5x02 Redux



Ashley Montagu: When we speak of life beyond Earth, what we generally mean is, of course, intelligent life--something resembling our noble selves. It is highly probable that there are such intelligent forms of life in other galaxies in the universe, and it is even *more* probable that many of these forms are vastly more intelligent than we.

Mulder: I've held a torch in the darkness to glance upon a truth unknown. An act of faith begun with an ineloquent certainty that my journey promised the chance, not just of understanding, but of recovery. That the disappearance of my sister, 23 years ago, would come to be explained, and that the pursuit of these greater truths about the existence of extraterrestrial life might even reunite us. A belief which I now know to be false, and uninformed in the extreme. My folly revealed by facts, which illuminate both my arrogance and self-deception. If only the tragedy had been mine alone, might it be more easy tonight to bring this journey to its end.

Kritschgau: Agent Mulder? Agent Mulder.
Mulder: Yeah.
Kritschgau: There is a matter of security--something I hadn't anticipated. Just after I left your apartment...
Mulder: Who are you?
Kritschgau: Just after our last conversation, I was followed by people...
Mulder: Who are you?!
Kritschgau: Are you listening, agent Mulder? Are you hearing me? We can't speak right now. I have reason to believe...
Mulder: Did they give agent Scully this disease? Did they do this to her because of me?
Kritschgau: They may be listening, agent Mulder. They may be watching you--everything you do and say. Are you listening, agent Mulder? Agent Mulder?

Mulder: Put that out! Back away! Get away!

[bang!]

12:24 AM

Scully's answering machine: You have no new messages.
Mulder: Keep going, FBI woman.
Scully: Mulder? What are you doing? Why are you sitting in my bedroom in the dark?
Mulder: It was too crowded in my apartment. I couldn't sleep.
Scully: I'm not kidding, Mulder.
Mulder: Good, 'cause neither am I. There's a dead man on the floor of my apartment. It's only a matter of time before he starts to stink the place up.
Scully: What are you talking about, Mulder? What's going on?
Mulder: Apparently, somebody thinks my life is interesting enough to put on videotape. My apartment's been under electronic surveillance for at least two months. Look at this--courtesy of the US Government.
Scully: That's the dead man in your apartment?
Mulder: Yeah. He works...he worked for the Department of Defense.
Scully: How did he die, Mulder?
Mulder: Gunshot wound to the face.
Scully: Have you contacted anybody at the Bureau?
Mulder: I can't do that, Scully. I can't go to the authorities with this.
Scully: What are you talking about?
Mulder: This man, Ostelhoff, worked for the military. Are you beginning to get the picture? Do you see what's happening here?
Scully: That the hoax is connected to the military, just like Kritschgau said it was.
Mulder: This hoax, your cancer, everything. It just doesn't lead back to the military. It leads right back to the FBI.
Scully: What?
Mulder: This man, Ostelhoff, was set up in the apartment directly above mine. I caught him trying to destroy phone records, on which the same number was called 17 times.
Scully: This is the PBX operator at the Bureau.
Mulder: Yeah.
Scully: Who'd he be calling at the FBI?
Mulder: I don't know.
Scully: Mulder, how long has this been going on?
Mulder: Maybe since the beginning. Since you joined me on the X Files.
Scully: That would mean that for four years we've been nothing more than pawns in a game. That it was a lie from the beginning. Mulder, these men...you give them your faith and you're supposed to trust them with your life.
Mulder: There are those who can be trusted. What I need to know is who among them is not. I will not allow this treason to prosper--not if they've done this to you.
Scully: Mulder, we can't go the Bureau making these accusations.
Mulder: No, but as they lie to us, we can lie to them. A lie to find the truth.

6:47 AM

Mulder: Let the truth be known though the heavens fall. The web of lies entangling us can now be connected back to the very institution which brought us together. The facts supported by a Byzantine plot, executed by someone inside the FBI, who, if named, could be tied to the hoax meant to destroy me, and to the terminal disease inflicted on Scully. In four years I have shared my partner's passionate search for the truth, and if my part has been a deception, I have never seen her integrity waver, or her honor compromised. But now, I ask her to lie...to the people lying to us--a dangerous lie to find the truth, to find the men who would be revealed as its enemy, as our enemy, as the enemy within.

Skinner: Agent Scully...is it true?
Scully: Yes, sir.
Skinner: Are you all right?
Scully: I'm, uh... I don't know what to say. They asked me to come down and identify the body.
Skinner: How'd you make the ID? The word from Alexandria PD is--it was self-inflicted. A shotgun blast to the face.
Scully: I saw Mulder earlier this morning. He was wearing the same clothes.
Skinner: I'm very sorry. Agent Scully...section chief Blevins wants you in for questioning on this. He believes you have information that you haven't come forward with.

DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH
PROJECTS AGENCY
8:24 AM

Mulder: The military connection to the conspiracy we had pierced was now undeniable. The man who lay dead in my apartment worked for the Department of Defense, at its Advanced Research Facility. What I might find here, I was uncertain of, but my crime had provided me access. As long as they believed Scully's lie, that it was me lying on that floor, I might learn truths here. But if our lies were discovered, both Scully and I would be discovered with them.

FBI HEADQUARTERS
WASHINGTON, D.C.
8:41 AM

Blevins: Agent Scully, please have a seat. Some time has passed since you were first in this office.
Scully: Yes, sir. Four years.
Blevins: From all reports, your work on the X Files brought you very close to agent Mulder.
Scully: Yes, sir.
Man: We're all sorry about what's happened, agent Scully.
Scully: But that's not why I'm here.
Blevins: You're here because we've been informed by the Department of Defense that prior to agent Mulder's accident, you may have been contacted by a DoD employee.
Scully: Yes, that's right.
Blevins: And that he gave you classified information.
Scully: He had information about the discovery of what agent Mulder believed to be an alien corpse. He, uh...he said the body was part of a hoax.
Blevins: He provided evidence of this?
Scully: N-no hard evidence, sir, no.
Blevins: Agent Scully, I suggest you tell us everything you know. If you have any knowledge of this man, you should speak up now.
Scully: What knowledge?
Blevins: His name. Whatever you're withholding, you'll be asked to explain yourself tonight at a joint FBI panel I've asked assembled on this matter.
Skinner: Is this the man? Michael Kritschgau?
Scully: Yes.

Kritschgau: Hey...how'd you get in here?
Mulder: Through the front door.
Kritschgau: You can't bypass security.
Mulder: You can when you have the card.
Kritschgau: Put that away. Put it away.
Mulder: You knew my apartment was being surveilled. How?
Kritschgau: [laughs] Come with me. I was followed from your apartment the night we spoke.
Mulder: Someone at the FBI is involved. This man, Ostelhoff, was in contact with somebody I...
Kritschgau: How'd you get his card?
Mulder: I found it on a dead man.
Kritschgau: Do you know what that is? What you have in your hand? It gives you level four clearance.
Mulder: Level four clearance. That means I get to dine at the officer's club?
Kritschgau: You have access to everything, Mr. Mulder--things I don't. Things I can only tell you about.
Mulder: I need to know who did this to Scully.
Kritschgau: What you can have...what you may find, is so much more than that.
Mulder: What?
Kritschgau: What you want most desperately of all.
Mulder: The cure for Scully's cancer?

10:02 AM

[CM visits Mulder's apartment]

[commercial break]

10:17 AM

Woman: Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I direct your call?
Scully: Communications center, please.
Woman: One moment.
Holly: Communications, Holly.
Scully: Holly, it's Dana Scully.
Holly: Dana, I'm so sorry about what's happened. I just heard.
Scully: Holly, I need your help on something. I was hoping that you could help me with some information.
Holly: Sure. What do you need?
Scully: I have some calls placed to the Bureau on consecutive
dates: on the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth. They came in to the PBX operator. The first was at 11:21, the next at 11:14, 3:07, 2:02 and 5:12. They would have all been transferred to the same extension.
Holly: And you're looking for that extension?
Scully: Yes.
Holly: I got five calls matching those times and dates, transferred to an executive-level extension.
Scully: Whose?
Holly: It's a branch extension. It could be anyone at that level.
Scully: Would assistant director Skinner be at that extension?
Holly: Yes.
Scully: Thank you.
Holly: Okay. You take care now, Dana.

Scully: Yes?
Vitaglione: Special agent Scully?
Scully: Yes.
Vitaglione: This is Dr. Vitaglione, with the Paleoclimatology Department at American University. You'd asked me to look into these ice core samples for you.
Scully: Right. I'm sorry that I haven't gotten back to you.
Vitaglione: I think you might wanna come down here to the lab. There's something I know you're going to want to see for yourself.

11:02 AM

Mulder: What am I looking for?
Kritschgau: Level four is a biological quarantine wing. It houses a series of labs and medical facilities, and an elaborate system for the storage of mass quantities of DNA.
Mulder: DNA from whom?
Kritschgau: Virtually every American born since 1945. Every immigrant, every indigenous person who's ever given blood or tissue to a government doctor. This is what I was telling you, agent Mulder. This is the hoax into which you've been drawn. The roots go back 50 years, at the end of World War II. Playing on a virulent national appetite for bogus revelation and a public newly fearful of something called the atom bomb, the US military command began to fan the flames of what were being called "flying saucer" stories. There are truths which can kill a nation, agent Mulder. The military needed something to deflect attention away from its arms strategy--global domination through the capability of total enemy annihilation. The nuclear card was fine as long as we alone could play it, but the generals and politicos knew what they could not win, was a public relations war. Those photos from Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not faces Americans wanted to see in the mirror. Oppenheimer knew it, of course, but we silenced him. When the Russians developed the bomb, the feared in the military was not for safety at home, but for armistice and treaties. The business of America isn't business--it's war. Since antietam, nothing has driven the economy faster. We needed a reason to spend money. When there wasn't a war to justify it, we called it "war" anyway. The cold war was essentially a 50-year public relations battle. A pitched game of chicken against an enemy we not much more than called names. The communists called us a few names, too. "We will bury you," Khrushchev said, and the public believed it. After what McCarthy had done to the country, they ate it with a big spoon. We squared off a few times: in Cuba, Korea and Vietnam, but nobody dropped the bomb--nobody dared.
Mulder: What does any of this have to do with flying saucers?
Kritschgau: The US military saw a good thing in '47, when the Roswell story broke. The more we denied it, the more people believed it was true--aliens had landed. A made-to-order cover story for generals looking to develop the national war chest. They opened official investigations with names like "Grudge," "Twinkle," "Project Blue Book," "Majestic 12." They brought in professors and congressmen, and fed them enough bogus fact, enough fuzzy photos and eyewitness accounts that they believed it, too. They even hooked MacArthur, for God's sake. I can't tell you how fortuitous the timing of it all was. Do you know when the first supersonic flight was, agent Mulder? 1947. Soon, every experimental aircraft being flown was a UFO sighting. When the abduction stories started up, it was too perfect. We'd almost gotten caught in Korea--an ambitious misstep. China and the Soviets knew it. The U.N. got all heated up at us.
Mulder: Germ warfare. We were accused of using it on the Koreans.
Kritschgau: It was developmental then. Nothing like what we or the Russians have now. The bio-weapons used in the Gulf War were so ingenious as to be almost undetectable. Developed right in this very building.
Mulder: These reports of abductions--you're saying they've been lies.
Kritschgau: Not lies exactly, but citizens taken unsuspecting and tested. A classified military project above top secret and still ongoing. You've heard the recent denials about Roswell by the military and the CIA. What's been the effect? Even wilder and more widespread belief. The American appetite for bogus revelation, agent Mulder.
Mulder: But I've seen aliens. I've witnessed these things.
Kritschgau: You've seen what they wanted you to see. The line between science and science fiction doesn't exist anymore. What this is about is control of the very elements of life--DNA. Yours, mine, everyone's.
Mulder: Then why a hoax? Why create hard evidence--an alien body that could be disproved?
Kritschgau: The body you found was so good, so believable, that only a directed and scientific examination would have proven the fraud.
Mulder: Scully would have known.
Kritschgau: The timing of the hoax was planned so agent Scully wouldn't be alive to do an examination.
Mulder: You went along with all this. You let them do this to Scully.
Kritschgau: I paid the price, agent Mulder. When my son came back sick from the Gulf War, that was my retribution. I'm helping you now, but not unselfishly.
Mulder: You believe there's a cure for him in here, too.
Kritschgau: I have to think there is.
MP: Michael Kritschgau...may we talk to you?
Kritschgau: What about?
MP: DoD is detaining you for questioning. Would you come with us, Mr. Kritschgau? Sir?

12:11 PM

Elder: I was told that you needed to see me. That there was some urgency.
CM: It seems I've been left out of the loop.
Elder: Left out?
CM: You were watching Mulder. You had a man on him. No one bothered to inform me of this.
Elder: I know nothing about a man.
CM: I will not be cut out like this. You need my expertise. Is this being run from DoD?
Elder: If it is, I'm unaware of it.
CM: I've always kept Mulder in check. I put this whole thing together. I created Mulder.
Elder: Agent Mulder is dead. Our FBI source confirmed it this morning. Mulder killed himself. Mulder was an asset. Without his partner, you may have underestimated his fragility.
CM: I've never underestimated Mulder. I still don't.

PALEOCLIMATOLOGY LAB
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

Vitaglione: As you'd asked, I've tested some of the cellular material found in the ice core sample. Because we couldn't identify it as either plant or animal, only as some kind of chimeric hybrid, I put some of the individual cells in media containing fetal bovine serum, and the cells began to divide.
Scully: Well, then they were animal cells that you found.
Vitaglione: They are not classifiable.
Scully: What do you mean? You said there was mitotic cell division.
Vitaglione: When the cells began to divide, they didn't just multiply--they began to go through the stages of morula, blastula, gastrula...
Scully: They began somatic development?
Vitaglione: The beginning of a life-form. Growing into what...I don't know.

Mulder: I had come here looking for answers, hoping not only to lay bare this conspiracy against the country and the men behind it, but to finally learn the truth about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now, with what I've heard, my beliefs seem more and more improbable. The possibility of a cure for Scully somewhere inside these walls, my only hope. But if I might find it and somehow save her, the very existence of this cure would mean with certainty that I have believed in a lie from the start.

[commercial break]

Scully: I had no way to reach agent Mulder to tell him what I had discovered--an unidentified microscopic life-form, whose very existence held the possibility of revelation. Was this organism, extracted from the ice which had entombed the alien corpse, the germ cell that might give proof of extraterrestrial life, or was it just the opposite--the scientifically engineered creation of a chimera? An unclassifiable biological product, designed to set up a hoax, manufactured to create the false beliefs that have long driven agent Mulder. I now began to realize that the answer to this question might exist within the life-form itself--biological proof of its connection to the cancer invading my body, to a virus living inside this organism, to which I had been exposed during my abduction three years ago.

2:04 PM

Vitaglione: I'm still not sure what you're hoping to find here.
Scully: I need to do a southern blot, to run the culture that you showed me against my own DNA. You said that the unclassified cells you looked at under the E.M. were full of virus.
Vitaglione: Right. What are you looking for?
Scully: A match. And I need it before 7.
Vitaglione: Tonight? Not going to happen. Not unless we have a blazing hot probe.
Scully: It's got to happen. Everything in my life depends on it.

[Skinner walks past the door]

Scully: What are you doing here?
Skinner: I was gonna ask you the same.
Scully: No, you weren't. You followed me here. Why are youfollowing me? Is this more dirty work you're doing for the DoD?
Skinner: Why don't you tell me somehing, agent Scully? Why don't you tell me what you're doing here?
Scully: I want an answer from you!
Skinner: I want an answer from you!
Scully: This isn't your job!
Skinner: My job is to direct the agents under me, to question their motives when they're lying about investigations, to take steps to cease or censure those actions. Your lying is on record, agent Scully.
Scully: And what about yours?
Skinner: On my desk, I have the pathology and forensics reports for the body found in Mulder's apartment. Now, you have to answer for yourself in five hours. As you compound the lies, you compound the consequences for them.
Scully: All lies lead to the truth, isn't that right?
Skinner: And what about your lie, agent Scully? What does it lead to?
Scully: The truth--about the men behind what happened to me...about my abduction and the tests...about being exposed to something against my will...about being put on a table and having something implanted in me...and then having my memory stolen, only to have it returned along with a disease that I was given.
Skinner: Is that your justification? Is that what you're going to tell the joint panel tonight?
Scully: Are you afraid of that?
Skinner: Considering the dead man in Mulder's apartment was murdered in cold blood and you willfully misidentified him, yes, I am afraid, but I'm only afraid for you.
Skinner: You're going to use that against me, aren't you? You're going to use me as I've been used all along--to preserve the lies.
Skinner: Where is agent Mulder? Your silence won't save you. Not with these people. And if you lie, I don't know if anything can.
Scully: Except proof.

Scully: the cruelest ironies are those consecrated by the passage of time, chanced and occasioned by shocking discovery. I had joined agent Mulder on the X Files because of my background in the medical sciences. My assignment was to question his work, to debunk his investigations, and reign him back into the FBI mainstream. Now, as fate would have it, I am calling on these very same skills to prove that he has been the target of a scheme, orchestrated by someone close to us in the FBI--someone we have trusted above all others, involved in a highly organized plot to keep a dangerous secret from the light of day. I could only guess at what agent Mulder may have uncovered on his own, what he may have found to confirm or deny what he has long held to be a conspiracy to control the public inquiry into the government's knowledge, and contact with an alien race or races. If he had hoped, as I do, to learn the identity of those who sought to destroy us, I had with the discovery of this unidentified microorganism what could amount to forensic evidence--hard and undeniable genetic evidence of a connection between the conspirators and the cancer which has now metastasized in my bloodstream. I have few, short hours, to conduct these tests before I must appear before an FBI panel to explain myself. And as I am ready to lie to them about agent Mulder, I am also ready to confront them with proof--proof extracted from this tiny organism that could blow open a conspiracy of global consequence.

Mulder: If agent Scully and I had been led to believe that the conspiracy meant to destroy us has its roots in the Department of Defense, that fact seem all but irrefutable now. I have gained entry to a large storage facility by a hallway connecting underground to the Pentagon. On hundreds of rows of shelves are materials that reveal nothing to me of a cure for Scully's cancer. And now, as I have reached the terminus of this space, what appears to be an old and antiquated filing system seems my only hope of finding what this man, Kritschgau, has assured me exists. If his own desperate hope for his son's cure has deluded him, I now share his desperation...that among these drawers is a sign, a glimmer, some small confirmation that the journey which has brought me here has not been in vain.

4:41 PM

CM: Yes?
MP: Yes, sir. I had orders to contact you in the event Scott Ostelhoff entered the building.
CM: Is he there?
MP: His key card was scanned through the level four entrance. He used the subterranean access to breach the Pentagon.
CM: Are you sure it's him?
MP: I can't ascertain that. Do you want me to apprehend him?
CM: Don't do anything. Don't say anything. I'm on my way.

Scully: If my work with agent Mulder has tested the foundation of my beliefs, science has been, and continues to be, my guiding light. Now I'm again relying on its familiar and systematic methods to arrive at a truth--a fact that might explain the fate that has befallen me. An investigation that began without, now turning within. Taking cellular material from the unidentified life-form, and isolating a virus contained within it, then matching the DNA from this virus against that which I believe has caused my cancer, I hope a picture will develop--a picture that might confirm my darkest suspicions about the source of this disease invading my body. In hope of providing evidence that its cause is not without blame, even though its cure remains unknown. If science serves me to these ends, it is not lost on me that the tool with which I've come to depend on absolutely cannot save or protect me, but only bring into focus the darkness that lies ahead.

Scully: There it is.
Vitaglione: I don't understand.
Scully: My DNA hybridized with the viral DNA from the cell culture.
Vitaglione: But that means...the material from the ice core sample...you'd have to have DNA from the unclassified chimera cells in your own body.
Scully: I know.
Vitaglione: But how? And how did you know?
Scully: I believe that I was exposed to this material, and it is responsible for giving me a serious illness.
Vitaglione: What kind of illness?
Scully: One which cannot be cured.

[commercial break]

6:54 PM

Mulder: If I did, indeed, have the cure for Scully's cancer, I was now as dependent on her as she was on me. As I had breached this facility, I needed to find my way out to safety depending on Scully to weave her story to tell her tale, to make them believe the lie.

Blevins: Agent Scully, please have a seat.
Scully: Thank you.
Blevins: Agent Scully, we've had a brief discussion. But will you restate the matter we're here to put to rest?
Scully: Yes, sir. Four years ago...section chief Blevins assigned me to a project you all know as the X Files. As I am a medical doctor with a background in hard science, my job was to provide an analytical perspective on the work of special agent Fox Mulder, whose investigations into the paranormal were fueled by a personal belief that his sister had been abducted by aliens when he was twelve. I come here today, four years later, to report on the illegitimacy of agent Mulder's work. That it is my scientific opinion that he became, through the course of these years, a victim. A victim of his own false hopes, and of his belief in the biggest of lies.
Man: You were contacted by a man who claimed he worked for the department of defense--a Michael Kritschgau--who told you that Mulder had been taken in by a hoax.
Scully: Yes, sir. He told me a story which detailed point by point the systematic way in which agent Mulder had been deceived and used. And how I, as his partner, had been led down the same path. Losing a family member due to my allegiance, and contracting a fatal disease, which I was being told was engineered by the men who were responsible for agent Mulder's deception.
Blevins: Were you able to convince agent Mulder of these facts?
Scully: What I couldn't tell agent Mulder--what I had only just learned myself--was that the cancer, which had been diagnosed in me several months earlier, had metastasized. And the doctors told me, short of a miracle, it would continue to aggressively invade my body, advancing faster each day towards the inevitable.

MP: I'll have security stop him at the entrance.
CM: No, it's okay. Let him go.

Scully: Early this morning...I got a call from the police, asking me to come to agent Mulder's apartment. The detective asked me...he needed me to identify a body.
Blevins: Agent Scully?
Scully: Agent Mulder died late last night from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Blevins: Agent Scully...these accusations that you've made--you've been given a disease...
Scully: Yes, sir.
Blevins: They're extremely serious charges.
Scully: Yes, sir. But I have proof. Against the men behind this...of the lies that I believed. What I have here is proof, undeniable, that the men who gave me this disease were also behind the hoax. A plot designed to lead to agent Mulder's demise and to my own. Planned and executed by someone in this room. What I have here is scientific evidence... [falls down, Skinner catches her] You...
Skinner: Somebody get a doctor.

Mulder: What? What is it?
Byers: It's deionized water. It's nothing more than that.