“Mulder becomes obsessed with solving a case that closely parallels an ‘encounter’ he experienced as a child.“

Uh huh. And was this ‘encounter’ related to Uncle Handsy being just a little too bold after drinking five glasses of cheap wine at Thanksgiving?

A campfire near a lake. A daughter and son are sleeping outside under the stars while mom stirs in the bed in their camper. Suddenly, the camper starts trembling and shaking! Earthquake! But not just any earthquake, it’s one of those earthquakes where the lights get really bright and there’s an obvious alien abduction happening! Long story short, Daughter gets abducted right in front of Son’s eyeballs and he calls for his mom in what I can only describe as “bad acting”.

NOOO!! WHY COULDN’T YOU HAVE TAKEN MEEEEE??!

This sounds like a File. A File to file under X!

In her direct superior’s office, I think, one of her direct superiors, I think, tells Scully that Mulder requested to open up a new case linked to a “TEENAGER STOLEN BY ALIENS” tabloid. Scully thinks that this is strange even for Mulder, and that guy is so strange that he eats Cheerios with a fork. She is handed an old file related to the disappearance of one Samantha T. Mulder. Foxy Boy’s sister. The reason for ALL OF THIS. All of it ever. It’s because of this.

It’s not news to Scully. Mulder told her that she disappeared 21 years ago, when Mulder was 8, and it happened right in front of him. Scully is asked if Mulder’s connection creates a conflict of interest with his casework, and Scully, on the record, says no.

It’s all starting to come together, Mulder. Your obsession with aliens. Your unstoppable determination. Your wooden acting.

Grrr, though! Grrr! Scully confronts her dear partner and asks what the fuck he’s doing now. Opening a case based on the Weekly World News? Are you mad, gurl? Mad like a Fox! Did I already make that joke? You won’t hear the last of that.

Mulder pulls out the ol’ slideshow with spaceships and UFOs and newspaper clippings and, eventually, forces Scully to come to Sioux City, Iowa with him so they can harass some grieving family members and look at some corn. Debbie Morris is the woman’s name, and having her daughter kidnapped by supernatural beings is the woman’s game. She introduces the FBI agents to her loathsome son Kevin, who pouts at the dining room table. Mulder stares creepily at the table and wall full of family photos.

During a conversation with Debbie, Mulder brings up the summer of 1967 where Debbie’s name is on record on the study for UFO sightings. She was interviewed as a witness to an event in the same area of the campsite. “They took her, didn’t they Mr. Mulder?” she says with these giant eyeballs.

Kevin sits in front of a TV turned to static while he draws a bunch of 1s and 0s on a piece of paper. When Mulder asks what he’s doing, Kevin just points at the TV and says “it’s coming from there”. Spooky!

Hey. I think this might be “Bohemian Rhapsody”!

Mulder goes to the Binary Numbers Translation Lab and waits six to eight weeks for an answer. In the meantime, he talks to the sheriff of Sioux City and gets his side of the story. Here’s his side: aliens aren’t real, Debbie Morris is a lunatic, the police didn’t find anything, and go fuck yourself sir. Mulder wipes his dick on his desk and leaves the office.

Outside the precinct, the duo finds a note on their windshield that asks them to follow a woman into the library. There, they encounter a classmate who’s being all shifty and coy like she think she cute; she tells Scully and Mulder that Ruby (the abductee, mind you) was planning on meeting her boyfriend, Greg, that night to run away. Greg is a big mean biker guy who is probably 40 years older than Ruby.

At the biker bar full of men and women wearing Harley-Davidson shirts and listening to the Allman Brothers, the burly and beefy bartender tells the duo that Greg is an asshole and that, if they see him, tell him he’s fired! Mulder changes the subject because the bartender has a stupid UFO tattoo on his arm. He pretends he doesn’t believe in that poppycock, which makes the bartender offer Mulder a ride on his hog someday to go check out some shit that’ll change his mind bro! Then he pulls back his hair and reveals a burned, mangled ear.

Check it out! Happened at Woodstock ’69!

They spend the night at a $2 hotel. Some NSA agents bust into Scully’s room at 3am looking for Mulder. In his own hotel room, Mulder is hella shirtless with a placid look on his face. The NSA agents show him the page of 1s and 0s that Mulder got from Kevin, and he plays stupid about. Mulder tells them that NSA can’t boss him around, only his own boss can boss him around! This makes the NSA agents sigh and then admit that the 1s and 0s come from a defense satellite transmission, which takes Mulder aback. The agents want to know how the FUCK he got this information, or else there will be fists to the pretty face! But then they’re interrupted by a call and they leave.

Here are my permits to be shirtless. I think you’ll find everything to be in order here.

How did Kevin get this info in the first place? What’s going on? Well, these NSA agents ransack the 8-year-old’s bedroom like he’s some kind of international terrorist and Mulder wants to go over there and tear them some new, fresh buttholes. NSA drags Debbie and Kevin into their car to take them downtown to waterboard them and take pictures of their naked bodies for the Internet.

Scully and Mulder examine the kid’s bedroom themselves after the house is empty, and Mulder spots the camper outside the bedroom window with a charred roof. He leaves to go check it out and he fondles the soot for a bit.

The Binary Numbers Translation Unit has finished their work! The 1s and 0s are a bunch of different files: a model of a DNA double helix, a sound file of Bach, lines from the Quran, lines from Shakespeare, and much, much more of the kind of stuff we shoot out into space to try to make alien contact.

The duo catch up with the Morrises at the Pentagon and Debbie is super pissed. Thanks for helping and everything, now my son’s butthole has been thoroughly inspected by 45 men. That’s completely cool and rad.

MULDER IS NOT GOING TO GIVE UP. They travel back to Sioux City with the intent to look for more dang evidence to show that Kevin is the link between the aliens and the people that aren’t aliens. A conduit, if you will. Scully confronts him about his so-called “abducted sister” bias, but he won’t listen. Time to check out the campground, bitch.

Charred trees, sand turned to glass, a charred camper? It’s gotta be pretty fucking hot to do all that, Scully. Hotter than even Mulder himself, and he’s a dish.

The scenery would be beautiful if it weren’t ruined by the dipshit in the background.

Next, Mulder chases some wolves into the forest for fun. Then he fires his weapon in the air, adding even more paperwork to his large desk pile. He suspects that the wolves were surrounding a makeshift grave covered in rocks, which he proceeds to clear out even though it’s an active crime scene and it’s very likely against the rules to move some rocks around. It’s on Page 7 of the FBI manual, actually.

Scully asks him to stop. He doesn’t stop. “What if it’s her?” he says, and Scully can’t disagree. The local police later exhumes the body and it’s confirmed by the sheriff to be Ruby’s boyfriend Greg. Mulder discovers a note in his wallet that says “Dr. Jack Fowler – Aug. 7, 2:30”. The handwriting matches the note the girl left on their windshield! Pieces are coming together! Allegedly! Time to find out why Greg needed to meet up with Dr. Jack “Me Off” Fowler.

They detain the library girl, Tessa, and start questioning her. She’s pregnant, Greg is the father, she waived the right to an attorney, and she needs to start talking NOW. Mulder tricks Tessa into admitting that she was down by the lake on the day Greg died. She’s a suspect. Scully thinks she may have also killed Ruby, but Mulder still says it’s ALIENS ALIENS ALIENS! This is the point where Scully has had enough and, as usual, suggests they need to go home and forget about all this shit. Especially since he’s obviously motivated by his damn sister. Always with the sister.

BACK AT THE MORRIS HOUSE, which is empty, Mulder finds the TV turned on to static. Scully finds a whistling teapot on the stove. The living room floor is carpeted with pages of 1s and 0s. Upstairs, overlooking the first floor, Scully can see that the pages form the face of Ruby.

Ahh, when you’re in a college dorm and you’re too poor to afford a poster.

BACK TO THE LAKE IN THE WOODS. Goddamn, you guys. Back and forth and back and forth on the taxpayer’s dime. It’s the middle of the night. Mulder and Scully find Debbie and Kevin in the woods, with the latter moseying toward a very orange light in the trees. Only Mulder is witnessing this, since Scully never sees anything… but there’s nothing to see. The orange light is just the headlights of a biker gang passing through woopin’ and hollerin’. Kevin insists that Ruby is somewhere in the woods, but Mulder tries to tell him that his sister is gone.

Elsewhere, Scully yells for Mulder because she and Debbie discover Ruby’s comatose body. Later, in the hospital, nothing in the biopsy suggests foul play, but Mulder namedrops a couple of medical nonsense words representing chemicals absent from Ruby’s body that point to prolonged weightlessness in an alien craft. Scully confirms the absence of the medical nonsense words. Ruby wakes up disoriented. Mulder pulls Debbie aside and encourages her to let Ruby talk about all those aliens. Debbie is like “get the hell out of here you weirdo”

“The truth has caused me nothing but heartache. I don’t want the same for her,” Debbie says of Ruby. Mulder is disappointed. He ain’t getting any closure today, son.

The episode ends with Scully going over the Missing Sister case file. She listens to a cassette tape of Mulder hypnosis sessions where he recounts the night in that bedroom. Meanwhile, Mulder cries in a church while holding up a photo of Samantha.

My theory is that she faked her own abduction to get back at her brother for flinging peas at her head during dinnertime.

“…the voice in my head.”
“What is the voice telling you.”
“Not to be afraid. It’s telling me no harm will come to her, and that one day she’ll return.”
“Do you believe that voice?”
“…I want to believe.”

Next Time on the X-Files

Season 1, Episode 5 — “Jersey Devil”
Scully and Mulder travel to Newark to catch a New Jersey Devils vs. Philadelphia Flyers game. Mulder gets hit in the teeth by the puck.