X-Files S9E17: Releasing them from their obligations

Sestra Amateur: 

As we approach the end of the original X-Files run, we finally get some long overdue backstory and closure for Special Agent John Doggett, who joined the party in "Within" (Season 8, Episode 1). We first learned about his murdered son in "This is Not Happening" (S8E14), the episode that also introduced us to Special Agent Monica Reyes.

Doggett gets a tip and breaks into an abandoned building. He’s knocked down by an unknown assailant who, surprisingly, doesn’t stop running just because someone yells, “Hey!” Inside a room, John finds a newly plastered wall, which starts dripping red liquid when Doggett claws at it. Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? Nope, it’s real, and it’s a female stabbing victim behind that wall. 

Special Agent Dana Scully gets to conduct the autopsy. Using it as a training experience for FBI cadets, she happens upon a savant named Rudolph Hayes who can profile with the best of them. Team Johnica later meets with Dana, who has identified the body-in-the-wall as Ellen Persich. Scully learns a similar murder happened two weeks earlier because it involved the same knife. John and Monica meet Cadet Hayes and learn he can “see things.” Rudolph easily corrects Doggett’s inaccurate profile of their suspected killer. Reyes seems dually annoyed and impressed by his abilities.

Later that night, Hayes, who clearly experiences some level of social awkwardness, returns to the comfort of his room, which he has wallpapered with gruesome crime scene photos. Some are from the unsolved murder of John’s son, Luke. Team Johnica locates suspect Nicholas Regali, who fits Rudolph’s profile description to a T. Their “interview” seems designed to poke the bear, but Nicky doesn’t take the bait, so our intrepid heroes leave the bar empty-handed. Doggett’s son is clearly on his mind while investigating this case. Back at home, John is thinking of Luke while staring at his box of cremated remains. (Luke was murdered back in 1993 when he was only 7 years old.) 

The following day in the X-files office, Doggett asks Hayes to look at his son’s case file and describes his son’s last day: Luke was bicycling around the block while his mom, Barbara, counted the laps. (In an interesting juxtaposition, the iPhone commercial which aired before this scene showed a boy running his smart phone’s video camera as he rode his bicycle around the block over and over again to demonstrate the phone battery’s long life.) When Luke doesn’t return, Mom goes looking and finds just the bicycle. After an extensive three-day search, Luke’s body is found in a field. With a devastated and desperate look in his eyes, John asks Rudolph for help finding his son’s killer. Regarding the previous day’s case, Hayes claims, “That is your son’s.”

Rudolph shows Doggett his wallpapered room of unsolved mystery photographs. Hayes claims the pictures tell him things and Luke, in particular, calls to him. (I’d love to know who at the FBI did Rudolph’s background and psychiatric evaluations during the application process. Maybe he’s a legacy.) John thinks Cadet Hayes might be nuts, but he’ll suspend that analysis for now. Rudolph reveals the original suspect, Bob Harvey, was Luke’s kidnapper but not his killer. Hayes says Harvey died in a car crash, which Doggett didn’t seem to know. Rudolph doesn’t answer with words when John asks if Regali killed Luke, but his body language is very telling. Doggett takes this new lead to Assistant Director Brad Follmer, who used to work organized crime cases in New York, the same FBI office that investigated Luke’s murder. Follmer denies hearing Bob Harvey’s name back then but agrees to “ask around” for information. John updates Monica, who doesn’t think Regali is a lead, just a desperate father’s hope for closure.

Doggett spontaneously visits his ex-wife in Woodbury, Long Island, but she’s also too emotionally destroyed to even hope John is right. Somehow he convinces Barbara to attend a lineup containing Regali, but she doesn’t recognize him from the neighborhood nine years earlier. Dana meets Barbara for the first time and learns the ex-Mrs. Doggett thinks John and Monica could have a relationship if he would let her in. Doggett, who had asked Scully to compare the physical evidence from the two recent stabbings to his son’s case, thinks the similarities are enough but Dana doesn’t agree; there are too many inconsistencies between the cases.

Cadet Hayes is back in his bedroom, listening to the voices of murdered victims. And John realizes Regali never got convicted for serious crimes because he probably bribed his way to freedom. Team Johnica confronts Follmer, who Monica witnessed take money from a mobster three years earlier. That was her main reason for breaking off their relationship but she didn’t report him to the bureau because she cared about him. Brad claims he was paying a confidential informant. Reyes doesn’t believe him but she also doesn’t have any proof. (That’s an annoying pattern with Team Johnica in this episode.) 

Follmer does have information on “Rudolph Hayes,” who died in a car accident in 1978. His real name is Stuart Mimms, a paranoid schizophrenic who checked himself out of a psychiatric facility. Follmer also claims Stuart was in New York the year Luke was murdered. The feds take Mimms into custody without incident, but all of the crime scene photographs are gone. Brad later meets with Nicky, who denies involvement with Luke’s murder. We also learn the leverage he has over Follmer; Regali has a videotape of him taking a bribe to lose an indictment. Team Johnica hit the nail on the head earlier, they just don’t know it.

Barbara Doggett attends another lineup, this time with Mimms, and she clearly recognizes him. During an interrogation, Agent Scully confronts Mimms with the fraud and stolen identity case. He denies killing Luke, claiming he studied the case obsessively. Stuart says he is still trying to help John and admits to sending the tip which led Doggett to Ellen Persich’s body (and to almost catching Regali). Mimms has nothing more to say and wants to return to the institute. In the bar, John confronts Nicky, who gives a hypothetical answer to the question Doggett has been asking for nine years: Sexual predator Bob Harvey grabbed Luke, who unfortunately saw "businessman" Regali’s face, so Regali had to do something about it. John (not Agent Doggett, if you get my meaning) unholsters his gun to go kill Nicky, but Follmer beats him to it, shooting Regali right in the eye! That’s one way out of your blackmail situation, Brad.

On a beautiful day, at a picturesque beach, John and Barbara Doggett finally scatter their son’s ashes. (When you go swimming in the ocean, do you ever think about the level of human remains floating around you? No wonder we need to shower so quickly afterward.) Barbara leaves and John seeks a comforting hug from Monica. If this was a movie, Team Johnica would live happily ever after. But nope, there are still a couple of episodes left, just enough for Chris Carter and company to deny them the happy ending they clearly deserve.

Sestra Professional: 

So much to unpack, so little time. As Sestra Am mentioned, finally a measure of resolution for John Doggett. Not to mention that they finally made some good use of Cary Elwes. They had a movie star with appeal to spare under contract the whole season, but not until this episode did we get to have any sense of what he could do for the long-standing show. And now it's too little, too late.

The tip: So we're introduced to a cadet who is sharper at sifting through evidence for clues that even our intrepid heroine Agent Scully doesn't pick up on. On top of that, he can shoot down FBI profiles provided by Team Johnica with the slightest of head shakes.

We've seen over the course of a couple of seasons that it takes a lot for Doggett to admit he doesn't have all the facts. And when he does, we know he doesn't just run around asking mediums what they see when it comes to Luke's disappearance and murder. We haven't even seen him take his limited information to the experts in the bureau.

Because of that, this winds up being a very powerful episode for Robert Patrick as an actor, perhaps his most dynamic performance over his run with the show. He shows us so much with his eyes. Through them, we see and feel John's most intense pain, and for the first time, his desire to believe in something that's not quantifiable. This time, for this case, he must believe.

Ashes: That emotion is amplified when Robert gets to play scenes with his real-life wife, Barbara Patrick. Every scene has that much more power. In a season when we didn't always connect to the past, Robert and Barbara bring their personal history to the screen. That kind of makes up for the fact that we didn't spend a lot of time with Luke's story in the past two years. We knew it was there, and the Patricks are able to tap into that well of emotion very quickly for us. It helps, it really adds an impassioned element that might not have otherwise been there for this crucial episode.

Jared Poe's the other key piece to this puzzle. Someone like Cadet Hayes/Stuart Mimms would usually get a season or at least an arc of several episodes to reveal himself. His portrayer's off-screen journey was equally interesting. Poe was a writing intern for the show. And even though he didn't have on-screen experience, he reportedly asked executive producer Frank Spotnitz if he could audition and beat out 30 other actors for the part.

Hayes/Mimms' story certainly wasn't wrapped up in a tidy bow. It was something of a misdirect when the FBI tagged and bagged him, blaming his history of paranoid schizophrenia. But does that really preclude him being able to tap into crimes the way he did or was he better at it because of his affliction? Like he said, that's what schizophrenics do, they obsess. It's an avenue Fox Mulder would have been interested in, were he on the canvas to do so.

A message: So things haven't improved too much at the FBI since the Mulder conspiracy days, have they? They have mentally challenged cadets running around. And we've certainly seen our fair share of compromised assistant directors before. 

The Patricks just break my heart with the denouement of the episode. We do feel for Luke and for them, even though the only one we really had any attachment to before the episode was John. It's a triumph that "Release" enables us to empathize to this degree. The hug between Doggett and Reyes winds up having more power and more substance as a result. Maybe in the future when they have those will-they-or-won't-they moments we've seen in episodes like "4-D" (S9E4) and "Audrey Pauley" (S9E11), neither of them will back away. 

"We never really got the chance to because we ended the show, but I think Monica would have definitely gone further with their relationship," Annabeth Gish said to back up that assertion in The Complete X-Files.

Guest star of the week: The truncated nature of wrapping up Doggett's backstory meant we didn't get more time with Jared Poe. That's a shame, because there was a wealth of potential in Cadet Hayes' intelligence and the questions about Mimms' intriguing abilities.