“Patience”
Opening: The local mortician of a pimple-on-the-butt-of-America town enters
his bedroom and gets sent downstairs by his wife because he's drunk. So down he
goes… and some sort of mutant bat-man creature swoops down from the ceiling
and tears him to pieces. Hearing the ruckus, the wife also goes down and
promptly gets slaughtered as well. Now THAT'S an X-Files opening.
ROLL CREDITS - It's worth noting that David Duchovny has now been dumped from
the credit sequence.
Down in everyone's favorite basement office of FBI headquarters, Scully looks
wistfully at Mulder's desk plaque. She's quickly distracted by the sound of
Doggett and some fellow agents laughing it up in the hallway. Wow, Mulder didn't
have ANY friends beyond Scully in the bureau. This John Doggett is a regular
life of the party. Scully berates him for treating the X-Files like "a
curiosity" and makes a point of telling him that this is still Mulder's
office. That said, it's time for business - Scully shows the slides of the
mortician and his wife and Doggett asks all sorts of stupid questions that
Scully learned not to bother with six years ago. Off to the crime scene!
The detective running the investigation is one of those burly fellows who
doesn't take kindly to the FBI sticking its nose into things. He naturally
assumes animal attack, especially given a bizarre, four-toed footprint found by
the bodies, but Scully's not so sure. She and Doggett look around inside and
find another weird footprint by the staircase. Doggett theorizes that the killer
is simply a psychotic and invokes Occham's Razor - big mistake. When you work
X-Files you throw that Occham crap out the window. Besides, as Scully points
out, there's twenty-five feet between each footprint. They eventually make their
way to the attic, where they find a pair of regurgitated fingers and claw marks
on the rafters.
Meanwhile, some random old lady is crying over a photo album when the mutant
bat-man creature swoops in and wastes her. Then X-Files suddenly morphs into a
C-grade horror film as the bat-man pops out of the shadows and howls into the
camera! Seventeen years ago, I might have found that freaky. Over in the morgue,
Scully does her usual autopsy thing and tells Doggett that the tears in the
mortician's skin are fang-like and laced with an enzyme only found in bats.
Doggett then whips out a handy forty year-old newspaper article from Montana
about a supposed bat-man that was seemingly killed by three men.
Cut to the latest crime scene, where the burly detective tells Scully and
Doggett that the random old lady had a daughter who turned up dead just a week
earlier - she was found in the river, burnt almost beyond recognition. Not only
that, but the old woman hadn't seen her daughter in forty years. Scully suggests
that there's a connection between the two deaths and even points out that the
events in Doggett's newspaper article happened forty years ago, but the
detective scoffs at her and says she's willing to leap at the most far-fetched
theory. Gee, it's a good thing he never met Mulder. Nonetheless, Scully wants
the daughter's body exhumed and the detective reluctantly agrees. Doggett,
meanwhile, refuses to let go of his "old-fashioned cop instincts,"
which is supposed to show us that he's playing the skeptic to Scully's believer.
