
Anyway. It doesn’t take them long, to expose the rotting fabric and its heart-shaped cutout, through which we can glimpse a few staves of a small ribcage.
Autopsy bay. Mulder flips on the lights and stands far, far away, by the door, for a long moment. The little body lies on a table in the foreground, covered by a sheet. Eventually he approaches, and with a heavy sigh peers at an X-ray from her file. Tenderly, wet-eyed, he uncovers the body, and very gently traces his fingertips along the little wing of bone protruding from the frayed shoulder of the girl’s pajama top. Brutal, this scene. Scully enters, and Mulder is quick to voice his thoughts before she can: “It’s not her, Scully. Am I right?” Samantha had broken her left collarbone, falling from a rope swing in their yard, and this little girl’s isn’t broken. “You’re right, Mulder, it’s not a match,” Scully tells him. “It’s not her.” Mulder’s whole body sags over the table, equal parts relief and despair. It takes him a moment to collect himself. “It’s somebody, though,” he says b leakly, turning away. He and Scully stand for a moment, not quite touching, silent.
VERY dusty in here. Sniffle.
Back to Roche. “Tell us the name of that girl,” Scully says, firing words like tiny terse bullets. Roche proceeds to wax rhapsodic about his experience abducting this particular child. He reminisces fondly about the mint that grew beneath her bedroom window: “I stood outside her window atop sprigs of mint. It smelled wonderful.” That detail, and Roche’s obvious pleasure, is magnificently horrific. Scully, taking her little notes, visibly swallows back her revulsion. “What year,” she grits, getting through this interview on sheer force of will. July 1974, Roche says, and then grouses for a bit about his failed sales pitch to the girl’s mother. Scully glares a couple smoking black holes in Roche’s forehead…or so you’d think, considering her expression. Mulder passes over the final heart, and Roche attests that it’s Samantha’s. He gets quickly to the taunting:
“You want to know a lot more than [where], don’t you? You want to know everything, right? The big mystery revealed?…I can’t just tell you. I mean, I know you don’t believe me yet. You need me to show you, you need me to lead you through it because…after all these years, anything less than that’s not going to satisfy you, right?” Mulder knows that Roche just wants to get out of the joint. He’s not wrong. “You’re damn right I do! If only for a day or two; I’m realistic,” Roche says. “And more than that, I…I can’t wait to see your face.”
“Oh GOD,” hisses Scully, shoving her chair back unseen. She’s on her feet, up in Roche’s grill. “You’re gonna see the inside of your cell instead. You’re gonna rot there,” she tells him, her tone glazing the earth under a six-inch crust of ice. Great work by Gillian Anderson here; she nearly smotes me dead with her gaze. She stomps to the door and holds it open pointedly, while Roche has the gall to look a tiny bit delighted at her abject loathing. Hey Roche, too bad you didn’t get the gas chamber; I know just the girl to push the button.
In the hall, Scully checks in with a dazed-seeming Mulder as they both try to pull themselves together. She struggles to console and counsel him not to play Roche’s game, that there has to be a better way to find out the truth. Through the interrogation-room window, Roche sits with his head in his hands a moment, feigning defeat. Then he gets up and…grinnnns, through the chicken-wired glass at Mulder before getting buzzed back out of the room. Oh GOD is right, dude. Holy hell.
Quick shot of Mulder on his couch, contemplating. Oh, no. He picks up the phone, and we hear his voiceover requesting a federal prisoner move order as the action cuts to Roche and Mulder on a plane, en route to Boston. For you compulsive types, Mulder’s badge number here is JTT-0471-01111. Is that last bit binary code?
Roche asks to use the restroom. Mulder drapes something, a jacket or a blanket, over Roche’s cuffed wrists to conceal them, in that way that we’ve all learned from t.v. Perps! Gotta leave them a measure of dignity! In the aisle, Roche promptly scampers past the approaching drink cart and immediately zeros in on the little girl prattling happily a few rows back. “First flight?” he asks her mother, twinkling a smile while Mulder, blocked, does the Hokey Pokey with two beverage-dispensing flight attendants. Mom has not read The Gift of Fear, and cheerfully engages Roche. “What’s your name?” he beams at the little girl. “Caitlin,” Caitlin squeaks back, and ohJesusMulderhurryalreadygoddamn. AT LAST Mulder clears the cart and hustles Roche off to the can. Will R oche even fit, in an airplane bathroom? He’s a damn giant. He’s going to have to sit down to pee.
Oh, tarnation, the Skinman is PISSED, giving Scully his standard what-the-fuck-has-Mulder-done-NOW speech # 473-B in his office. “And where were you while this was happening?” he demands. Scully claims that she’d left Mulder for the day and urged him to get some sleep. In the outer office, Kimberly mutters “goddamn!” and crosses one of her squares off of the Mulder and Scully: Totally Doing It? office pool sheet. Scully thinks she knows where Mulder’s taking Roche, and Skinner digs at her a few more times before they light out together after him.
Mulder ushers Roche into what we can assume is his father’s place on the Vineyard, everything closed up and swathed in plastic. Mulder, maybe you should unload that real estate. Roche strolls around, happy as a pig in shit to resume tormenting Mulder pronto. “You ready?” he asks. “Go,” Mulder says, stone-faced. Roche begins his recitation: the date, the Mulder ‘rents stepping out next door, Roche watching the kids for a while before cutting the power. He paces, smiling puckishly, enjoying this so, so much. Ugh. The front door wasn’t even locked, ha ha, oh, the innocent 70s! He gives Mulder credit for going for his dad’s gun, but he ultimately choked and Roche took Samantha “away from all this. To a happier place.” Mulder’s been listening to all this, motionless, but now he approaches Roche, gets right up in his face. “That’s exactly how it happened? Right here in this room?” he prom pts. Roche agrees, and Mulder takes a moment to breathe before breaking out in a tight, deadly smile of his own. “Wrong house,” he tells Roche. They’re in Bill Mulder’s post-divorce home, an entirely different village six miles from where Samantha disappeared. “You screwed up! You were never here! You didn’t take Samantha!” Mulder goes on, gathering steam. “Wishful thinking,” Roche tries, but Mulder’s got a theory: when he profiled Roche, got inside his head, it somehow opened a connection between them, and Roche in turn got into Mulder’s dreams and memories. This is as paranormal as this episode is going to get, which I like, frankly; in a story that’s otherwise an emotional steamroller, it’s all the woo-woo you need. Roche keeps trying to backpedal. “You’re just resisting me,” he says, and Mulder snaps: “And you’re in the wrong house, you stoopid sonova bitch!” he barks. Duchovny’s New York accent busts out a little here, with the yelling ; it’s a tiny bit funny, and a huge bit SMOKING HOT. Yow.
Roche knows he’s beaten, and sits…but he can’t help a little more taunting. “I heard things about you, Mulder….I heard you go after aliens. From space! It’s like your world will be okay as long as you can believe in, like, flying saucers—” Here, Noonan makes this truly hilarious little buzzy-whistling bbwwweeeeeoooooo! spaceship noise, with accompanying “liftoff” hand gesture; he’s still completely heinous but it’s the single thing in this episode that makes me laugh out loud. “But I’m telling you the God’s honest truth,” he finishes, wagging his finger at Mulder. “I can see you’re not as open-minded as you think you are.” Now that he’s spelled out the theme of this entire plotline for us, I guess I could use a break and a drink. Mulder’s all, whatever, jackass. Enjoy your last night of freedom. You stoopid sonofa bitch!
Davy Crockett Motor Court. Oh, it’s Massachusetts…maybe the Paul Revere Motor Inne? Anyway: motel. Roche lies in the bed, sleeping petulantly, handcuffed to the nightstand. Mulder’s at the table. He’s just going to sit up there all night, stewing in his own bitter triumph. No, he’s not at all sleep-deprived! What are you implying? Frankly, he takes umbrage at the very—hold on. Is that screaming, outside? Mulder hurries to the window. Hey! There’s actually a lighted sign we glimpse for a second: Vineyard Motor Court! Well, it was nice of the crew to knock that together, there. The El Camino’s parked out front; in the passenger seat is little-girl Samantha, crying for help. Casting a frantic glance at the sleeping Roche, Mulder runs out.
The El Camino’s engine revs and revs; Samantha bangs on the window, screaming. “Fox! Unlock me!” she begs, as Mulder races to the car. It’s obviously a nightmare, but hella creepy nonetheless. Hey, Sam, there should be a little button on the thing, there, do you think you could…never mind. In the seamless logic of dreams, Mulder finds the keys in his pocket. He yanks the car door open and hauls Samantha into his arms. Oddly enough, she seems to be dressed in her overalls from her days as a clone grunt-worker on that bee farm in “Herrenvolk.” Mulder doesn’t care; he clutches her to him and spins her around in ecstatic relief, beaming. It’s over! Thank God! Nothing to worry about here, no, never mind the fact that Samantha is apparently a 34-year-old in a second-grader’s body. Mulder holds her away from himself for a second, just to check: yep, it’s really her! Whew! Hurray! He clasps her to him again and, over her shoulder, spies the red dot on the pavement. It winks into a word: BYE. The tires scream. Mulder whips around: his arms are empty. So’s the parking lot.
Furious hammering on the motel-room door. Mulder blearily lifts his head from the table…and discovers he’s handcuffed to it. The bed’s empty; Roche is gone. Mulder manages to stand and flip the table over to free himself, without whacking himself in the face like I would have. It’s Skinner and Scully at the door, Skinner marginally more likely to have his entire head blow off with anger. They quickly assess: Mulder must have freed Roche in his sleep, and Roche took off with the last heart…aaaand Mulder’s badge, cell phone, and gun. Greeaaat. Skinner conveys his considerable disappointment, loudly and about six inches from Mulder’s face. Where might Roche have been headed? Mulder suddenly remembers the little girl on the plane, and borrows Skinner’s phone to request the passenger manifest. Funny coinky-dink: “Special” “Agent” “Fox Mulder” of the FBI just called and requested that same information ten minutes ago!
Multiple carloads of Fibbies and cops come squealing into the New Friends daycare center parking lot in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where little Caitlin’s teacher is having a meltdown: “Agent Mulder” came in claiming that Caitlin’s mother had been in an accident and took the girl away. “Oh my God, what have I done?….It’s all my fault,” she sobs. Mulder leans in. “It’s not your fault. It’s my fault,” he assures her grimly. What a sad, sad, pretty, pretty tormented man, staring so intently at me! she thinks. There will be plenty of time for guilt and self-loathing later, Mulder—let’s find the bastard. Mulder and Scully ping-pong ideas back and forth; Roche can’t have gone far, and he lived in Boston in the early 70s. Scully pulls up the address, 9809 Alice Road, apt. 6. Ding ding ding! Alice Road, Alice in Wonderland…Mulder babbles, flinging himself into the car as Skinner tries to keep up with whatever the hell he’s on about.
Cut to a whole squadron of The Law, kicking in the door to Roche’s nasty, vacant apartment in that same dark, creepy-ass building where every bad guy, monster and mutant in Vancouver ever lived. Everyone storms around pointing their weapons and scuffling through debris on the floor; nobody’s home. “I don’t think he brought her here,” Scully says, as Mulder goes to the window and stares out across a ratty field to the fenced salvage yard, bristling with trolley-bus antennae, in the distance. “He never brought anyone here,” Mulder realizes, and sprints out.
Trolley-bus graveyard, where dozens of rusting, decrepit hulks of buses are parked claustrophobically close together. Mulder clambers over some barrels and other piled garbage and drops down on the other side of the fence. The sun is setting; the lot is shadowy and desolate and still scares the hell out of me somehow. Mulder draws the gun at his ankle, again—Roche missed that one. Thank God that Mulder’s butter-fingered tendencies have led him to carry two pieces. He slinks between the grimy, gloomy dead buses, breaking into a run when he hears Caitlin scream. Where is she, where? Mulder stops, turning around in a gap between the endless rows. It looks cold, to me, in this scene; Duchovny’s nose is red. Compounds the creepy misery. Looking around, Mulder finally notices the trolley antennae on one nearby bus, swaying slightly against the blue sky.
Oh, God—after all these viewings, I just caught the potentially even more horrific implication they’re giving us, here. The bus? With the child molester and victim on it? Is rocking. Ew. Christ on a bike, ew. Mercifully, Mulder does not bother knocking; he shoves the accordion door open and creeps up the steps. More mercifully, Roche and Caitlin are just sitting, way in the back: Caitlin in the last forward-facing seat, Roche behind her on the bench along the side. “I’m beginning to believe we do share that nexus you spoke of,” Roche says genially. “You always seem to find me.” Mulder ignores him, asking Caitlin if she’s all right. His name is Fox and he’s here to take her home. Can I get that as a ring tone? Caitlin looks a little teary but overall way, way calmer than I would be in this situation ; I’d totally be crying and wetting my pants. I’m 37. Roche announces that he has Mulder’s gun…well, one of ‘em.
Mulder distracts Caitlin, asking her to close her eyes and count slowly, aloud, to twenty. When she begins, he strides past her and levels his weapon in Roche’s face. “I will shoot,” Roche warns him; he’s got his gun trained on Caitlin, directly against the seat back. “Don’t make this end badly,” Mulder whispers. Caitlin counts. Seven. Eight. Scully and Skinner creep into the stairwell up front. Roche bargains. He really doesn’t want to go back to prison. He withdraws the last heart from inside his jacket. “You’ve got one left. How are you gonna find her without me? How sure are you it’s not Samantha?” Fifteen. Sixteen. Standoff. Staring. “How do you know?” Roche asks. Eighteen. Nineteen. Roche’s finger tightens on the trigger. Mulder fires. Caitlin flies screaming up the aisle, and we hear Scully mother-hen-ing her off the bus, aww, and Skinner yelling for an ambulance, as Roche sl umps over…leaving most of his brains on the bus window. Blech. Mulder stands over him, stunned.
LBO. The camera pans slowly over all Mulder’s crazy tabloid crop-circle crap tacked to the walls, lingering on The Poster before finding Mulder at his desk, still looking wrecked. Scully knocks (why so formal? Doesn’t she feel at home there? I’m sure the purchase order for her desk is due any…wait. Um.) and then enters, approaching Mulder all sad-eyed. She has lab results from the final heart; a dye analysis puts the fabric’s date sometime between the late 60s and early 70s, but that’s all they’ve got. Still, she’s sure it’s not Samantha, and she’s sure they’ll find this little girl. “How?” Mulder whispers. “I don’t know. But I do know you,” she tells him. He glances up at her for a second, but he’s not really comforted. “Why don’t you go on home and get some sleep,” Scully suggests. Mulder gapes at her for a moment before breaking into a mirthless giggle—is she serious? Scully clos es her eyes over her own poor choice of words, and steps close; Mulder hugs her one-armed around her waist and leans his head against her, somewhere between her shoulder and her hip. It’s remotely plausible that he squeezes her ass. Not that it’s appropriate to the immediate situation—it’s just a strangely placed hug, is all I’m saying. Scully, for her part, strokes his hair gently before slipping away. Hey Scully: I know a damn near guaranteed method for making a man roll over and fall into a blissful slumber. You could take him home, tire him out a little…no? Too soon? All right, all right. Just trying to help.
Scully closes the door behind her, and Mulder’s smile drops off his face like a stone. He holds the unidentified heart in his fingertips for a moment before slipping it into a drawer and out of sight; then he just sits, staring exhausted at nothing. And that is all the resolution we get.
Maybe they’ll find that last little girl in the new movie.
But I don’t think so.
Recap by Lurkey