Sestra Amateur:
In Michigan, a tense couple arrives at a drugstore in a punch-buggy yellow Volkswagon so the woman can get a passport photo taken. Mary Louise Lefante poses with a lovely wide smile but forgets her money to pay for it so she goes back to the car. On the way, she gets drugged by the Gorton’s fisherman and loses consciousness. Her boyfriend, Billy, isn’t looking so good either; he’s unresponsive and bleeding from his ear. The impatient drug store clerk assumes she isn’t coming back and is about to trash her photo when he sees it’s actually her looking terrified. Her makeup still looks good, though.
Sculder respond to the case because it’s considered an abduction. Billy is dead but there’s very little evidence to find Mary Louise because the rain washed it away. Scully solves the mystery of the future-predicting passport photo -- the drug store’s film is expired. Dana also uses the nearby heater to explain the warped parts of the photo.
The agents meet with postal inspector Puett and learn Mary Louise is under investigation for mail theft, Billy for forgery. Mulder finds a Polaroid camera in Mary Louise’s apartment and tells Scully about thoughtography. (It’s always amusing when The X-Files throws some extreme reality into the episodes. In the 1960s, unemployed bellhop Ted Serios claimed he was able to produce images on Polaroid film through psychic power. The Stupendous Yappi would be jealous. Makes you wonder which is worse, though: Having your legacy being that of a fraudulent psychic or an unemployed bellhop?) Fox experiments with Mary Louise’s camera and ends up with several copies of her terrified image, meaning her abductor was there before them.
Mary Louise shows up on the side of a road looking shell-shocked and wearing the world’s ugliest nightgown. At the hospital, a PET scan reveals Mary Louise was lobotomized … badly. She can only say one thing -- unruhe, which is German for unrest. Police officer Trott tells Sculder another woman has been abducted. We see her captor speaking fluent German to her so let’s keep the Google translate accessible for a bit… “Have no fear. I’ll help you. Forget your rest building. (Stupid literal translation…) Forget your restlessness, yada yada yada.”
Sculder go to the crime scene, which is luckily indoors, so no rain issues this time. The deceased male victim, an accountant, was stabbed in the ear. The abductee is his secretary, Alice Brandt. Mulder is convinced he’ll find a camera in the crime scene. If only smart phones were available in 1996, they could just check the victim’s phone. Scully realizes the two crime scenes have the same Iskendarian Construction Company in the background. (Sestra, did you know Iskendarian is the 6,300,947th most common surname in the world? In comparison, ours is the 1,876,364th most common. Sometimes I love the Internet.) Sculder split up to follow their two leads while the abductor/killer gives his current victim an ugly nightgown and just says “very soon."
Fox gets the photo analyzed at the FBI lab. It looks like red-eyed, razor-sharp-toothed demons are surrounding Mary Louise. The photo tech is able to get a human image from the photo. Mulder continues to overanalyze it, figuratively and literally. Dana meets with local police and Mr. Iskendarian to find out which foreman may have hired some unofficial day laborers.
At one of the restoration locations, Scully finds Gerry Schnauz on stilts, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince – who is ripe for the Comic Con picking due to roles in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., True Blood, The Walking Dead and Stranger Things. He’s got some buggy nystagmus going on with his eyes that Dana probably can’t see from that far away. So Fox is right on target when he calls her to tell her their suspect has unusually long legs. She says “unruhe” and pulls her gun, but Schnauz runs away … on the stilts. She’s able to catch him but during the frisk she accidentally jabs her finger with his ... lobotomizer.
Sculder interrogate Gerry, who denies knowledge of the abductions and murders. However, he does identify his father as the human image in Mary Louise’s terrifying photo as well as the howlers in the background. Schnauz had a sister who committed suicide years ago. Now that Dr. Scully is face to face with Gerry, she should clearly be noticing the nystagmus. Schnauz directs them to Alice’s body in the woods.
Officer Trott processes Gerry and takes his booking photo. But the developed photo shows the officer after he’s been shot in the head, which is precisely what Schnauz does next. OK, it’s more like the throat, but the end result is the same for poor Trott. Gerry then raids the drug store for his abduction pharmaceutical of choice. Dana worries Schnauz targeted someone near his last job site. Too bad she didn't consider he would choose her, because he hides under her SUV. Drugged Scully unfortunately doesn’t get to take a shot. When Mulder looks at a recently developed photo in the drug store, he sees a terrified Dana. Fox runs after them, but a man on foot cannot catch a speeding Ford Explorer.
Mulder continues to stare at Scully’s picture, trying to decipher it. Would it be weird if that was the picture of Dana he kept in his wallet? Fox and the police officers follow leads to Gerry's father’s old office and notice the dental chair is missing. Scully wakes up duct-taped to it in another location. She tries to reason with Schnauz in German and English. He’s convinced the howlers are in Dana's head, but Scully thinks it’s more like Schnauz’s coping mechanism because his father abused his sister before she killed herself. One stupid scan of Gerry's head would show the brain damage from which he probably suffers. His buggy eyes are making me dizzy.
Schnauz takes photos of himself instead of Scully but claims not to understand what they mean. Mulder somehow deciphers the six “fingers” he sees in Scully’s distorted images are six headstones where the Schnauz family is buried. Now that's a stretch. Fox sees a recreational vehicle in the distance, and of course, it’s where Gerry is holding Dana. Mulder breaks in and shoots Schnauz before he can offer Scully an ugly nightgown. We see those last photos show Gerry lying dead on the floor. In the end, Dana can’t explain this one away with mere science.
Sestra Professional:
Season 11's in full swing now, and while doing this rewatch, some concepts seem to be coming back to haunt us. The revival has led to much discussion -- perhaps too much -- of the show painting Scully as a victim, long a facet of the storyline in ways great and small. I don't think that should particularly affect how we feel about the episodes, but even in a standout such as "Unruhe" -- her fourth abduction since the start of the series -- such thoughts are bound to invariably creep in.
Speaking of creepy, this one hits dead center in The X-Files' monster-of-the-week wheelhouse. It's traditionally kind of an overlooked episode not named on a lot of best-of lists or atop rankings. But it stands up really well -- use of almost-defunct Polaroids for passport photos aside -- and the idea of a live lobotomy is about as scary an idea as they come ... on this planet anyway.
Stand back, Scully, it's loaded: No big surprise, "Unruhe" was penned by Vince Gilligan, really coming into his own on the show following the late Season 3 gem "Pusher." With Darin Morgan no longer in the fold, Gilligan's starting to become the most distinctive voice on the show. Yet he's not just walking in Morgan's footsteps, he's creating his own path. His characters are more rooted in the here and now, there's less of an alternate-reality structure -- and, as a result, there's more terror.
Let's check on the progress of our agents. They both get to contribute again in the actual resolution of a case. Mulder notices that the mail fraud/forgery is actually incidental to the X-file, but Scully's the one who spies the construction company nearby and makes that connection. They're on their game this season, this is another episode in which their suspect gets nabbed halfway through the show.
You left it like a fingerprint: Now a few words about Scully's German class in college. It covered the word "unrest"? That was pretty comprehensive. And beyond that, kudos for her for remembering, because after a couple years of Spanish and a couple years of French, I can't do a lot more than order hamburgers in Spanish and French fries in French.
Dana's not quite as shook up here as she was in Season 2's "Irresistible" by serial killer Donnie Pfaster. She's able to speak with Schnauz, to tell him if howlers exist they're only in his head. And that's after the perfect reveal at the construction site, where Mulder tells her of the legs out of proportion in the Polaroid and she sees Gerry in construction stilts. She gets a little Silence of the Lambs on us during her report at the end, talking about risking letting monsters venture into our heads to get into theirs. But that's excusable, after all, Scully was originally conceived in the Clarice Starling mold.
Why don't you cut the B.S.? Not only is this a standout episode, it has impressive meta too. The production crew told Gilligan they'd be using cutting-edge technology on the photographs. "Someone said to me, 'We're gonna Photoshop it,'" Gilligan said in The Complete X-Files. "And I was thinking, 'What the hell does that mean?' It was 1996; I didn't know what he hell they were talking about." Speaking of the Polaroids, when asked which prop I would want from The X-Files if I could take one thing, my answer invariably is Scully's photo from "Unruhe." Top-notch work by the art department.
Gilligan also tripped himself up literally. He told The Complete X-Files the stunt coordinator warned him how difficult it would be to walk in plasterer's stilts and he didn't believe him. So they went out to the parking lot and he tried them on with six crew members spotting him as he stumbled around. "I sweated probably five pounds of water walking on those things out there."
This was the second episode filmed that season, but it aired fourth because the show wanted to take advantage of a time-slot move from Fridays to Sundays. "We wanted to pick an episode that was particularly successful as a script and that would be an excellent representative of the show -- and we made the decision that 'Unruhe' would be a better episode than 'Teliko' for that purpose," co-producer Frank Spotnitz said in the official fourth-season episode guide. ... According to the guide, Gilligan's dentist threw a scare into him by having a "Twilite Sleep" sign on his office wall at a checkup after the episode aired.
Guest star of the week: Pruitt Taylor Vince. He too tends to gets overlooked when the show's top baddies are referenced. But his hulking figure on those stilts and his eyes -- Vince does really suffer from nystagmus -- strikes a chord. It did for Anderson as well. "It was a little hard for me to let go of the concept of his being an evil person," she said in the fourth-season guide. "Whenever I saw him on the screen (afterward), I felt like he was going to swing a pick-ax at somebody at any moment."
Sestra Amateur:
A man on a plane is reading some legal documents when he gets up to use the bathroom. Someone (or something) in white face with red eyes is staring at him from a hidden location. The man enters the unoccupied bathroom because, well, it would be rude to try and enter the occupied one. Unfortunately, he gets attacked. When the plane prepares to land at JFK Airport in New York, a flight attendant goes looking for the missing passenger. She walks by a young man in the aisle who looks completely normal and unassuming. She then finds the missing passenger dead and albino-ed with red eyes.
At FBI Headquarters, Agent Scully meets with assistant director Skinner and Dr. Simon Bruin of the Center for Disease Control to make small talk over weather and sports. Oh, and there’s a joint task force with Philadelphia regarding murdered African-American men who have been depigmented. The man cast as Owen Sanders does not have a credit listed on IMDb, but playing a dead body is not his strong suit, he blinks more than I do when something flies into my eye. Maybe he’s a zombie! Scully begins the autopsy so I hope he isn't a zombie. Mulder and his sunflower seeds quickly join her and he entertains yet another conspiracy theory.
Marcus Duff, played by Carl Lumbly – a comic-con staple for people like me (M.A.N.T.I.S.!, Martian Manhunter! Marcus Dixon of Alias! I’m sensing a theme), meets with Samuel Aboah regarding the latter's naturalization papers. Turns out Samuel is the normal, unassuming man from the plane, but he’s looking a little feverish and his skin is blotchy. Duff gives Aboah a pep talk. We’ll see how that plays out.
Mulder gets the test results from Agent Pendrell, who is crestfallen because Scully won’t be joining them. He shows Fox a seed indigenous only to parts of West Africa. He learns it’s a cortical depressant and calls Dana. She says Owen’s pituitary gland was necrotized, but she still doesn’t know what caused the condition. Mulder goes to see Maria Covarrubias -- Mr. X’s replacement -- at the United Nations in New York to seek information about the missing men. She denies knowledge of the case but reminds Fox that U.S. borders really are just lines on a map.
A young black man gets stung by one of the seeds while sitting at a bus stop and freezes in place. Samuel is there, all red-eyed and patchy. The next morning, Scully interviews the bus driver while Mulder searches the area for another seed. Fox also has photographs of the first victim – the man from the airplane bathroom – who was returned to West Africa before there could be an autopsy. A Philadelphia police officer knocks on Aboah's door during a neighborhood canvas for the missing young man. Looks like Samuel’s activities are starting to occur too close to home. Very close, in fact, the man is still immobile and inside Aboah's apartment. On the upside, Samuel’s eyes are brown and his skin looks normal again. Aboah does a reverse fire eater and removes a long ceremonial-looking stick from his own throat.
Sculder meet with Duff, who is pretty defensive from the get go. Dana pulls the public health crisis card and earns his cooperation. Samuel shows up at Marcus’ office and panics when Fox asks to talk to him. They chase him to an alley where Mulder finds him crammed into an extremely narrow drainpipe. Maybe he’s Tooms’ distant cousin. Dr. Bruin analyzes Samuel, who is currently healthy, so Doc thinks they have the wrong man. The agents ask Duff to translate for them. Marcus reminds Mulder that Aboah probably ran because he fears police, not because he committed a crime. Fox isn’t buying it.
He goes to the Burkina Faso Embassy in Washington, D.C. to ask Ambassador Diabria why he quashed the original death investigation. Diabria tells Mulder about the Teliko -- an African folktale -- and how he first encountered it when he was 7 years old. His cousin died the same way as the man on the airplane. So if that convinced Diabria the Teliko was real and had arrived in the States, shouldn’t he be held accountable for what happened to the four missing men? This could have been resolved three months earlier at Patient Zero’s autopsy.
Meanwhile, Samuel is making a Squeeze-like getaway in a food cart. Seriously, how have Fox or Dana not made a single Tooms reference in this episode? Samuel’s PET scans indicate he does not have a pituitary gland. His X-rays are a little questionable as well. Mulder returns and tells Scully that Aboah hightailed it out of there. Samuel goes to his case worker, intending to make Marcus his next victim. Duff offers Aboah a ride home and doesn’t suspect anything is wrong.
Fox realizes Samuel used the food cart as a getaway vehicle. Dana tells him they found Marcus’ car. Catatonic Marcus can’t move while Samuel shoves that ceremonial stick up Duff's nose. Aboah gets interrupted by a police officer who calls for an ambulance. Mulder tells Scully what he learned about African folklore. They separately search for Samuel in a nearby construction site. If the camera closeups are any indication, Aboah's not looking so good. Fox gets all woozy after being shot with the seed.
Dana crawls around the ducts and fires her gun at Samuel, who is looking progressively worse. Scully finds Mulder and the missing men. They are dead; Fox is not, but he’s as quiet as we’re ever going to see him. Dana calls 911 while Samuel sneaks up behind her. Mulder warns her with his eyes and Scully shoots Aboah. He lives, but the outlook doesn’t look good for him in the evolutionary chain. Dana closes her final report with Fox's 10-cent words -- deceive, inveigle, obfuscate. And with those spelling-bee flashbacks, we’ll see you next week.
Sestra Professional:
The world's political climate has always had some kind of unseen but clearly palpable effect on The X-Files. Rewatching "Teliko" makes me think about the reverse. This case just gives our president fuel for more foul-mouthed fire.
As Sestra Am mentioned, the episode marks a return to a kind of Season 1 Toomsy vibe. (Yes, I used a liver-eating mutant as an adjective.) But I'm having a flash-forward to Season 9's "Badlaa." Planes are such a convenient way for nefarious supernatural types to get their groove on.
Not everything is a labyrinth of dark conspiracy: But the difference is how far our agents have come in their three-plus years together. Mulder's able to discern that he sees conspiracy in everything, even when it's not there ... although it's usually there. More importantly, Dana Scully -- once the beacon of light for women everywhere but in the currently airing Season 11 a source of controversy for show creator Chris Carter -- doesn't walk behind her partner, like she was forced to do by Fox in the early going. She can play hero ... and not just in the morgue.
It's also a good time to mention how well put together Scully seems to be in a physical sense as well this season. Dana's wearing form-fitting clothes actually made for a woman and her hair style has been more tailored to Gillian Anderson's face. In short, she's become quite the babe, and it's no small wonder that she's leaving a trail of admiring puppy dogs like Agent Pendrell in her wake.
I heard you were down here slicing and dicing: But lest I get too far off the mark, Scully's got her science on. She finds out about this particular X-File before Mulder does. Dana gets to shoot Fox down early and often with statements about how she found the effect and not the cause of death for the young black men. Of course, Scully can state all the science she wants ... and eventually Mulder will probably be proven right.
Until that time, Fox gets to quip and feel out his mysterious new informant Marita Covarrubias, whose agenda seems even more clouded than those of her predecessors. "There's a Michael Jackson joke in here somewhere but I can't quite find it," Mulder says upon seeing the albino body. That's a politically correct way of story writer Howard Gordon getting his MJ joke across, ain't it?
This guy can squeeze into a coffee can. He could be anywhere: It's always a plus when when our heroes nab their suspect during the episode, but when he can easily escape in a food cart while Sculder are otherwise employed, it doesn't count as much of a victory. Nor does case worker Duff's claim that Aboah merely ran away because back in his country he got used to evading authority figures.
We can also appreciate Mulder getting his hackles up. The show really picks and chooses the moments in which he strays from his usual objective in favor of really trying to solve a case. Season 3's "Oubliette" was the perfect example of this. As he stated there, not everything he says and does reflects back upon his sister. Here might there be a bit of an irk factor because Scully's taken the lead?
Historically, this episode is not much of a fan favorite, it's probably on the lower end of most spectrums. But there's a lot of growth for both our leads, probably best exemplified by Fox rationalizing that fear of the unknown causes people to reduce questions to the easiest possible theories. For the ambassador, it was the folk lore, for Scully science and for Mulder conspiracy. See, Fox is on top of his game too. He just profiled three people in the course of one sentence.
Totally in Sestra Am's corner when it comes to the ambassador and not understanding his rationale for covering up the first death. Was he merely afraid the other ambassadors would refer to him as "Spooky"? It's not like the deaths would just stop after five murders like the Tooms case. Aboah needed constant -- and apparently increasing -- refresher courses.
We keep making references to the currently airing Season 11, and that's a credit to the series being able to reflect upon itself so many years later. There's been a lot of debate about Dana as a victim following the controversial opener, and she's completely the opposite here. Scully saves the day -- and Mulder -- by reading her partner's eyes ... and by being a good shot. Yeah, this was the fictional character we know and love who inspired so many in the real world to get into careers in science, medicine and the FBI.
Guest star of the week: Apologies to Carl Lumbly, but Willie Amayke made a superbly creepy baddie as Samuel. The former Ghana Olympian was cast on the show soon after the 1996 Games in Atlanta, and although his previous acting work was just a bit part in Congo, he cuts quite the menacing figure. It's actually easy to disregard Tooms comparisons because our pulses quicken when Aboah's got Duff, Mulder and Scully in his sights.
Sestra Amateur:
It’s time for a nice, sweet family-friendly episode of The X-Files. Luckily, this one is a bottle ep because it’s pretty repulsive. The score is catchy, though. It starts with a woman in labor inside a remote farmhouse in Home, Pennsylvania. After the bambino is born, the deformed men witnessing the event bury the crying baby in a shallow, muddy grave.
Sometime later, local boys are playing baseball near the property. The batter disturbs the baby’s final resting place and stains his sneakers when he digs in at the plate. Scully and Mulder report to the scene and meet with Sheriff Andy Taylor, who is not played by Andy Griffith. Mulder gets nostalgic for days of yore while Scully cracks about how Mulder can’t live without a cell phone. Dana, I can list at least five examples of Fox not having his cell phone and how it adversely affected you, him and your cases.
Mulder asks the sheriff whether he interviewed the farmhouse residents who have been watching Sculder. Taylor explains the tragic history of the Peacock family and implies they evolved into an inbred, ignorant lot who couldn’t be involved in the baby’s death. Considering the proximity of the body and the condition of the baby, the Peacock house should have been everyone’s first stop.
Scully's autopsy confirms the baby was alive when buried. Afterward, the agents discuss having children. No, not together. Considering the direction of the first episode of Season 11, this conversation is rather disturbing, especially when Fox suggests Dana find a man with spotless genetic makeup so she can pump out uber-Scullys. On the upside, corrective lenses, alien abduction and conspiracy theories aside, the Mulders allegedly pass the genetic test. Fox thinks the baby’s young parents panicked. Dana is already on the inbred bandwagon … for the investigation. Mulder doesn’t think there’s a living female in the Peacock family because the brothers don’t have a sister and their mother supposedly died 10 years earlier.
Sculder find the birthing location inside the Peacock home. Luckily, the boys left some glaringly obvious footprints in the blood which match the ones Scully recovered at the burial site. Meanwhile, someone is hiding and listening as our heroes discuss their next moves. Dana calls the sheriff to update him. After providing some details about the Peacock family, Taylor considers carrying his gun again. But he decides against it, so that should bite him in the ass later.
In his motel room, Mulder is wrestling with the TV antenna … remember those days? The Peacocks take a road trip and quickly ruin Johnny Mathis’ song "Wonderful! Wonderful!" for me. I’d rather think of Chances Are with Robert Downey Jr. and Cybill Shepherd when I hear it, not the Three Inbred Musketeers. They arrive at Sheriff Taylor’s house and beat him and his wife to death with bats.
Deputy Barney Fife, I mean Barney Paster, is now in charge. He gives the baby’s DNA reports to Scully, and they indicate more genetic abnormalities than even she expected. Paster is ready to join their fight and kill the Peacocks, who are giving each other a very creepy pep talk about keeping their way of life.
The trio decide against calling for backup for expediency's sake and head to the Peacock farm. Paster takes the booby-trapped front door, so deputy go bye-bye. Sculder try to divert the Peacocks by chasing away the pig stock with Dana using dialogue from Babe to move them along. (“Nah-ram-ewe!” I’ve never seen Babe, but that line once popped up in an episode of How I Met Your Mother.) The pigs make a run for it while the FBI piglets head into the house. They find family photos which indicate the inbreeding has occurred for generations.
Mulder finds a woman who has no arms and legs under the bed. He thinks she’s a traumatized victim but Scully confirms she’s Mrs. Peacock … in the bedroom … with the photographs. Mama chooses to stay, which clearly disturbs Mulder. Scully tries to reason with Mrs. Peacock, who views the world – and her boys – differently than “normal” people would. The boys return to the house and are unprepared for a gunfight with Sculder. Two of the boys die, but one gets away with Mama. They talk about finding a new home and starting again, which is not wonderful! wonderful!
Sestra Professional:
My, how times have changed. Back in the day, "Home" was deemed so graphic that it came with a viewer's discretion warning and famously only aired on Fox the one time. Now it seems it tame. I mean not tame in the sense of babies squishing out of birth canals and getting buried, but tame in the sense of what's become acceptable on television since. By the way, it's probably important to note the infant stopped crying before being placed in the shallow grave -- cause the show's most experienced director -- the late, great Kim Manners -- said on the episode's commentary that was a point of contention for the network.
"I did, perhaps, the most awful shot of my career when I shot the baby's (point of view) as it was placed in the hole, and the mud was being placed over the lens," Manners said in The Complete X-Files.
So Glen Morgan and James Wong returned to the fold after Space: Above and Beyond didn't fly and delivered one of the series' seminal episodes, reportedly with a desire to produce a truly dark and controversial show. Point, Morgan and Wong. But it's not just the gory nature of the case that makes it so wonderful wonderful, the returning writers really know the characters, and they delve more into who Mulder and Scully are as people while grossing everyone out. Dana wants to be a mom -- and this is a theme that will be examined down the line -- so she's empathizing with the mother of the baby. Since shippers consider Fox a candidate for dadhood, they're happy to learn his family history is in the clear.
There's something rotten in Mayberry: Somehow there's quite a lot of fun to be had in this episode too, and not just because Home, Pennsylvania seems akin to a certain Andy Griffith program. Just to point out Scully's precognitive powers, she likened Home, Pennsylvania to Mayberry before we learned the sheriff's name was Andy Taylor. Morgan and Wong strike the most delicate and precarious of balances because the crimes are so violent and the Peacocks' situation so off-putting.
I don't know if it's due to Dana's heightened sensitivities on this case or what not, but she is really on her game here. Not only does she realize the sons overheard the agents talking during their search of the house, she even solves how an infant with that many birth defects could have been born of the Peacock's mother before she learns the matriarch is still alive. Using a pop-culture Babe reference only makes Scully more of a ... well, I'll say it, babe. (Although note to Dana, the pig in the movie uses that phrase to move the sheep, not fellow oinkers.)
I knew we couldn't stay hidden forever: Mulder's big contribution to the proceedings proves to be obvious statements on the boys' undiluted animal behavior and how our heroes are intruders trying to stop the Peacocks from obeying the most savage laws of nature. Better luck next episode, Fox, you may now return to smelling baseballs at your leisure.
Sestra Am was reminded of the final moments of the just-aired Season 11 opener during Sculder's genetics discussion, but Mama Peacock's diatribe -- "I can tell you don't have no children. Maybe one day, you'll learn. The pride, the love. When you know your boy will do anything for his mother" -- really hit home for me in a similar way. Exactly what would Scully's son do for her and are we going to find that out before it all ends?
More than Mama meta: According to the official fourth-season episode guide, put Cadillac down in the not- offended column when it comes to "Home." Manners said the company sent the show a thank-you letter for putting one of their products in the ep. ... In The Complete X-Files, Morgan said "Wonderful! Wonderful!" was used because he liked when a song runs contrary to the action on screen. "Certain songs have a creepy, icky quality that none of us have really openly acknowledged." But Mathis wouldn't let the show use his version, so a sound-alike was dispatched. ... The Peacock's homestead also was used as serial killer Harry Cokely's home in Season 2's "Aubrey." ... A Peacock sequel was planned for sister show Millennium, but FOX gave it the kibosh, according to The Complete X-Files. ... Morgan has often said a story from Charlie Chaplin's autobiography about a quadruple amputee inspired this tale.
Guest star of the week: At Morgan and Wong's behest, during the fourth season we see quite a bit of personnel from the one-season-and-done Space: Above and Beyond, starting with Tucker Smallwood. He's both charming and naive as Sheriff Andy Taylor in a most perfect Griffith manner, but he also fits into The X-Files sensibility perfectly before the character's unfortunately early and untimely death.
In Michigan, a tense couple arrives at a drugstore in a punch-buggy yellow Volkswagon so the woman can get a passport photo taken. Mary Louise Lefante poses with a lovely wide smile but forgets her money to pay for it so she goes back to the car. On the way, she gets drugged by the Gorton’s fisherman and loses consciousness. Her boyfriend, Billy, isn’t looking so good either; he’s unresponsive and bleeding from his ear. The impatient drug store clerk assumes she isn’t coming back and is about to trash her photo when he sees it’s actually her looking terrified. Her makeup still looks good, though.
Officer Trott processes Gerry and takes his booking photo. But the developed photo shows the officer after he’s been shot in the head, which is precisely what Schnauz does next. OK, it’s more like the throat, but the end result is the same for poor Trott. Gerry then raids the drug store for his abduction pharmaceutical of choice. Dana worries Schnauz targeted someone near his last job site. Too bad she didn't consider he would choose her, because he hides under her SUV. Drugged Scully unfortunately doesn’t get to take a shot. When Mulder looks at a recently developed photo in the drug store, he sees a terrified Dana. Fox runs after them, but a man on foot cannot catch a speeding Ford Explorer. 
