I had some concerns going into this one. There are a handful of X-Files episodes I’ve seen more than once, and of those, there are a few I thought I loved. Part of me worried I would look at "Paper Hearts" through cynical eyes and see the same old forced-plot contrivances -- all the scenes involving lack of cell-phone communication to move along a story or bonehead, out-of-character choices that really, really question the almighty suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy a show like The X-Files in the first place (Looking at you, "3.") I can say "Paper Hearts" contains my favorite piece of Mark Snow music -- an uplifting, mystical lullaby called "Watergate Hearts." I remember being very disappointed it wasn’t included on the first soundtrack and wasn’t available outside of the episode. Forget calling it "Watergate Hearts," for me, it's "Dot’s Theme," because we only get to hear it and enjoy it during the "red dot" scenes. What are "red dot" scenes? I’m glad you asked.
Mulder seems to be enjoying a restful sleep when he sees a red dot moving along his wall and ceiling. Dot tells him to “Follow” and leads Fox to Bosher’s Run Park in Manassas, then flashes the words “Mad Hat.” Mulder tracks Dot into the woods to the body of a dead little girl, then the light turns into a heart and she sinks into the ground. Fox wakes up, locates the park in the phone book (remember those?) and follows the path he saw in his dream to the site. Mulder calls for an excavation and a body is found. Fox puts the evidence collection at risk to speed up the excavation, but he professes to already know who the killer is: John Lee Roche, a man already incarcerated for killing 13 girls. Roche, played by character actor Tom Noonan – who I know best as Cain in Robocop 2 and Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter – admitted to the murders. So why didn’t he admit to No. 14? Scully identifies the corpse as Addie Sparks who went missing in 1975 and our heroes then inform her father of the news. The agents track John Lee's former car, an El Camino, in attempt to find his missing trophies. Mulder keeps seeing “Mad Hat” via Dot and looks for the vehicle’s camper shell. He finds a copy of Alice in Wonderland (Mad Hatter, ahhh.) Inside the book are 16 hearts cut from the material of the girls’ clothing. (Is Cotton Hearts more accurate? Cotton/poly-Blend Hearts?) Now Sculder need to identify and locate the other two girls.
They visit Roche in prison -- Dana properly refers to them as cloth hearts. John Lee is flippant with his responses, but agrees to tell Fox everything if Roche can have his trophies back. Later that night, Mulder is mulling over the evidence when Dot appears again. (Cue "Dot’s Theme.") Dot leads Fox into the past, to his sister and a night of Stratego and Watergate news coverage. Mulder's relives an argument with Samantha about what to watch on television, but instead of an alien abduction, Fox watches John Lee kidnap Samantha. Is one of the unidentified victims his own sister? The next day, Mulder confronts Roche, who claims he sold William Mulder a vacuum when the family lived in Martha’s Vineyard in 1973. (Bill, no woman wants appliances as a present, I think that killed your marriage more than the secrets.) John Lee pushes Fox's button one time too many times, so Mulder belts him in the face. The guard “didn’t see” it, but Scully did outside the interview room. Fox thinks Roche knows what happened to Samantha, but Dana learns the convict accessed the prison internet the previous day, probably to mess with Mulder’s head. Funny how Scully doesn’t believe Samantha was abducted by aliens, but she doesn’t believe John Lee killed her either, even though that is the more plausible of the two tales.
Mulder goes to his mother’s house to see if she recognizes the material on the cloth hearts from one of Samantha’s night gowns. She can’t say for sure, but she does still have the crappy 23-year-old vacuum cleaner in her basement – the same brand Roche claimed to sell to Fox’s father. Considering how cluttered and disorganized the Mulder family basement is, I’ll allow this teeny bit of plot contrivance. Maybe Teena really left it down there for a couple of decades. Upstairs she probably uses one of those useless carpet sweepers.Assistant director Skinner revokes Fox's access to Roche. Did Scully rat on him for hitting Roche? Of course not, I can’t believe you even thought that was a possibility. It happened at one of those prisons that uses video surveillance. Dana backs Mulder’s belief that John Lee is a viable suspect in Samantha’s disappearance. Walter does the stern boss thing, then let’s them get back to the investigation. Back at the prison, Fox shows Roche the two unidentified hearts.
John Lee accurately describes the scene of Fox and Samantha watching TV and playing Stratego back in 1973. He offers a deal: Mulder picks a heart and Roche will tell him where that body is buried. There’s a 50/50 chance it will be Samantha. This brings us to another forced-plot contrivance: Wouldn’t Mulder have had the hearts tested to see whether there is the presence of DNA and wouldn't that already have been tested against something of Samantha’s? DNA plots are alive and well in the X-Files mythology and I refuse to believe Teena would save the world’s oldest, ugliest vacuum cleaner but none of her abducted daughter’s possessions. John Lee directs Sculder to West Virginia where Fox finds a tree with the words "Mad Hat" carved into the base. Mulder starts digging with his hands – seriously, no shovel? Did you think the body would be out there sunbathing for 23 years? Clearly consumed by the obsession, Fox digs until he finds a girl’s body with a heart cut out of her nightgown.
In the morgue, Mulder quickly realizes the girl is not his sister. He brings the last cloth heart back to John Lee, who tries to use the body’s location as leverage for a day pass to the burial site. Scully isn’t buying it. Unfortunately, Fox does and he springs Roche. They board a plane to Boston where John Lee creepily chats up a young female traveler and her mother. At Martha's Vineyard, Roche describes what happened the night of Samantha’s disappearance, but Mulder finally has the upper hand -- it’s the wrong house.
Fox sounds insane as he claims John Lee has somehow gained access to his memories and dreams. Later that night, Mulder is in the hotel room while Roche sleeps peacefully. (He really didn’t think this one through. You’ve got to sleep sometime, Fox.) Mulder hears Samantha calling to him for help. Outside the window he sees his sister in John Lee's El Camino. Adult Fox unlocks the car door and saves Child Samantha. Dot appears, tells Mulder “Bye” and his sister and the car disappear. Fox wakes up to Dana and Walter banging on the hotel door. Roche is long gone and Mulder is handcuffed. Now, that’s just embarrassing. At least John Lee didn’t take Fox's badge, gun and cell phone. Uh oh…Mulder surmises Roche went after Caitlin Ross -- the girl on the plane -- with the stolen identification. This abduction is on you, Fox. He narrows down their location to an old bus storage yard. Luckily Mulder still has his spare gun. He hears Caitlin scream and finds them in the back of a bus. Fox thinks John Lee is about to shoot the girl, so Mulder takes Roche out first.
Back at FBI headquarters, Scully tells Mulder they’re unable to identify the final victim so the episode ends pretty bleakly. Even my mystical lullaby has been replaced with somber music. Mulder should have been suspended without pay, fired and maybe even charged with manslaughter. (Before you argue he saved Caitlin’s life, it was Fox’s criminal action that put her in danger in the first place.) On a lighter note, did anyone notice Dana's FBI ID badge? It’s a side profile glamour shot that makes Scully seem less like an FBI agent and more like Gillian Anderson playing an FBI agent on TV. So I guess in that respect, it’s pretty accurate. "Paper Hearts" remains a favorite, despite the demerits on my plot-contrivance grievance list. And I'll play myself out on "Dot’s Theme" so I can end on a high note.Sestra Professional:
"Paper Hearts" was a game-changing episode on The X-Files landscape. It gets underway with the mind-boggling premise that Samantha's abduction was not part of the alien conspiracy. And that's carried out with such steely resolve that you believe it for 40 minutes or so. Not only that, you kind of want to believe.
How is that possible when we've spent more than three seasons investing in the idea of the mythology? Give all due credit to writer Vince Gilligan, who strayed far off the path -- but not in a Darin Morgan-esque alternate universe-type way. Save some kudos for David Duchovny, who delivered his best performance to date (and probably his finest for the entire series) and guest star Tom Noonan (so creepy, and most of all, convincing as Samantha's possible abductor). Helping him detail: The opening scene is a marvel. As Sestra Am mentioned, Mark Snow's "Watergate Heart" (aka "Dot's Theme") sets an unusually light tone until Fox finds exactly what the Red Dot is leading him to in the woods. There's none of the usual machismo emanating from Mulder, we're on the journey with him as though we put on shoes and followed him into the forest. Usually there's a beat that enables us to approach Fox's theories with a measure of Dana's trepidation, but not so to start here.
"Paper Hearts" gives us an intriguing look back at Mulder's past history as a profiler. It's being filtered through his present patented X-Files' I'll-do-what-I-want-when-I-want bent, but we certainly can go along with his suppositions about Roche's crimes. Even though the methods may leave something to be desired, his heart is in the right place.
The episode advances Fox and Dana's relationship as well. Early on, Scully echoes Mulder's earlier sentiment from "Aubrey" (S2E12) of a dream being "an answer to a question we haven't yet learned how to ask." She's not just paying him lip service. There's a nicely crafted exchange in which Mulder asks Scully whether she really believes his sister was abducted by aliens. That scene more than any weighs the scale in John Lee's direction. And later, there's the poignant moment at the crime site when all of Dana's investigative instincts are laid bare by Fox's request for help, followed by a nice moment in the autopsy room when he realizes the body he found couldn't be Samantha. I got nothing to gain: The use of "Alice in Wonderland" imagery is blatant, but we're not really hit over the head with a fairy-tale sensibility. Gilligan's truly treading the fine line perfectly while building on a motif he introduced in "Pusher" (S3E17). The Mulder-Roche dynamic isn't too far afield from the one Gilligan penned between Fox and Robert Patrick Modell, the dying murderer who drew Mulder into a game of Russian roulette.
One of my favorite scenes of the entire run -- and one unencumbered by plot contrivances -- shows Fox as an adult reiterating the dialogue we saw delivered by his younger self in "Little Green Men." In David Duchovny's voice, Mulder's words are older, more wary and slightly astounded to be reliving the childhood trauma. And then the bright lights flood the room and the door opens to reveal Roche, not the little grey men he's always accusing of having nabbed his sister. And he's powerless again.That's geography, man, it's just geography: I've never really thought the episode needed to hang the Mulder-Roche connection on a "nexus" somehow created when Fox profiled John Lee. I suppose that's what the "Red Dot" represented and since it was an X-file, it needed some kind of supernatural bent. It seemed more likely that Scully was right about Mulder being right about dreams and that Roche learned details from Fox's interviews on the subject in the prison library.
Like Modell in "Pusher," Roche has a way with words. The way he details choosing a victim because a customer decided not to buy his vacuum chills us to the core. He's almost as good as Fox at recounting the night Samantha disappeared and he wasn't even actually there. And he's got a point about Mulder being OK as long as he can believe in flying saucers. (The twirly UFO noise Noonan supplements that with is priceless.) Fox does fly in the face of procedure a lot. I guess that's glossed over because John Lee will never get out based on the crimes he's already been convicted for. Roche's never getting out, right? (Well, except for the little detour to Martha's Vineyard.) It's a little bizarre that Scully seems to suffer more recrimination for Mulder's actions than he does within the confines of the episode.
Meta me mucho: Keen eyes will note the remaining cloth hearts don't match the nightgown worn by Samantha in this episode nor from Mulder's abduction flashback in the second-season opener "Little Green Men." ... Noonan told me at X-Fest 2018 that Duchovny sunk his basketball shot on the first try and the former Princeton player made two of three on subsequent takes. Noonan added that he made all of his own shots, but the show didn't want Roche to look too good at the sport. ... Noonan's character in the 1989 Pat Morita-Jay Leno film Collision Course was named Scully.
Guest star of the week: Let's let Vince Gilligan bestow the honors. In The Complete X-Files, Gilligan credited Noonan for making him rethink the "mustache-twirling" nature of villains: "I learned that people don't think of themselves as bad guys. ... Roche really believed that he took them to a better place." When the guest star expands the horizons of a writer firing all cylinders, you know you've got exactly the right guy for the role. It's a seminal guest performance, one of the ones invariably brought up when X-Philes are asked to name their favorite guest star for the entire run.
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