X-Files S4E4: Take a picture, it'll last longer

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."