(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

SHOW: The X-Files
EPISODE: “Elegy”
FIRST AIRED: May 04, 1997

In nine years of ghosts, monsters, beasts, aliens, and vampires (one of whom bore a striking resemblance to Ham), Fox Mulder himself remained the most improbable X-File.  Prone to absurd leaps of logic yet always right, he somehow remained employed at the FBI despite spending our hard-earned tax dollars chasing bumps in the night.

As the supposed central figure of The X-Files, he fulfilled every mythological definition of hero, man on a quest, man vs. the system, man vs. the world, man vs. himself.  He’s everything taught in a high school English class.  But while the show’s writers insisted on casting Mulder as a Christ figure (no, seriously), as his partner, Scully traversed a journey more human and humane.   “Elegy,” Season Four’s exploration of the most funereal aspects of Scully’s inner workings, demonstrates that while Mulder reflected our primal desires for possibility, ideals, and untainted hope, Scully bore the burden of reality, uncertainty, and death. Mulder might have been out there, but it was Scully who contended with bleak truth.  

“Elegy” begins with the same launching pad of all episodes of every crime drama ever in the history of television: someone’s been killing beautiful white women! 

In the teaser sequence, a bowling alley proprietor investigates a malfunctioning lane and sees a ghost caught in the machinery. Her lips move despite her very slashed throat. Horrified, he runs across the street and finds a cavalcade of police surrounding… the corporeal dead body of the woman whose ghost he had just seen.   (In a classic bit of X-Files logic both savory and absurd, the weight of a ghost can disable a bowling pinsetter.)

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With three women dead under similar circumstances, Mulder and Scully arrive on the case.   Mulder and Scully investigate the bowling lane where the proprietor claims to have seen the ghost, and Mulder discovers a cryptic message etched on the floor: “SHE IS ME.”  Hearing of an anonymous 911 caller who claimed “SHE IS ME” were the victim’s dying words, the agents trace the call to a psychiatric care facility.  They single out one of the residents, Harold Spuller, due to his employment at the bowling alley.  When they interview him, the autistic Spuller cooperates but becomes agitated when Mulder asks if he’s seen a ghost.  

It’s all X-Files case-of-the-week business until Scully’s nose starts bleeding, a symptom of her recently diagnosed cancer, specifically an inoperable nasal tumor. She runs to the bathroom, where she sees a ghost of a woman in a college sweatshirt with her throat slashed, followed by a mystical appearance of the phrase “SHE IS ME” painted on the bathroom mirror in blood.  The ghost and the message disappear, just as Mulder informs her of Victim #4: a college woman with her throat slashed.

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A shaken Scully dismisses herself from the case without telling Mulder of her ghostly vision.  Instead, she runs to her therapist and attempts to delineate her feelings in the midst of her condition and freaky supernatural bathroom encounter.    The therapist suggests that Scully has kept on working despite her diagnosis due to feeling indebted to Mulder’s support, a notion that Scully hesitantly validates.  Desperate to explain away her vision of the ghost, Scully reasons that it may have been due to stress or, oddly enough, the fear of failing her partner.

Here, writer John Shiban raises questions central not only to the episode but to Scully’s entire series-long arc: Why does Scully the skeptic strive so hard to do right by Mulder the believer? And if she fears failing Mulder so much, why doesn’t she simply tell him that she saw a ghost, something that would probably send him singing upon hilltops?

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When Mulder further questions Spuller, Spuller sees a ghost of his boss, the bowling proprietor.  Soon after, the proprietor dies of a heart attack.  To help break a hunch into a theory, Mulder consults with the off-the-case Scully, praying at home.  He tells her that the witnesses who had reported seeing apparitions of the murder victims all had one thing in common: they themselves were dying.  Mulder’s observation doesn’t bode too well for Scully, who can secretly count herself among those who have seen a victim’s apparition. He asks her to confirm his theory that Spuller is dying.

No longer a suspect in the case, the police return Spuller to the care facility. The registered nurse on staff, Nurse Innes, berates him and mocks his friendships with the dead women. When Mulder and Scully arrive, Nurse Innes claims that Spuller attacked her and ran away from the facility.  Scully interviews Spuller’s roommate Chuck, who reveals that Nurse Innes had been stealing Spuller’s medication.  When Scully confronts her, the nurse attacks her with a scalpel. After a fight, Scully disarms and arrests her for the serial murders. 

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(The X-Files team doesn’t just borrow the trope of the abusive psychiatric nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Sydney Lassick, who played Chesswick in the 1975 film, plays Spuller’s roommate Chuck, who continually insists, “I’m only a human being,” a phrase repeated so often in the episode, it should be on a T-shirt somewhere.)

Scully reasons that Nurse Innes, unhinged from taking Spuller’s medication, killed the women in order to destroy Harold’s happiness.  Mulder reports that Spuller was found dead from respiratory failure.  Scully responds by finally admitting that she, too, experienced a vision of one of the victims but couldn’t bring herself to believe it, fearing what it would mean regarding her fate.  Mulder expresses frustration that she didn’t tell him earlier, but tells her that he shares her fear for the worst.   After struggling to maintain her trademark stoicism throughout the entire case, she finally breaks down in her car and cries… before seeing an apparition of the recently departed Spuller.

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As a show that relied heavily on guest stars to carry the emotional brunt of playing the weekly villains, victims, and monsters, The X-Files often served up stand-alone tales in which Mulder and Scully have so little to do, they might as well be listed under the guest cast.  Nevertheless, the show proved most effective when the central duo had an emotional stake in the case-of-the-week.  Despite this episode’s anonymous status in comparison to more fondly remembered episodes of the show, “Elegy” is an exciting rarity: it’s an X-Files episode that starts out as a stand-alone, then seamlessly weaves in the driving element of the current season-long arc, in this case Scully’s cancer.  Writer Shiban has essentially served us two versions of the same story.

After all, Harold Spuller has much more in common with Scully than either of them might imagine.   The autistic Spuller suffers from what Scully terms ego dystonia, an acute form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.   As such, at his job he insists on arranging the bowling shoes in their racks ever so, and he’s memorized the bowling scores of every single patron of the bowling alley dating back seven years.  He recites the scores as a means to calm himself while under stress.  Despite living under the tyranny of Nurse Innes, he finds comfort in his friendships with the women he meets at the bowling alley.  

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Meanwhile, despite living under the dangling sword of her condition, Scully finds comfort in both her work and her skepticism toward the paranormal.   Like Harold’s incessant reordering of the bowling shoes and recitation of the scores, Scully exhibits a strong need to file, categorize, and easily reference the world around her using science, reason, and law.

Even the bowling imagery could serve as another mirror for Scully’s internal struggle.  Most of us experience a bowling alley from the same cleanly lit vantage point, never traversing the long corridor of the bowling lane toward the darkness of the pins and pinsetter, established in the teaser sequence as a place of death.  As intrepid investigators who traverse the darkness every week, Scully and Mulder examine this place of death up close, but it’s the stalwart Mulder who bowls a strike in a playful bit of show off, in a sense “conquering” the darkness while Scully retreats from the place altogether. Meanwhile, not only does Spuller hide behind the pins and pinsetter but he practically lives there.  In the course of the investigation, Mulder chases Harold through the pin area and discovers a sort of “nest” that Spuller has built for himself.  As a man defined by longing, oppression, and ultimately death, Spuller is the darkness.

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So if Spuller is the dark side of Scully, then the crazed and villainous Nurse Innes might as well qualify as the dark side of Mulder.  Not only does Nurse Innes seek to rob Spuller of his happiness, but she ultimately robs him of his life due to her systematic theft of his medication.  While Mulder doesn’t exert that sort of cruelty toward his partner, his quest for the paranormal and Scully’s all-too-close encounter with it threatens the only comfort she can find in her trying time. The last thing she needs is to believe. To believe in Mulder’s crackpot theory-of-the-week would mean solidifying her death sentence.   Comparing Mulder to Nurse Innes might shed light on the episode’s mystery of why Scully wants to please Mulder but refrains from telling him of her otherworldly experience.  She’s grateful to him for his support, but perhaps resents him for forcing her to confront the possibility of her own death.  The question of Mulder’s effect on Scully’s life grows even more unsettling when, only episodes later, Mulder learns that the show’s long-standing shadowy conspirators may have given Scully cancer in order to manipulate him for their own ends.  Mulder, of course, isn’t a scalpel-wielding psycho nurse, but in many ways he was a source of Scully’s sorrow almost as much as her support.

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Gillian Anderson’s work during Scully’s season-spanning cancer story was enough to win her the only Emmy that either of the show’s two leads would earn during the show’s nine-year run.  It’s justly deserved; Anderson’s mournful yet resilient performance never skews too melodramatic or too hopeless.  Although she ended up dedicating most of her post X-Files work to the stage, her smart and subtle acting choices are tailor-made for the up-close intimacy of the camera.  It’s not quite known what “SHE IS ME” is supposed to mean, though it may have something to do with Nurse Innes’s wish for the affection that Spuller felt toward his female friends.  When pressed to explain the phrase at the end of the episode, Scully can barely manage a tired, “I don’t know,” and it might behoove viewers to do the same.   One thing is clear, though: while Mulder doled out impossible hunches, choices, and maybe even ideals on a weekly basis, Scully engaged with the scarier questions of reality, life, death, and the questions in between. As a fictional character, her emotional and philosophical journey resonates on levels both genuine and universal. She is us.

~ C.J. Arellano

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About the Art:  Since “Elegy” discusses the emergence of one’s soul after death, I thought the iconic ‘Day of the Dead girl’ imagery was appropriate here. Scully struggles to come to terms with her own mortality, as any of us would, but she does so in a graceful manner. She’s fearful and rattled, but she expresses that fear in an internal and beautifully understated way – the Scully way. In grappling with her fear, she turns to prayer and faith. At the episode’s end, she continues to be unsure and fearful, but maybe she has learned she can depend on Mulder as she continues her journey of acceptance. As for my color choices, the episode had a lot of dark blue hues via bowling alley shadows and ghostly lighting balanced with red hues via our fair share of blood throughout the episode. “Elegy” is also a very spiritual episode, and so Scully’s gold cross necklace is an appropriate use here, in addition to the ‘Day of the Dead girl’ imagery. ~ Aireen Arellano