“A religious sect member capable of changing gender becomes the prime suspect in a murder spree.“

Damnit, this is going to be one of those really bad ones, isn’t it?

The episode opens in a dance club, but there’s a closeup of an eye filled with colors like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Young people are dancing and having fun. A sultry woman approaches an even more sultry man and grabs his hand. She does some eye flirting and whispers sweet nothings in his ear before leading him to a hotel room. They do some PG sexual relations and the guy is all like “wow that was incredible, wow my orgasms, wow”. She walks away to bathroom, and silhouetted in the doorway she appears to choke him out telekinetically. He dies and froths at the mouth.

Is it a man? A woman? Kenny G? Who knows?!

Then this woman bends her gender! She really gends her Bender! And then puts on clothes. Cue the music.

The crime had happened in Germantown, Maryland. Witnesses report a man and a woman entering the room, and then a single, different man leaving! Bizarre stuff, but I’ll be dollars to chocolate donuts that Mulder has already cracked this case handily. He scoops up a small sample of the dried, pink froth off the guy’s mouth and keeps it for, you know, posterity.

Cause of death was “blowin’ an artery”. Must’ve been some good sex, heh heh heh HEH HEH HEH HEH HAHAHAHA!! HAHAHA!!!!! HAHAHAHAHEHEHAH!!!!

Scully wonders why the fuck the FBI needs to be involved, but she should know by now that this is going to turn into a hella X-File. Five similar deaths in the last few months, all during sex, all with the froth on their mouths. Two women and three men. Each body showed huge amounts of pheromones; 100x more than normal. The pheromones contain human DNA, but Scully is already skeptical about that. Studies show that humans may not even secret disgusting pheromones!

Pfft. Shut up, Scully, and pay attention. The killer keeps hitting cities going south, so the next stop is, I dunno, Raleigh, North Carolina maybe? Who cares, it’s time to talk about the religious sect. A similar death occured about a year ago outside the sect. They’re like the Amish only creepier, if you can believe it. Sorry to any Amish who might be reading this on their computer made out of tinker toys.

The sect is called “the Kindred”. Scully and Mulder shove off to the small town outside of the sect to talk to some locals at a general store. The owners of the establishment don’t mind the sect one bit; they bring in tourists. In fact, they have photos on the walls of sect members from the ’30s. They’re creepy. You can tell it’s ominous because the ominous music plays, this is how you know how to feel about them! Hey, there goes a group now on horse and buggy. Everyone wave and throw your tomatoes at them.

According to this map, the Kindred Sect is just up the hill. Next to the Arby’s.

Scully and Mulder leave the store to try a chat with a few of the women, but they’re deliberately ignored. Mulder follows them into the feed store while Scully attempts to chat with one of the younger, more autistic members of the sect. She tries some friendly banter, but he looks like talking to a woman is causing him to cream his pants and he stays quiet until he is asked what his name is. It’s Andrew, and he’s not allowed to talk while in town. She shakes his hand, he starts rubbing it, and Scully looks like she just got pumped full of pheromones. Loaded up. Mulder breaks up the enchantment after leaving the store, and the group leaves on their carriage.

I remember this episode now. It sucks ass.

The FBI agents decide to follow them through the woods to their faux Amish camp. They think they get lost, but they start getting flanked on all sides by a group of members. Scully announces that they’re here to investigate a murder, but Brother Ishmael over her warns them that their weapons are forbidden here in the merry old land of the Kindred. Scully and Mulder just want to ask a few questions but do give up their guns after it is clear that these people are not going to stop bothering them about it. “There’s no reason to be afraid,” says Sister Abby, one of the more congenial members of his little Hell Clan, as she and the rest of her group leads Mulder and Scully into the camp.

I’ll have the potato skins, and Agent Scully will have the mozzarella sticks.

They enter a house where a table is set and ready for supper. They all do a quick prayer, but Mulder notices one guy coughing his lung out at the table. “We’re looking for someone we believe may have come from here,” Mulder says as every starts scooping mush onto their plates. Scully wants to show them some pictures, but Sister Abby insists that they don’t allow pictures. It’s like, first the guns and now the pictures? Are these people vampires? Do they believe in the soul-capturing powers of Kodak film? Scully’s starting to get peeved until Brother Andrew pipes in with curiosity. The agents offer to show one of them some video surveillance. This guy has committed five awful, murder-y crimes and he will do it again (or your money back).

It’s at this time that a particularly dour looking motherfucker slams his hand down on the table. “Your world does not interest us! We have no need for for your violence or your questions!” Everyone takes in the awkward silence, then Sister Abby stands up, confronts this loud asshole, and puts him in his place. The coughing guy starts choking, and the people stop Scully from performing the Heimlich maneuver under the pretense of “outsiders do not interfere with our way of life” or some other weird nonsense. It’s starting to appear that none of this is worth it whatsoever.

Mulder and Scully get kicked out of the camp and escorted to their car in the rain. “Do you believe all that ‘we take of our own’ business?” Mulder asks Scully, and the answer is obvious. Someone needed taking care of and nobody took care of him! That’s a D- reaction! Mulder isn’t taking this and decides to sneak back into the camp in typical, quintessential Mulder fashion.

Fucking sucks that we weren’t invited to the Creepy Cult Barn Party.

The house is dark and silent. “Maybe they went to the movies,” Mulder quips. I laughed at that. There’s light in a nearby barn, so the agents creep on over to take a closer look at the ritual unfolding before them. Mulder, ever so curious, sneaks into the barn after the group leaves to investigate a cellar. Scully keeps on peaking, but is stopped by Brother Andrew and his pheromone injection!

“I can give you information,” he tells her after the commercial break (buy war bonds!) and then leads her away. Mulder traverses a dark, narrow underground tunnel and discovers the members chanting and murmuring. Andrew tells Scully that he knows who did the murders. It was his best friend, Brother Martin. “I called him Marty,” he says fondly even though this guy murdered people like a real Marty.

Something gross is happening in the basement. The people are rubbing oil on the dead body of the choking man.

“I need to show you something. Something about Marty,” Andrew says as he barricades the door of the room they’re in with a chair.

Mulder investigates once the people leave the little chamber. Some sort of makeshift cocoon like a sarcophagus covered in clay.

Marty had magazines! Magazines from the other world! He liked the slickness of the paper and the garish, nude ladies within.

Mulder hears approaching footsteps. He’s fucked. He tries running toward the entrance, but there are footsteps coming from there as well. So he jumps through a man-sized hole in the clay tomb, successfully hiding, and discovers that the dead man looks like a woman now. Cool stuff, this gender-bending cult. I wonder who came up with this stupid idea in the writer’s room.

“How did he kill his victims?” Scully asks Andrew. “Does it have something to do with the ceremony in the barn?” Andrew starts rubbing Scully’s hand again and she stares at him with dreamlike vacancy. “Marty is different,” he explains. “We’re all different.” Then he kisses her, and she’s thoroughly seduced! Sex time.

I named my penis “Marty”.

Mulder interrupts the coitus, so to speak, and throws Andrew off of her. There is a group waiting outside. “I told you not to interfere,” says Sister Abby coldly. There’s a 20-minute staredown before Mulder and Scully walk away back off the camp.

“What the hell were you doing back there?” Mulder asks her.
“I don’t know,” Scully replies hazily. She’s all flushed with primality. It’s disgusting.

Next we’re back at the loud club where a guy attempts to speak on his brick-sized cell phone. A “woman” approaches and seduces the guy with a simple touch on the hand. They go off for some lewd business.

When asked what Mulder saw in the cellar, he tells Scully that it was “Brother Whatshisname in a gopher hole in the wall — buried alive.” He looked like he was pumped full of hormones, the kind that makes a man into a woman or vice versa and this episode is teetering on offensiveness but it hasn’t crossed the line yet, luckily.

A cop stops the couple in the far mid-fuck. While the “woman” talks to the officer, the guy starts convulsing hilariously! The “woman” then kicks the cop’s ass, turns into a man just long enough for the convulsing guy to get a nice, hefty glimpse, then runs off.

“Her touch was electric,” the guy says to Scully and Mulder in his hospital bed. Other than that, nothing unusual! Ha ha ha. Oh wait, he’s remembering something. She turned into a man right before his eyes! Crazy stuff. Off the record right? No homo, Mulder. Please don’t tell anyone. There’s the offensiveness I’ve been waiting for!

The gender bender has taken another victim. He/She monologues toward the corpse about how much “your world” is filled with “pleasures” that “our world” doesn’t have, unless you count “praying to Jesus” and “being rude and snotty” as pleasures.

The rest of the episode sees Scully and Mulder spending suspenseful minutes chasing down the gender bending killer, ol’ Marty. A few Kindred motherfucks are there while Marty is apprehended, and Andrew tells Scully not to hurt him. He knocks the gun out of her hand and they all run off without a trace.

Scully, Mulder, and the local police drive on down to the Kindred camp, which is now completely deserted. The barn is completely sealed off. “I don’t understand how they can just disappear with no means of transportation,” Scully says as the duo runs off through the hayfield. “No earthly means of transportation,” Mulder says, finally shoehorning the alien angle into the story.

They come across a large, empty, matted-down UFO-shaped crop circle in the field…

This could have come from anything, Mulder! This could have been the local ruffians throwing around a giant manhole cover.

Next Time on the X-Files

Season 1, Episode 15 — “Lazarus”
Scully dies and is brought back to life by a secret, magic alien elixir Mulder found under his kitchen sink.