Good Cop, Insane Cop: The Adventures of Moose & Squirrel

Recap by As An Amoeba

Before I begin I’d just like to point something out. I got out the DVD for this, and the four episodes that are on it are Teso, Hell Money, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, and Pusher. How’s that for a disc of ups and downs? Tense, emotionally wrenching Russian-roulette showdown, Alex Trebek and Olympic-level pie-eating, B.D. Wong — and I get to watch the killer kittycat episode. (Whoops — spoiler alert!) Well, I brought it on myself. Ipi niki ta! Shall we get started?

Camera on tripod. Guy with bushy beard and a fedora-y kind of hat (wait, am I in Harvard Square?); another guy has on a similar hat and a poncho. Rain. The woods somewhere. Pulling back further shows us that we’re at an excavation site. To fill us in further, the legend informs us that we’re at the Teso dos Bichos Excavation, Ecuadorian Highlands. “South America,” it adds condescendingly. In case we didn’t know where Ecuador is. It is, if I’m not mistaken, rather close to the equator, as a matter of fact. And according to this, it pretty much looks exactly like western Canada. Well, all righty.

Various shots follow of indigenous-looking folks at work at the site. Shovel man walks past a wheelbarrow, which rolls past a guy sifting dirt in a hole. In one spot, a bunch of woolly-hatted dudes (the woolly hats look quite a bit warmer than the fedoras) are excavating what look like clay pots, when one of them sees something that piques his interest. He yells for everybody else to come over, and they do. A fellow in jeans, a button-down and a down vest — the only one not in Andean-type clothing — is among the gathered crowd, and he seems to be more or less in charge, pushing his way to the front and listening to the reports of the men. (Unfortunately, the only Spanish I know is what I learned from Sesame Street — “abierto/cerrado,” counting to 20, stuff like that — so I’ll be very little help with the Spanish parts if they don’t give me subtitles. I did catch “muy malo,” though. That can’t be bueno.) He runs off and, in turn, pops into a tent to report to Dr. Roosevelt, a white, American-sounding older man who’s messing with some papers. The other guy tells him they’ve found something he should see, and Dr. Roosevelt follows him out to the dig site.

Outside, it’s now snowing. God, can I take ONE trip to the equator without it SNOWING the whole damn time? (I know, I know, they’re in the mountains. Just kidding, equator.) Dr. Roosevelt gets down next to the half-unearthed pot, which, I’ve got to tell you, pretty much looks like it’s made of gingerbread. It’s also awfully brightly colored for having been unearthed 30 seconds ago. Anyway, there’s a skull peeking out of it, and it’s this that Dr. Roosevelt seems most interested in. Looking up at his assistant, Dr. Only Other English-Speaking Guy, he breathes, “It’s an Amaru!” I’m not sure what that is, but I’m bettin’ we’ll find out, and I’m bettin’ some paranormal activity will be involved, and I’m bettin’ that some of that paranormal activity will have to do with kittycats. In the background, half the extras are looking off camera for some reason.

Dr. Roosevelt pronounces the Amaru “fantastic” and “nearly intact.” However, Dr. English-Speaking Killjoy tells him that they can’t take it. “What do you mean?” snaps Roosevelt. Dr. Please Hurry Up And Give Him A Name says that “they’re saying” that the body of a female shaman is sacred and she can’t be disturbed. Dr. Roosevelt and his mustache earnestly assert that they’re not disturbing her, they’re SAVING her. “I thought you could handle these people!” he bitches in an I’m-very-disappointed-in-you voice. Dr. Reminds Me Of Antonio Banderas protests one more time that it’s not right, and even dangerous. But Roosevelt tells him to pack up the piece: “It’s going with us.” Now he sounds kinda British. Gillian, is that you in makeup? You take a mustache well. Dr. I’ve Run Out Of Names For Him looks back at the skull. Scary pan-flute music plays. Well, that should be your first clue right there, folks. Up on the hill, an important-looking guy with long grey hair holding a big…scepter thing looks down disapprovingly. I’m pretty sure that guy’s long grey hair is a wig and he’s really a truck driver in Vancouver named Doug. He sure is making our bilingual archaeologist friend nervous, though.

Night. In his Tent of Eminently Civilized Euro-Modernity, Dr. Whitey McWhitingsbury is listening to classical music and sipping tea and admiring the lion head on his wall while some native children polish his shoes for him (well, almost). He hears something and turns down the music; it’s something going on outside, with drums and a rattle of some sort. He turns the music back up. Stupid people from other cultures! Outside, the native guys are sitting around a fire in their many kinds of hats, the drum and rattle going strong, having a ceremony. One guy — I think it’s Doug — has snakes painted on his face. Snake Face Doug the Scepter-Wielding Vancouver Truck Driver is cooking something — it’s a pot of viscous greenish liquid, which he stirs with a wooden spoon. Sort of like pea soup, only more radioactive-looking. Chanting commences (ipi niki taaaaa), led by Snake Face and repeated back by the crowd. Snake Face takes a spoonful of the green stuff, holds it up high, then sips it down. Maybe it’s a peace ceremony. Get it? Peas? Peace? Peas on earth?…Okey doke.

The spoon is passed down the line; everyone takes a sip from it. Dr. Bridge Between Two Cultures is there, and when the spoon comes to him everyone watches him carefully. He hesitates, then takes his own sip. He makes a terrible face. Needs more ham! That’s the only thing I like about pea soup, the ham. I love ham. Through Dr. Clearly Not Really Able To Handle These People’s eyes, we see that his vision is smeared and blurry. What was IN that pea soup? Snake Face looks especially impressive through Crazy Soup-O-Vision, which is probably the point of the snakes, &c. Cut to some kind of POV shot of something running through…something. The campfire? Back to His Excellency Lord Duke Whitington of Whiteford-on-Whitemustache in his tent, where he is totally not about to get eaten by an evil spirit, still blissfully listening to his music. We can see his silhouette from outside the tent — and suddenly, the silhouette of a large animal, not unlike a jaguar, OR JAGUAR-LIKE creature, leaps at him, knocking him down. Then it eats a hotdog, which makes for ALL KINDS of dirty misrepresentations! The Ecuadoreans all giggle. You might say that it is shagadelic. And also gory. In case there was any doubt about what’s happening, we see Dr. Roosevelt’s hand flailing against the tent wall, along with splattering blood, for about 20 minutes before we fade to the credits. Doodly doo, doodly doo! A jaguar spirit killed you! (Spoiler.)

Hall of Indigenous Peoples, Boston Museum of Natural History, Three Weeks Later. There isn’t one of those, FYI, though there’s the Peabody, which is suitably full of creepy, mothbally-smelling taxidermied animals probably all collected by white people with mustaches, and the Museum of Science. Which, by the way, has monkeys, I recently found out. Capuchins! Eeee! And baby chicks. And also a Mobius strip. And in November, the Harry Potter exhibit. Because of science! (Don’t think I won’t be there regardless.) Anyway, some guy with a flashlight is wandering through this fictional museum, past some Native American headdresses and stuff and — mwagah! — a stuffed jaguar. WILL THIS HAVE ANY SIGNIFICANCE? I’m not sure. There’s also what certainly looks to me like a bucket of large wooden toothbrushes. For cleaning artifacts, I s’pose. The night watchman calls out for a Mr. Horning, asking if he’s still here. Nobody answers. BUT the watchman steps in a huge puddle of blood. D’oh! He runs away in fear, and right behind him? Is the pot from the dig, the Amaru, the skull still half-buried in dirt inside it. We zoooooooom in for a time-killing closeup.

Now it’s day. Ah, morning in Boston. This episode is just like The Departed, in so many ways. Like how a policeman is in it. I must say, the Boston Police logos on the cars look right. Some cops are milling around outside the museum — we know it’s the museum because we get another lingering closeup on the sign. You see, that was INSIDE, but now we’re OUTSIDE, but it’s the same museum. Because it has the same name. Everybody still with me? Back INSIDE the museum, which I believe is called the Museum of Natural History, our favorite buddy Fox Mulder is crouched on the floor, looking at the bloodstain. He gets up and walks across the room, passing Scully, who’s questioning a museum guy, who says the security guard called him when he found the blood. Scully exposits, “According to the police, you felt his murder may have been an act of political terrorism.” The museum guy says he thinks Dr. Horning might have been killed because of the project he was working on. Scully consults her little notes and confirms that this was “the survey and excavation of the highland burial grounds of the Secona Indians.” Dr. Why Don’t They Give Anyone Names On This Show? looks surprised, and alarmed. Scully says it’s from a letter sent to the State Department on behalf of the Secona, who want their damn urn back, apparently. While Mulder eavesdrops, the museum guy explains that they rescued the urn, among other artifacts, because PetroEcuador is going to build a gas pipeline through the burial ground or something…oh lordy. This episode is so boring until you get to the cracked-out yaje/kittycat part. Roosevelt and this guy organized the dig. Scully says that she heard Roosevelt disappeared under similar circumstances. We learn that the Ecuadorean government, which evidently is just as evil and deny-everything-y as the U.S. government, said it was a wild animal attack. “But that’s not what you believe,” Scully prods. She does have the biggest bluest eyes that ever there were, doesn’t she? “Not after last night,” Museum Guy says. Scully asks if there were any death threats, to which he says no. “Well, what about the curse?” Mulder pipes up. Now we’re getting somewhere! Apparently, the Secona believe that “great evil will befall anyone that disturbs the remains of an Amaru — a woman shaman — that they would be devoured by the jaguar spirit.” Dr. Whoever agrees that this is a popular myth, and he shakes his head tut-tuttingly that anyone would fake it up like this just to get back the urn, which he is totally not giving back. “Written by JOHN SHIBAN,” the credits announce. Woo! Shiban’s first episode. Oh, Shibes. I bet your baby, Jerry Shiban, could have written a better episode than this. Hee, just kidding. I just like that you named your baby Jerry. That rules. Also, it just occurred to me that baby Jerry Shiban (the first William Sculder, doncha know, before James and Travis Riker took over in Season 9, and “Travis Riker” overtook “Jerry Shiban” as Most Awesome Name For A Baby Actor Ever) must be like 8 now. Dude, I AM SO OLD.

Mulder asks to see it. That’s what she said, Mulder. Dr. Whoever calls for Mona.

Mona’s a Neve Campbell look-alike in a gungy plaid shirt who, in the next scene, is wheeling out the whole Amaru thingamajig, dirt, skull, gingerbread and all, on a rolly table. “Personally, if someone digs me up in a thousand years, I hope there’s a curse on them too,” Mulder says, amusing no one but Mulder. Mona says solemnly that they should have left it buried. Mulder asks if she believes it’s cursed. “Might as well be,” she replies. She tells them that she had been helping Dr. Horning sort and catalog the stuff from Ecuador — she’s a Ph.D. candidate at BU. She doesn’t look old enough to be a Ph.D. candidate, but maybe that’s because people her age on TV are usually playing 14-year-olds. She says, in response to M&S’s interrogaysh, that no, “Craig” didn’t have any warning — he was just doing what Dr. Lewton (presumably, that other museum guy they were just talking to) asked. And he didn’t give any particular political crap about the artifact. Scully mentions the protest letter; Mona says she knows of several. “This one was written by a man named Alonso Bilac,” Scully says. Mona recognizes the name: Dr. Bilac was the liaison with the Secona. AHA! A name, at last! (I’m not kidding, BTW — I totally couldn’t remember that dude’s name. Nor any of these people, except Mona.) Dr. Bilac is off the project — Mona’s not sure if he resigned or was kicked out. Evidently, Dr. Soup-Addled Bilac “feels the Secona have the right to determine the fate of their ancestral remains.” God, what a crazy asshole. Mulder asks if she knows where they could find him. She pauses and looks hesitant. Does she know OR DOESN’T SHE? WILL WE EVER FIND OUT? Yes, because here they are at his house in the next scene. Oh, that snappy TV writing. You have to know just when to cut the scene!

Dr. Bilac lives in a crazy awesome run-down weird house that looks like it’s in Newton somewhere. That’s just my guess. And if it is then it would cost about $4 million, run-down or no. Mulder and Scully knock and he opens right up, apparently not afraid that they’re disguised jaguar spirits or anything, SUCKA. He lets them come in — maybe this house is supposed to be in Watertown; it looks like my old apartment. I love MA-set episodes. Remember the “M” from that Season 8 ep? And they acted like it was a death sentence that one of the trains wasn’t going to run during rush hour? What a giant shock that would be! It would be almost like all the times it snows in Boston. Or rains. Or there’s track maintenance. Stupid T. Mulder noses around while Scully starts the questioning. Bilac concurs that he was part of the expedition that brought back the urn, but says he objected. Scully wants to know at what point he turned against Dr. Whitely Whitestache. Bilac answers, “When I felt like he had gone too far against the wishes of the Secona.” And it’s just about here where I start to get the giggles over this dude’s voice. He just kind of…stretches out the last part of everything he says. His sentence really sounds more like, “When I felt like he had gone too farrrrrr…against the wishes of the Seconaaaaaaaa.” And his voice is sort of gravelly. It’s got nothing to do with his slight accent — he just taaaaaaaalks like thiiiiiiiiisssss. It’s sort of akin to pirate talk, but much much softer. Scully asks if he told Dr. Roosevelt that. “Yeeeessss,” Bilac gravels. “He wouldn’t listennnnn.” Bilac travelogues that he spent six months with the Secona, learning of their many awesomenesses, and when some asshole wanted to steal their lady shaman bones, the idea didn’t have the appeal it once would have. Scully prods that they seem to have learned something from him too. “Yeeeesss, I’ve been teaching them the jooooooyys of American bureacracyyyyyy,” says Bilac dryly. He can be funny in that voice, too! It’s very nuanced. Scully allows the faintest jaguar spirit of a smirk to cross her lips, then tells Bilac that Lewton thinks that Craig’s disappearance (fuck, man, I can’t keep all these names straight — Lewton’s the not-dead one, right?) was related to the protests. Bilac says darkly that the word “disappearance” makes it sound like they expect to see him alive again. Scully asks what he thinks happened. She does NOT want to know! According to Bilac. Mulder jumps in, finally, and says that, hell yes, they totally would like to know. At least he would. Bilac hesitates, then says that whatever happened will continue to happen, “until the bones are returrrrrned to their rightful plaaaaaaace.” Scully turns up the heat, asking how far Bilac would go to defend the Secona’s rights. “If you think I did this, then you are a foooooooollll,” Bilac says succinctly. I hope Mulder uses that on her for the rest of their lives. “Mulder, did you use the last of the creamer and put it back without getting a new one?” “Scully, if you think I did this, then you are a foooooooollll.” God, you’re so annoying, Imaginary Future Mulder! Just buy more creamer next time, OK?

More interrogation. Where were you last night? Here. Alone? Yep. Also, your investigaaaation is a waste of tiiiiimmmme. I guess they believe him, because they leave after that. Scully thinks it’s PAINFULLY OBVIOUS that Bilac did it. “He did look a little squirrelly back there,” Mulder allows. “Maybe because he was up late last night murdering Craig Horning,” says Scully. That’s true — not getting enough sleep can have a profound impact on your health and your day-to-day productivity. Hey, Bilac lives in Boston — maybe he should buy a new mattress from Jordan’s Furniturrrrrrrrre. If the Red Sox win the World Series, he will get it for freeeeeeeeee.

On further haranguing, Mulder admits he isn’t sure Bilac had anything to do with it. “So you think Bilac’s innocent?” Scully demands, and for some reason her head is jiggling back and forth in this scene in a Clooney-like fashion. Hey, it’s a shout-out to Jessica and Intern George! “That the victim wasn’t even murdered at all, that he was devoured by a mythological jaguar spirit?” Well, I’d say if that had happened, it’d still be murder. “Go with it, Scully,” Mulder says, and that is to be our Mulderism for this episode.

Now it’s dark, and we are, if I’m not mistaken, back in the museum, in the hauntediness of a Boston night. Mona’s on the phone with A MYSTERIOUS SOMEONE. “Why did you lie to them?” she asks someone named “Lonnie.” HMMMMM. Lonnie is only drawing suspicion to himself by lying. Mona says she’s worried and wants to come over, but Lonnie is, apparently, not down with that. A dude is lurking creepily in the corner. Oh, it’s Dr. Lewton. Mona says she has to go and hangs up.

Lewton is concerned that Mona’s working so late by herself. She says she needs to keep working, and that the guard knows she’s here. Lewton asks if she was talking to Dr. Bilac. “Yeeeeesssss,” says Mona. Oh, just in my brain, where everyone is now talking like that. Lewton looks at her for a second, then launches into a lecture about how they have a responsibility to history and posterity. If Dr. Roosevelt hadn’t brought the urn back, it would have been destroyed. Now it’s safe in a musty Boston museum where the T will probably find a way to run over it at any moment. Lewton cautions her not to get caught up in the politics. He turns to go, then turns back, offering to give Mona a little free advice, which is an automatic indicator that he’s about to say something jackholey. “You have a bright future here…Be careful where you plant your flag.” Uh, that sounded kind of gross, Dr. Lewton. Am I going to have to send you to Lauren Kyte’s HR person? Because I will. Mona doesn’t respond to that. Lewton leaves. Mona sits down at the desk. Let the haunted museum hoo-ha begin!

“[Door Squeaking] [Gasps],” says the closed captioning, and need I elaborate, really? Mona turns around. It’s only a dog! Sugar. He looks sort of like…a pit bull/Irish Setter cross? I don’t know, I made that up. He’s cute, at any rate. I wonder if the jaguar spirit likes dogs? Hmmmmmmm. Mona is relieved, which means nothing haunted is going to happen after all! And we can all relax! Yay! Sugar cutely puts his paws on the table and Mona snorgles him. You know what’s an awesome idea in a museum filled with rickety shelving holding priceless cultural artifacts? Having a dog run around unsupervised. I’m sure there aren’t any, you know, bones or anything lying around. I mean, not to cast aspersions, Sugar. But, come on. Hey, you have white paws. Awww.

Closeup on a METAL JAGUAR! IT’S THE JAGUAR SPIRIT! Nope — it’s the hood ornament on Lewton’s car. HE IS THE SPIRIT’S MASTER! Or, perhaps not. He turns the car on, and Sting starts singing about how he dreams of rain, and of living in a giant castle and having hours of sex at a time with his hot wife, and of giant paychecks from letting his songs be used to endorse Jaguars. Hey, you know what? That ties in, because Sting can also be heard as the before-and-after Muzak at the New England Aquarium Imax. STING IS THE JAGUAR SPIRIT! No? OK.

Actually, the car doesn’t start. “That would NEVER happen in a Jaguar!” sputters Sting from his castle, looking up momentarily from pleasuring Trudie. (You know what? I just rewatched that ad, and Sting isn’t even dreaming about DRIVING the Jaguar — he’s RIDING in it. That’s just sad, Stingalingadingdong. So Jaguars are great for rich people to aspire to be driven around in? Awesome. I think Sting needs to be set upon by a gaggle of kittycats. That would smarten him up.)

ANYhoo. Dr. Lewton is in his crapbucket of a Jag, trying in vain to start it. He gets a flashlight and pops the hood to investigate. And…uh-oh! Someone’s watching him through Crazy Soup-O-Vision!

The first possible issue that reveals itself regarding Dr. Lewton’s engine is that it’s slathered in shiny red blood. Is this all part of Sting’s dream? This episode is getting Lynchian. Like all movie and TV idiots before him, Dr. Lewton reaches down to touch the blood and then smears it all over his fingers while staring intently at it instead of getting the hell out of there.  Sure enough, he is attacked, and there’s lots of screaming and cuts back and forth from Soup to Regular. There’s a shot of some guy’s eyes, peeking through something? I cannot tell if that’s supposed to be Lewton or whoever’s attacking him, or what. It seems Lewton is on the ground so he can’t be peeking through anything. Or maybe he was in the hood, then fell to the ground, but the editing doesn’t really reflect that. Anyway, Lewton is toast, is what this scene is telling us. Death by soup attack. We end with a sinister shot of the Jaguar ornament. You’re next, Sting!

Typically, the morning after this event, the cops and Mulder and Scully find it necessary to come around and be all, “Oh, what’s going on?” and “Hey, did somebody get killed on this bloody Jaguar engine?” and “How does this connect to the other guy who disappeared from this museum, leaving behind voluminous puddles of blood?” and shit. Such busybodies. Scully, thankfully using a latex glove (though not WEARING it — guys, just put the gloves on, OK? What’s the big idea, you think they’re uncool or something?), pulls the back half of a rat out of the engine cavity or whatever you call the inside of the hood. She orders the very tall Boston PD cop holding the evidence bag to label it as “partial rat body part.” She says this like it’s obvious, but that actually doesn’t make sense, Scully. It’s a partial rat, but it’s not really a body part, and it’s certainly not a partial body part. Anyway, I think we can all agree that it’s gross. Moving on. Scully sails off to have a word with Mona. She asks if Lewton was behaving strange(ly) last night, or if he said anything about Dr. Bilac. Mona hesitates before saying no. She also says she doesn’t know when Lewton and Bilac last spoke. A clearly skeptical Scully gives Mona her card and tells her to call if she thinks of anything.

Oh, maybe Mulder wasn’t at the scene after all, because here he is, romping through the woods with a bunch of cops. Someone’s watching him from up in a tree…through old familiar Crazy Soup-O-Vision. Scully comes jogging up, telling Mulder they haven’t found Lewton’s body and asking how his police-escorted woods-romping is going. Mulder says that last night’s rain will make it hard to determine if Lewton was brought through here. From the hood’s lever having been pulled (how do they figure that? Fingerprints? Wouldn’t there be fingerprints on the hood lever if he’d EVER pulled it?) and the flashlight found by the car, Scully has deduced that Lewton was checking the engine when he was attacked. Mulder suggests that maybe SOMEONE didn’t want the engine to start. Unlikely, says Scully, because at least two rat bodies were found in the engine — apparently, the museum has always had a rat problem. Great — the sacred shaman urn is in a museum with a rat problem, a dog running around loose, and probably a flooding basement if the rest of Boston is any guide. No wonder the Secona want to get it the hell out of there, PetroEcuador or no. Mulder makes a face befitting one who has just envisioned rats getting mutilated inside a car engine.

As Mulder and Scully continue to stroll amongst the foliage, they discuss the time of death (or at least of the attack, I guess, since they don’t know if he’s dead because they can’t find him — a bit of sloppy writing there), which was between 9:30 and midnight, the same as Craig Horning. Scully notes that Mona got nervous when asked about Bilac and thinks maybe she’s trying to protect him. Mulder listens, then starts when some blood glops onto his face. “I think it’s starting to rain again,” he says mildly, and it’s not even a Mulderism. “I don’t think so, Mulder,” Scully says, and swipes the blood off of his face with her finger (say it with me: awww!), smearing it carefully around and around on her hand, as one does, if one is on TV, before finally looking up. It’s the jaguar spirit, throwing blood at everybody! Nope, it’s some entrails in a tree.

Mona walks up the steps of Bilac’s house and knocks on the door. Getting no answer, she goes inside. It’s very dark, of course, even though it’s broad daylight out, and it’s not even raining, unless you happen to be standing under a tree with blood-dripping entrails hanging off of it. There’s a fire in the fireplace. “Lonnie?” she calls fearfully. She moves to open some blinds (really, though, there are way too many uncovered windows for it to be that dark) and a voice says “Don’t.” It’s Dr. Alonso “Lonnie” Bilac, emerging from the shadows looking sweaty and unshaven. Mona tells him that Dr. Lewton is dead. “Say something, Lonnie, you’re scaring me,” she says when he doesn’t answer. “I told you not to come here!” he snaps. Mona wants to know what’s happened to him. Mona, I think if you buy some dried peas, soak them overnight, drain and put them in a heavy soup kettle with a meaty ham bone and some salt pork, add 10 cups of water, simmer two hours, remove ham from bone and dice, add half a cup of light cream if desired, blend ham back into mixture, and stir in a mind-boggling amount of possibly radioactive hallucinogenic drugs, you’ll have your answer. Mona tells Lonnie that ever since he’s been back he’s been acting like a stranger. “The bloooood has to stop,” says Lonnie in a totally normal way that doesn’t at all indicate that he’s been possessed by a creepy jaguar spirit and/or is hopped up on soup. “You know something, don’t you?” Mona says. That’s one way to put it, dear. Bilac says she wouldn’t understand. “Then help me to understand!” she says, and catches sight of Bilac’s delicious bowl of green glop. “You can tell me,” she adds, more hesitantly, then asks what’s in the bowl. “Viiiiiine of the sooooouuuuul,” says Bilac. “Yaje? YOU’RE DRINKING YAJE?!?!” Mona shrieks, and tries to grab the bowl from him. She’s so culturally insensitive. In the ensuing scuffle the yaje spills (I think) to the floor. Bilac looks crushed. Mona says that Bilac needs help, but he yells at her to get out. She does. Bilac stares after her, looking sweaty and stoned.

Scully’s in one more autopsy bay in one more city, cutting up one more mysterious human small intestine found draped over one more tree branch. Her job is so monotonous. Mulder’s lurking helpfully around as usual. “There’s about four feet of jejunum and another foot of ileum,” Scully says. I love when she talks parts-of-the-small-intestine-y. She knows it’s Lewton because of how both the jejunum and ileum are chock full of corn chowder. Which, I don’t know, maybe he had some of on his shirt yesterday when she was talking to him or something. Or there’s an I ♥ CORN CHOWDER bumper sticker on the Jag. And also sunflower seeds. “A man of taste,” Mulder quips obligatorily. For some reason, though, Scully can’t determine from the single nature-ravaged internal organ in front of her how the body was eviscerated. “There are no knife marks on the epithelium…” How many intestine parts CAN she recite? I love her. She “imagines” that the intestine could have been “torn or pulled” from the body. It’s good that she can still use her imagination. But she can’t even tell that for sure, because someone has been nomming on the intestines since they were removed, and that someone is a rat. “More rats,” says Mulder sagely. Scully gets a phone call, and takes off ONE bloody glove to answer it, at least, which for Scully is really good. Also, this is what, Season 3, right? What I’m saying is, that cell phone? Is large.

It’s Mona. We cut to her POV, somewhere in the apparently perpetually dark museum, with Sugar panting cutely in front of her in order to remind us that he exists. Probably not for any particular reason though. Mona says that she was with Bilac and he scared her, that he’s sick and doesn’t know what he’s doing. She says she left Bilac at his house and came back to the museum, but she feels like someone’s watching her. Sugar is all, who, me? You know, it’s Sugar who really should be the one investigating this case. He likes all people regardless of ethnicity, history, or political persuasion. He is not grossed out by rats, partial rat body parts, entrails, blood, or pea soup, and in fact would regard all of it as a delicious and hearty lunch. And he can handle kittycats. Er, at least of the non-evil-spirit variety. Uh, spoiler.

Scully tells Mona to stay put, that Mulder is coming to get her. Sugar starts barking as Mona hangs up. Mona decides that now, when she feels like someone’s watching her and has just called for help, in the scary haunted museum with the curse and everything, is a good time to grab a knife and start hacking away at the Amaru to try and forcibly extract the skull. Sugar growls. “What is it?” Mona asks. “[Rumbling],” the closed-captioning answers, somewhat inaccurately. Mona and Sugar go to investigate. It’s coming from the ladies’ room. Sugar stays back, growling, perhaps because he is not a lady. Mona goes inside. The room is lit by four or five light bulbs, which apparently are about 3 watts apiece, because we can barely see anything, as usual. Mona opens a stall door, and the closed toilet seat is rattling and jiggling, causing the sound. Mona looks apprehensive, though I can’t imagine why. It’s probably just a playful band of toilet fairies! They’re so mischievous. Mona reaches out and lifts the toilet lid. A swarm of rats are scrambling and squeaking to the surface. Mona screams like a banshee. Yep, that seems about right.

Here’s Scully, driving some SERIOUSLY OLD and gigantic Buick and stopping in front of Bilac’s house. It’s now dark, of course. As usual I wonder how it took them an entire day to peek in the trunk of Lewton’s car, find a dripping intestine in a tree, and start autopsying it. Scully walks into Bilac’s house with her flashlight. Maybe she doesn’t turn on the lights because she doesn’t want him to know she’s — “DR. BILAC?!?” OK, scratch that. Maybe the jaguar spirit has some political beef with electrical lighting. She finds the bowl of yaje, which in this light looks less like pea soup and more like phlegm. Eww. Also the yaje-making ingredients, all of which are in handmade-looking wooden bowls (it would have been funny if they were in, like, Tupperware or a Star Wars souvenir cup), and a wooden spoon like the one they were using to drink it with back in Ecuador. The flashlight swings around more — hey, Scully’s turned into Mulder! Oh, no, Mulder’s just ALSO flashlighting around, only in the equally dark museum. His flashlight illuminates the stuffed jaguar again. “DEE-doo!!” the music pan-flutes significantly. As he walks, Mulder gets waylaid suddenly by Argus Filch, I mean, by the museum guard. When Mulder tells him he got a panicked call from Mona, the guard says he’ll take him to her. They walk darkly on, SERIOUSLY, DOES THIS MUSEUM NOT HAVE ANY LIGHTS? Maybe in normal times the night watchman likes to go around with a flashlight for whatever reason, but now when they’re investigating murders and stuff? I think it’s OK to turn a few lights on, EVEN outside of regular operating hours.

Mulder’s flashlight comes upon the Amaru head in the jar. “Here she is!” says the guard. Just kidding. Mulder’s phone rings. It’s Scully, at Bilac’s, asking if Mulder’s found Mona. No, he says, but her car is parked outside, probably being napped in by 25 rats as we speak. Meanwhile, Filch wanders out, apparently content to let Mulder do whatever, hopefully while he looks for Mona. Scully says Bilac’s nowhere to be found either, but she did find his journals. Well, geez, Scully. She starts reading them to Mulder: “Dr. Rooseveeeeelllllt is such a diiiiiiiiiiick. Just because he has a giant teeeeeeeeent he thinks he can do whatever he waaaaaaaants. Also it is totally snoooooooowing here even though we are at the equatoooooooor. WTFFFFFFFFFF? When I get back to Bostooooooon I am toooooooootally asking out that girl Monaaaaaaaa. She is cuuuuuuuuuuuute. Oh crap I have to gooooooooo, I am being summoned by Dr. Assfaaaaaaaaaace. I wish he would get killed in his stupid teeeeeeeeent by a jaguar spiriiiiiiiiiit.”

OK, fine, Bilac’s journal says: “I’ve seen the Amaru coming out of the jungle with the eyes of a scorpion, the claws of a jaguar.” And the wig of a truck driver named Doug. “She leaps down from the trees. She tears at my flesh, then holds my head in her hands and eats out my eyes.” I don’t need to read your Mary Sue fic, Lonnie. Mulder, staring at the Amaru skull, asks if there’s a date on the entry. Scully says they’re all recent. Mulder wants her to read the part about the jaguar coming down from the trees again while he touches himself. Oh, he didn’t say that last part. “Maybe that’s how the intestines got up there,” he says. I…guess that makes sense. “Mulder, I think Bilac’s been tripping,” Scully says, once again making use of the drug terms that she learned in seventh-grade health class. I wonder if he was tripping on angel dust, or maybe grass. Scully tells him about the phlegmy goop she found in the bowl. And how she tried a drop of it and right now she’s only telling him all this because the snakes coming out of the lampshade are suggesting that she do so. She tells Mulder that according the journal it’s a hallucinogen called “yaje.” There’s a closeup of the journal, where Bilac seems to have drawn what I am assuming is the skull in the jar thingy, but which might be a bowl of yaje, I don’t know. “The Vine of the Soul” is written next to it, complete with quotation marks. “The Vine of the Soul,” Scully recites. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Mulder asks, walking out into the hall. Indeed. Scully says she thinks Bilac is “invoking the curse.” Mulder will have to call her back, because there’s a giant slippery puddle of blood on the floor in front of him. Ditcher! She wasn’t done talking! “Did you find Mona?” Scully asks. “I hope not,” Mulder says, and hangs up. Scully goes back to her journal reading: “Some FBI douchebaaaaaags came to my hoooooouuuuse. They would not shut uuuuuuuuuuup. One of them was clearly a mandroooooooid. The other one thinks I did this, and she is a foooooolllll.” Scully ponders what that could signify.

Mulder opens a door at the end of the hall, gun in hand. There’s actually a little light, for once, enough that you can sort of make out some room details. One of which is a chair covered in blood. And a sink covered in blood. Oh, it’s the ladies’ room, which seems a tad brighter this time. Maybe the night watchman was in here replacing bulbs while Mulder was on the phone. Mulder hears a similar “rumbling” to what the closed captioning identified last time, which again is really more of a rattling than a rumbling. I imagine deaf people watching this and being all “How can a toilet lid rumble? Is that due to paranormal activity?” Oh, look who’s curled up in the corner, all wet and disheveled: it’s Bilac. Mulder demands to know what he’s doing there. “She’s dead,” Bilac says softly.

Cut to another room in the FOR GOD’S SAKE TURN ON SOME DAMN LIGHTS, PEOPLE, I PRESUME THERE ARE TIMES WHEN YOU HAVE VISITORS THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO SEE THE EXHIBITS, SO YOU MUST HAVE THEM museum (yes, I know we’ve been in back rooms, not the exhibit halls, BUT STILL), where Mulder and Scully are questioning a now dried-off Bilac, wrapped in a grey blanket. He says he doesn’t know where Mona is. Scully says that Bilac told Mulder that she was dead, so he must know where she is. “*I* didn’t kill her,” Bilac says, looking at her like she’s the biggest idiot in the world. “Then why do you have blood on your clothes?” Scully asks reasonably. Bilac says that he came here because “the Amaru would not be appeeeeeaaaased.” He says he was afraid for Mona, that he tried to keep her away from “all this.” Scully tells him that Mona was scared, that she said Bilac had become violent. Scully is looking awfully pretty in this scene, all spectrally lit. Also she seems to be elongating her words a little. Gillian the Unconscious Accent Imitator strikes again! See also Oswald, Darren Peter; Else, Everybody. Bilac says she didn’t understand; Scully says that maybe Bilac was too high to know the difference. Just like that time with the kid with the hamburger in Idaho who thought he saw a UFO. Drugs are bad! They interfere with accurate scientific observation! She says that there is no curse — Bilac is the curse. Bilac says no — this is more powerful than any maaaaaaaan. It’s the spirit of the Amaru. It’s not something you can put in handcuuuuuuuffs. Mulder is like, buddy, you’d be surprised. Then he apparently gets bored and leaves. Scully asks him one more time where Mona’s body is. He does not knooooooooow. Scully stalks out after Mulder. She tells the cops outside, including Officer Partial Rat Body Part Evidence-Bag Holder, that Bilac stays where he is until the museum is searched. Geez, she sure likes to order that guy around. Fanfic alert!

Back in the ladies’ room, where Mulder generally wishes he could spend more time but maybe not necessarily today, he calls Scully in and points out the mysterious fact that, inside this old restroom in a rickety old building in Boston, there is water on the floor. “I just assumed one of the toilets had overflowed,” Scully says. Mulder points out that there’s water on every toilet seat, as if EVERY toilet had overflowed. “Why would THAT happen?” he asks. Um…maybe some big pipe that goes to all the toilets got backed up? Admittedly, I’m not a plumber, but that doesn’t sound like it’s outside the realm of extreme possibility to me, guys. “I guess there’s only one way to find out,” Scully says. Really? “I hate this,” Mulder grumps. Scully looks a tiny bit sympathetic but mostly secretly delighted. Hee. Mulder whips open the toilet. Remember the pea soup? Now think of a different soup, more like a clear, though slightly bloody, broth, and instead of ham there are a bunch of furry rat corpses. And also the soup is in a toilet. It’s practically the Food Network over here!

“In every toilet,” says Mulder, checking. A rat in every toilet, and a chicken in every pot. Why does only Mulder have to do this? It is the LADIES’ room, after all, SCULLY. “How did they get in there?” Scully wonders demurely, while not having rat juice mixed with toilet water sloshed all over her hands.

In pops the guard. They found something outside. “Mona Wustner?” says Scully. “No,” says the guard, “her dog, Sugar.” Then everybody fake cries for a long time in a comical manner, ruining the take but providing everlasting blooper-reel entertainment. Then they do it again without the fake crying. Spoilsports. Seriously, I am sad about the dog. I’m glad I remembered he was going to die, thanks to that blooper. See, bloopers help us.

Out we go into some dingy room presumably elsewhere in this endless, unrelentingly gloomy museum. Some guy in a button-down shirt is autopsying the dog, I guess, who thankfully is under a sheet. He says it’s rat poison. Damn you, rats! Leaving your poison out all over the place! Wait. Damn you, cats! Using chemicals to try to control the rat population! Wait, no. Maybe I’d better just keep watching. The heretofore unseen autopsy guy (why can’t Scully just autopsy the dog? She autopsied a damn elephant, didn’t she?) says he found cat intestine inside Sugar. “The dog ate a cat,” Scully says. Also, rat fur. “Cat ate a rat,” Scully freestyles. “And the dog ate the cat,” Mulder adds, and she looks at him like he’s being insensitive or something. It rhymes, Scully! Sheesh. “More rats, Scully,” Mulder says, and manhandles her off into a corner so they can talk without this nosy dog-autopsying stranger eavesdropping. Mulder reminds us all of our rat-related travails so far: “There were rats in Dr. Lewton’s car engine. There were rats in the bathroom where it looks like Mona Wustner may have been killed, and now here.” Except he pronounces it “Woonsler.” See, guys? You use up all the film doing funny takes about crying and giggling over the word “yaje,” and this is what happens. Try to pay attention, Agent Miles. Scully points out that it’s an old building with a rat problem. Mulder thinks there’s more to it than that. Like how the Secona believe that the jaguar spirit will devour anybody that desecrates the burial place of a holy woman. Has anybody actually been devoured, or just more like, chomped on by rats? No, no, we’re talking about “transmigration of the soul into animal form.” Through the ceremony where they drink the, uh… “Yaje,” Scully supplies. Yaje? Yaje. Go, girl. Hi Chris! Hee, I love that blooper best of all. Of the Teso bloopers. Even more than Mulder getting into a fistfight with the…never mind, we’ll get there.

“So what are we talking here, Mulder? A possessed rat? The return of Ben?” Scully quips. I have always meant to google that line (well, I’ve meant to since Google was invented, which was well after this episode first aired), so here we go: “A lonely boy becomes good friends with Ben, a rat. This rat is also the leader of a pack of vicious killer rats, killing lots of people.” Thanks, IMDB. Oh, and look at the “sponsored link” I got with it: “Boston Area Rodent Exclusion & Trapping for Rats & Mice.” Blargh! Rats everywhere! You know, between this and The Departed, the world probably thinks that rats are just hanging around all over Boston all the time, reading the paper, getting their nails done, cooking French food, etc. They’re really not! Well, except in Allston, which is, in fact, currently overrun with rats. Because of how Harvard dug a giant hole there and then abandoned it.  Oopsie. Anyway, Mulder thinks the rats were killed while trying to escape from something. Scully is all, why would they all simultaneously jump into several different toilets? Oh, Scully. Doy, says Mulder: they were trying to get OUT through the toilet. (By the way, have you ever in your life been in a public multi-stall restroom where the toilet lids were closed? Or that even had toilet lids? Just wondering.) “Have YOU been drinking yaje, Mulder?” Scully asks. Scully, yaje is cool! Everyone’s doing it. I guess you’re just not cool. “Go with it, Scully,” Mulder says. Why does he say that twice in this episode, and never in any other episode? Sort of silly, it is. Scully makes a Scully face.

Out of the relatively bright autopsy room and back into the dark corridor. Guess what? Bilac’s gone. The task of delivering this news unfortunately falls to the cop that Scully’s been ordering around the whole episode. Poor guy. “HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?” barks Scully. The cop doesn’t know. Sure enough, Bilac’s gone, except for his grey blankie. Scully asks Officer Whipping Boy whether he left his post; he didn’t. Mulder asks if anyone saw a rat in the room. The museum guard says, sure, they come in through the heating system. There’s HEAT in this rattletrap of an old museum? I find that hard to believe. As Scully continues to grill the cop within an inch of his life and then orders him to search the entire building, Mulder looks around, then calls Scully and the guard over. It’s an entrance to an old steam tunnel that hasn’t been used for 50 years. An abandoned steam tunnel that no one has been in for 50 years? Oh, that can’t be it then. “You think Bilac crawled down there?” Scully says. Mulder’s found one of those puddles of blood that we’ve grown so fond of over the course of this episode, and following the lead of Lewton and Scully, he sticks his fingers in it and smears them all over the place. “Unless he was dragged,” he says grimly. Wait, I thought he turned into a rat! Pick a theory and stick with it, Mulder. He runs off, and Scully follows, leaving Filch and Officer Whipping Boy staring at a dark shot of something that I imagine would be the steam tunnel entrance if I could see it. HEY, OFFICER WHIPPING BOY, I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO SEARCH THE DAMN BUILDING!!

Outside. Mulder’s prying open a manhole cover while Scully has somehow in the middle of the night gotten hold of schematics for the obsolete steam-tunnel system, which she is busily reading. Apparently it branches off into three directions. “There must be miles of tunneling down there,” she says. And only one way in, and one way out. Well, except for all those dozens of vents in the museum. We have a shot down the manhole, which is adorned with some rather fake-looking cobwebs that I think the set decorator got at Spencer Gifts. “Ladies first?” Mulder says hopefully. You know, Scully, you kind of owe him one for making him open all the toilet lids in the ladies’ room. But she shakes her head. I have to say that I always compare this with Squeeze, where she jumped right into Tooms’s nest without hesitation. Boo, Shiban. Not that she should have to do everything first, but she shouldn’t be all “Eeeww, no, you’re the boy, you do it” about everything. Hmph.

So down Mulder goes, into this perfectly clean steam tunnel that looks less grody than most of the museum, and Mulder follows. Scully’s little map thingy says they should go left, so they — uh-oh! CRAZY SOUP-O-VISION! Behind them! They keep walking, through some darkness. You know, I am just about at capacity for watching people walk through dark corridors with flashlights. I know that happens all the time on The X-Files. But, for serious, in this episode it happens ALL THE TIME. At least these are some different corridors. NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW SINCE I CAN’T SEE THEM. Oh, look, a rat! It sniffs Mulder’s shoe the way a trained rat might do on TV, then scampers off. “Follow that rat,” Mulder says. He sounds like Darth Vader, which I guess is because they’re in a tunnel? I don’t know. Or because they forgot to record that line of dialogue and they had to do it later via tin-can telephone. They follow the rat. Though how they can see it I do not know. At one point Scully says, “We should be directly under the museum here,” though how she knows THAT I do not know. She’s not even looking at her schematics. This episode is really lazy in a lot of ways. Look, it’s a door! Like a regular old closet door down here in the tunnel. All righty. Scully walks up to it. There is a creak, not captioned, so I assume she has opened it, not that I can see anything. The deaf people watching this episode roll their eyes in annoyance, because they literally have no clue what is going on right now. Scully lifts up her flashlight. Look, it’s — some stuff! And some more stuff. For some reason, when Scully is dimly visible she’s blue, but the unidentifiable stuff she shines her flashlight on is orange. So I guess they’re being lit by the moon, which apparently is shining through the earth. Scully looks at the boxes or whatever, then studiously points her flashlight back at her schematics.

Mulder is…also somewhere. Possibly somewhere else; possibly not. He’s following the rat, I guess. There it is; squeaky squeak squeak. He’s leading them to Allston! Mulder keeps shining his flashlight directly on the rat and it doesn’t seem to mind. Mulder has legs, and a tie. This is what I can discern from this shot. “Scully?” he calls. “What is it?” she says, coming up behind him. Mulder shines his light — oh, there we go! A bunch of bodies. Of humans. Perhaps Mulder had a reaction when he first saw them, but if he did I couldn’t see it. “Oh my God,” Scully says, and sinks down to look more closely. It’s Dr. Lewton, and according to Scully, his eyes have been eaten out of his sockets. As opposed to pulled out and then eaten, I guess. Also, eww. “We still don’t know by what,” says Mulder. Well, true, but I think here the important thing is eyes being eaten out of sockets, yes? The Soup-O-Vision watching them agrees. In Soup-O-Vision light, they are green, naturally. It’s a veritable rainbow of color correction down here.

Suddenly we see an eye — it’s a green, feline-looking eye. In Soup-O-Vision, Mulder turns around and shines his light, at long last, on the nemesis who has eluded them for so long. It is — a kittycat! A chubby orange tabby, looking a bit like Morris. Snorgle! I mean, eeeeeek! Scary! Morris runs away. I CAN HAS JEJUNUM? “What is it?” Scully asks. “I think it’s a cat,” says Mulder. You THINK? You looked directly at it for like five minutes. He starts walking after it. Scully thinks “Fuck no, I’m allergic” but then gives in and follows. “You think a cat killed these people?” she says. Yeah, Scully, it is starting to seem like Animal Cops: Boston would have been a better choice to investigate this, eh? “No,” Mulder says, stopping over a grate and shining the flashlight downwards, “THESE cats.” There’s a whole bunch of them, in many colors, meowing and stepping all over each other. They made you a partial rat body part, but they eated it. HEY! I just figured it out. Evil jaguar spirit…basement…The Amaru is Basement Cat!

And now I think it’s time to revisit one of my very favorite XF stories ever, which was told by Kim Manners on one of the extras discs, I guess probably for this season. Basically they had a bunch of cats and they got them all messed up to look like gross dirty sewer cats. Then they had to get the shot set up, and while that was all happening, the cats, because this is what cats do, licked themselves clean. So by the time they were ready to roll on this scene about scary, mangy, terrifying cats, they were all sparkling clean and fluffy again. Hee hee hee! Cats are hilarious. Between this and the having to build a fake one for Gillian to fight because of her being allergic, I’m not surprised we didn’t see a lot of cat-centric episodes after this one. Also because of the fact that cats, again, are hilarious. And not scary. Shiban, this is an illustrious beginning if ever there was one, my friend.

In Soup-O-Vision, which I guess we now know is also Kittycat Vision, Mulder says (in an echoey voice that I’m going to say is part of the inconsistent steam-tunnel sound and not how a cat might hear it, because, yeah, that’s silly), “Which way is out?” Scully turns around, and looks right into the soup-flooded eyes of whichever cat, or jaguar spirit, or dead Native American female shaman, or whatever, is looking at her. Her eyes widen. And then — ATTACK! Now, I’m not saying cats can’t do some damage on you when they attack you. I have been enlisted to cut my parents’ cats’ nails enough to know this. Gloves have been worn on occasion. So I don’t mean to make light of this. The screeching kittycat leaps on Scully, perhaps trying to determine if she has any cheezburgers, which she does not, so it claws her face a lot. At least as far as we can tell with the heavily edited sequence, which is designed not to display the pretend kitty puppet on the stick that we see with such entertaining clarity in the blooper reel. “Come on, Scully!” Mulder says, perhaps staying behind to engage in human-versus-kitty fisticuffs. Nope, they both run off, and a whole bunch of cats jump out of a whole bunch of neatly cut holes in some wooden crates or something. It looks like a cat jungle gym. Only lit in blue. There is also a lot of meowing that, frankly, sounds more “faintly cranky” than “murderous.” I mean, my cat meows all the damn day, especially when it’s time for canned food. Nevertheless, Mulder and Scully, clearly not cat people, run like the dickens.

“No, Mulder, this way!” Scully says, because, it appears, she has the schematics memorized now, even in the dark, Go, girl! Hi Chris. She’s found a vent. Going to be all pouty about not wanting to go first now?

Now we’re I guess looking down through a grate, with the flashlight: and this is easily the most hilarious part of the episode, or pretty much any episode, because the cats are all sitting down there, just sort of looking up, like cats do when, you know, you wave something in their face, or they think maybe you have food, or what have you. They’re just chillin’ in the steam pipe. And then a bunch of cat eyes are CLEARLY Photoshopped in. Those look a little more sinister. But mostly they look like my Cats: The Musical sweatshirt that I wore all the time in ninth grade.

All right, fine, then a meaner cat suddenly jumps up against the grate, startling Mulder. I guess if I had the volume turned up, and it was dark, and any part of the rest of this had been especially scary, I might have been startled. Since I am the most easily startled person of all time. Still, I bet that was the cat puppet. So, yeah.

Scully’s poking in some tunnel or other, and she sees a body. It’s Bilaaaaaaac. Now a door starts banging — WHAT is with the preponderance of cat-friendly doors down here? It’s like a Petco — and I guess the cats are going to come out and attack them some more. They’re scratching at the wood from behind and you can see it splintering, from the front — I don’t know. Mulder and Scully sort of stare helplessly. There’s also a lot of snarling, which sounds more like hobgoblins than cats. The cats break through. Mulder asks Scully if she can get up into the tunnel, which seems to be leading upward. Bilac’s body is in the way, though, so they sort of dump it to the ground and then Mulder boosts Scully up. Shouldn’t they check for a pulse or something? Oh, here’s a closeup of a bloody cat face. That was totally filmed at the same time as all the rest of this. Mulder kind of glances back and then hoists himself into the tunnel. It’s like the scene with the aliens in FTF, only way, way less intense and way, way lower budget. And also, instead of aliens, there are kittycats. There’s a bunch of crawling with flashlights (that’s a change from walking with flashlights, at least), and then Mulder and Scully emerge from the vent in the room where they left Bilac. They support each other as they stagger away. (Really, guys?) In the background we can still hear cats screeching.

Next day. Now in addition to the police and the FBI they’ve got firemen at the scene. I can just picture all the people in the Boston.com comments section bitching about how much all of this is costing the taxpayers. Somebody calls down into the manhole, saying whoever it is can come back up. Scully tells Mulder that the search team has recovered all the bodies, including Mona Woonsler’s and Lonnie’s. “What about the cats?” Mulder asks. A scratched and Band-Aided Scully says that animal control is still looking for them but they haven’t found any sign of them so far. See? Animal Cops: Boston. Time for another crossover! Mulder’s all affronted, because the cats are down there, they both saw them! Puppety, fluffy, sparkling clean cats! Scully says there are miles of tunnel down there and it will take weeks to search them all. I do hope we get regular updates!

Mulder says he was just on the phone with the State Department. After the deaths of five people, they’re finally taking it seriously. “The CURSE?” Scully says. Oh, Scully, you’re so fanciful. Mulder laughs uproariously (well, just about.): “No. Bilac’s letter of protest.” They want the museum to stay closed until they can act on it, which shouldn’t be a problem since I don’t think the museum’s been open the whole time they’ve been there. If it had been I would think there would be a few more LIGHTS ON. Besides, it seemed to be the middle of the night for basically the entire episode. They’re going to send the urn back to Ecuador. Mulder and Scully both look dismayed for some reason. Why do you guys care again, exactly?

Oh good, it’s a voiceover! It’s Mulder for a change. “The Suffolk County coroner ruled that the deaths at the museum were the result of animal attacks. What motivated these attacks and why no more have occurred since has not been explained.” Paranormal activity in the house! OK, I’m not going to transcribe the rest of this. To the museum it was just a historical artifact, there is a world beyond our own, etc. Meanwhile we’re panning through the museum, past some masks, the stuffed jaguar, some bones, and finally to the urn, gingerbready as ever. Then we’re back in Ecuador, and some guys in hats are reburying it, while Doug the head shaman guy looks on, holding his scepter. Closeup on him, and — OMG! Jaguar eyes! That totally…makes sense! I guess! We see the skull, dusted with snow, and then a Soup-O-Vision shot from its POV, looking up at Doug, then covered with dirt. After all, as Mulder says, some things are better left buried. Even jars made of gingerbread. Because if you unbury them, a bunch of kitties might come after you, especially if you work in an unlit, rat-infested museum in Boston.

OK, the guy playing the shaman is actually named Gordon. And he has quite a long list of IMDB credits, so he’s unlikely to be a truck driver. I still think he was wearing a wig though. And somebody called Mr. Decker (no clue who that is — Dog Autopsy Guy?) is played by RON SUAVE! That’s the best name EVER! That almost makes up for — aw, it’s Ron Sauve. Too bad. Special Vocal Effects! You know what that means — hobgoblin-like cat snarling! I wonder which of these fine folks was responsible for the kitty puppet. Yes, I AM reading the credits.

So — everybody was killed by kittycats, then? I guess we’re meant to assume that a LOT of cats, acting under the direction of a jaguar spirit, can kill somebody, drag them into a storm drain (in Lewton’s case at least they either had to open a manhole cover or get him into the museum and into the steam pipe), and also drape their entrails over a tree branch after, uh, asking rats to gnaw on them? And, I guess they killed Sugar by…designating one of their number to eat a poisoned rat and then splay enticingly in its death throes where Sugar would find it, right around the usual Alpo time? I know, I know — MAGIC. Spirits. Paranormal activity. Wizards. I will go with it, Scully, because if you think too much about this episode, my friends, then you are a fooooooollll.