SEASON 1

SEASON 2

SEASON 3

SEASON 4

SEASON 5

FIGHT THE FUTURE

SEASON 6

SEASON 7

SEASON 8

SEASON 9

< PREVIOUS

Back at the 14, Scully’s shown up with the Greatest Hits of Charlie Morris for Mulder and … Dear God! She’s wearing a sort of mushroom-coloured skirt suit, with a black scoop-neck top underneath. The skirt cuts her right in half, making her look not only short, but chunky to boot. What was Wardrobe thinking? Had they ingested some sort of hallucinatory fungus? It makes Mulder’s tie look tasteful and understated and he looks even taller than usual. By the way, he’s just sort of nodding away as Scully talks. I think he’s daydreaming about growing a pornstache and making some money on the side. At any rate, he’s not paying much attention to Scully, who’s making cracks about Michelle seeing poltergeists. To Scully’s chagrin, Mulder just throws her own findings back at her, saying that she found the lesion on Detective Sleaze’s body that could have been caused by electrothermal energy. Scully won’t back down though – she’s waiting for the lab results. Mulder loses patience with her and raises his voice a little, asking her why it’s so hard for her to believe when the evidence is there. Scully then busts out her evidence of Charlie Morris and shows Mulder a picture of him in a trophy case on the wall in the police station, offering an explanation for where Michelle got her description of the other man. But Scully, who threw the detective through the window? Mulder’s not ready to give up on his theory yet. He asks Scully for the grisly details of Charlie Morris’s death (the subtitling for the hearing impaired spells it ‘grizzly’, so for a while I’m misled, wondering how a bear got involved all of a sudden). Mulder and Scully are really not getting on well at all in this episode. Scully seems completely pissed-off with her role as the Sceptical Sidekick, and Mulder is just running the investigation like she’s not even there. It turns out that Charlie Morris’s left arm was severed by a chainsaw and his eye was gouged out. Is anyone flashing back to Scarface here? Oh, just me? All right. Mulder then pulls out one of the disfigured dolls and shows Scully, saying: “Hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?” He’s really laying down the law to Scully here. “Before we discount anything I think we should find out more about Charlie Morris.” Scully’s looking a bit chastised and embarrassed. She doesn’t like being uncertain and Mulder’s just thrown her for a loop. Get used to it, girly-girl.

Fiore Residence, Kenmore, New York. Mulder and Scully knock on the door and Detective Fiore opens it a crack, acting in a completely non-suspicious (shyeah right) manner when Mulder asks him if he knows this man, while flourishing the Photo-fit of Charlie Morris. Fiore unchains the door and comes out onto the porch. He’s a squirrelly little man with a receding hairline who wants to talk outside as he says he doesn’t want to wake his wife. Fiore admits that the picture is of Charlie Morris and that they used to be partners. Mulder asks about the circumstances surrounding Charlie’s death and Fiore sort of coughs and heads down towards the end of the porch. No, nothing suspicious going on here. After all that, Fiore tells Mulder and Scully that the matter is still under investigation, so he can’t comment on it. What’s with the scurrying down the porch then? Porch-scurrier. Scully gives Fiore the bad news that she and Mulder are working under the auspices of Captain Gresham at the 14 and Fiore’s all – I never worked at the 14, whassup? Mulder gives him the news that he believes that Barbala’s death is connected somehow to Charlie Morris’s death. Fiore counters Mulder, saying that Barbala flipped his wig and jumped out the window. Mulder blathers on a bit more asking about Charlie’s death and Fiore tells him that it was a payback for a major police sweep against the Woo Shing Woo Triad. I’ll have a side-order of Woo Shing Woo, it sounds delicious! Lots of heroin was stopped from hitting the streets and Fiore speculates that there were a lot of pissed-off people playing mah-jongg that week. I was probably one of them – I used to play a lot of mah-jongg with my Dad and a mutual friend back then, whose wife used to think it was funny to cheat. God, she was annoying! You can get quite worked up over mah-jongg, at least in my experience. Mulder asks if Charlie was killed as a warning to the police to back off. Fiore says, “I think they picked a cop, any cop, and they whacked him.” A woman appears at the door, asking what’s going on. Ooh, I bet that’s the wife Fiore lied about before, saying she was sleeping. She doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping. Actually, what she does look like is a Poor Man’s Minnie Driver. She’s wiping her hands with a dishtowel, so it looks like she’s been washing the dishes. Sleep-dishwashing. Huh, I wonder if Thorazine works for that? Fiore then blahs on about it being the weekend and sort of hurries Moose and Squirrel along. Doesn’t he know that crime doesn’t take the weekend off? Mulder’s not very impressed with Fiore, and Scully says that Poor Man’s Minnie Driver had baking flour on her hands. Oh, well-spotted, Scully. Sleep-baking. That Poor Man’s Minnie Driver is a woman of many talents.

Cha-ching! Buffalo Mutual Life. Someone’s telling Fiore (who’s now wearing a suit instead of the nondescript tracksuit from the last scene), that something is not a big deal, and that Fiore’s ‘acting like a little bug”. Ooh, good call. Fiore’s all amped-up about the FBI investigation, but if I were him I’d spare some angst over his wardrobe choice. The suit he’s wearing is sort of grey-green, but the tie is dark purply-blue with BRIGHT RED diagonal stripes! My eyes! My eyes! Someone call the Fashion Victims Unit – that tie is HEINOUS! Doink doink! The other guy is sitting in the shadows, so I can’t see what he’s wearing in any detail. He seems to think that Mulder and Scully are just going through the motions, and that they don’t really know anything. He obviously hasn’t met Our Lad Spooky, who is faster than a speeding hypothesis and leaps to unsubstantiated conclusions with a single bound. Fiore refuses to be calmed (after all, he has seen the obsessive look in Mulder’s eye for himself) and demands to go to Citibank for the safety box. His friend refuses to be panicked, and suggests jokingly that they make a donation to the Little Sisters for the Poor. Fiore wants to ‘dump it somewhere’. I’m guessing this is ill-gotten gains of some sort. The Life Insurance Man says, “There’s only two of us left now, that’s over a million each.” Fiore yells, “Take it all! I don’t care!” and makes a crack about his dream of Costa Rica. Shadow Guy then starts to bitch about how much it sucks to be selling disability insurance to morons. I’m thinking it would suck more to have your arm chain-sawed off and your eye gouged out. I’m just sayin’. Shadow Guy then points at Fiore threateningly and says, “You listen to me, Tony. We agreed to wait ten years and that is exactly what we’re gonna do.” Fiore’s not taking this lying down: “I listened to you once before and look what happened.” Shadow Guy then starts to justify himself: “Nobody! Not me, not Barbala, wanted to see Charlie wind up like that. We were just trying to scare a little sense into him. It was an accident.” Oh, riiiigghhhttt. He must have fallen over on the chainsaw and inadvertently bumped it and turned it on, while accidentally gouging out his own eye with a convenient fork. Perhaps the gouging was deliberate, considering that it was the eighties and maybe he was confronted with someone wearing fluorescent pink bike shorts. God knows, I’ve considered it myself. Shadow Guy tells Fiore he’d better pull himself together. Big mistake for Fiore to mess with Shadow Guy.