It’s time for everyone’s favorite X-File – the humorous monster-of-the-week episode! This one is particularly hilarious, with some geeky guest stars and a couple of cute nods to fans (for example, speedos and Queequeg).
We open in Shawan, Oregon, where a couple of stoners are huffing gold spray paint and pontificating on life and getting stoned. A noise draws their attention and they see a lizard-man attacking an animal control officer, Pasha. The lizard-man lunges at them and runs. Pasha is alive, but there is another man beside him, dead.
Back at the FBI, Mulder is bored, throwing pencils at the new “I Want to Believe” poster that Scully bought. Since they have been away, the unexplained has been explained, and it has left Mulder in an existential crisis. “I thought it would be great to get back to work, but is this how I want to spend my days, chasing after monsters?” Scully, after asking if Mulder has been taking his meds, tells him they have another case. “It has a monster in it.”
In the Oregon forest, Mulder is disillusioned. He has no desire to talk to the stoners; doesn’t think it is odd that one of the victims was found naked, and assumes that grey wolves or mountain lions were responsible for the attacks. Scully reminds him that people have been killed there, and they should help get justice for them.
That night, the lizard creature scares a transgendered hooker at a truck stop. The sketch that Mulder has of the lizard creature is accurate, except it had two eyes, not three. They find Pasha there, nervous, who claims he was called out for a lost puppy. “Anything larger and I am going to start questioning my life choices.” A growl, definitely not from a puppy, sends Pasha running in the opposite direction. The agents move towards the noise: Scully with her gun out, Mulder with his camera phone out, determined to get a photo. They find a fresh kill, which Scully stays to look over while Mulder continues to look for the creature. Pasha surprises him and offers to help Mulder with his new camera app, which seems to be going haywire. (Should have gotten an iPhone.) The creature jumps out at them, and the men scream, bringing Scully running. She finds Mulder on the ground, briefly knocked out and covered in someone else’s blood; Pasha has decided he quits. Mulder is proud to have gotten a picture, but the creature is still out there. They chase him into a port-a-potty, but when they throw the door open, all they find is a timid British man making use of the facility. They apologize and go back to their hunt. The Brit comes out of the toilet and we see horns on the back of his head, sink back beneath his hair.
Scully is trying to do an autopsy but Mulder, like an excited child, just wants to show her his blurry photos. He got a close-up of the creature – and is proud he called it a creature, not a monster – and shows a video, but it is just a tight shot of Mulder screaming his head off. “The internet is not good for you,” Scully chastises, before telling him that the wounds were made with human teeth. She is enjoying herself.
At the motel, Mulder is woken by screams of a monster. He checks in with the front desk clerk, who is alternating between drinking and sniffing rubbing alcohol. He promises the screams stemmed from an argument with a guest who didn’t want to pay his bill. On his way back to his room, Mulder stops into an open room, which was the scene of a struggle. Of interest, he finds a bottle of the anti-psychotic drug clozapine, and a hole in the wall that was, at one point, covered with a hunting trophy that has no eyes. A tug on the wall reveals a dead space behind the walls. Each room has been fitted with trophy heads that can be used to spy on each room. He lingers for a moment on Scully, asleep in her room, before he goes through another door and finds himself again in the motel’s front office. Mulder assures him that “when one checks into an establishment such as this, one expects a peeping tom.” He won’t press charges if the manager tells him the truth about what happened.
The clerk was watching Mulder sleep (because, why not?) when he heard a scream and checked another room. The man from the port-a-potty is yelling at himself in the mirror, yelling at his alarm clock, breaking stuff, and begging that “this be the last time.” He shifts from human in lizard-man, which is when the clerk started screaming. He confirms that is what he saw.
Mulder takes this new info in to Scully, who smiles and attempts to answer as Mulder runs through the entire conversation – both his side and Scully’s. He finally finishes with “I don’t know what this is or how it came to be, but it’s a monster!” Scully smiles and nods. “Yeah, this is how I like my Mulder.” She still thinks he is “bat crap crazy,” but who doesn’t love a bat crap crazy Mulder? She praises him in an almost child-like manner, on grabbing the drugs. Before they investigate, though, they have got to check out of this motel.
Mulder pays a visit to a shrink who tells him an old legend of a man who must kill a monster by stabbing it in the appendix with green glass. He does so, but then realizes he just stabbed himself – he was the monster this whole time. “It is easier to believe in real monsters out there than the real monster that dwells within us,” he explains of the moral. This was the shrink who prescribed the clozapine to “Guy Mann” – an obvious fake name, but clearly this doc is not concerned with professional ethics. The doc doesn’t think the drugs did him much good, as he was “pretty crazy.” He does admit that he told Guy to go for a walk in a cemetery if he needed to clear his head, then writes a prescription to Mulder. He leaves it behind.
Scully calls, and can’t believe she is saying this, but she thinks she found Mulder’s horned lizard man, working in a cell phone store. He rushes down there, hanging up before Scully can tell him about the anomalous blood test results. By the time Mulder arrives, Scully is alone and the store is trashed. She went in to ask him some questions, he screamed, “I quit!” and went on a rampage, leaving out the back. Scully points out the direction Guy went, and Mulder races out – again without hearing the autopsy results.
That direction leads Mulder to a cemetery, where he sees Guy drinking in front of a grave (for Jack Hardy, a deceased AD on The X-Files: I Want to Believe). He pretends to pay his respects to Kim Manners (a deceased producer and director on The X-Files). They start up a chat, and Guy, possibly drunk, rambles on about how he just learned a few days ago that “we die,” and that he wants to die. He then tries to stab Mulder with his green booze bottle. Mulder goes for his gun, but doesn’t need it. Guy gives up pretty quickly and Mulder insists he wants to help. “The only way to help is to kill me,” Guy insists. Mulder agrees, which makes Guy quite jolly, but before he does, Mulder wants to hear how all this happened.
Guy starts his tale of woe. He was lounging in the forest in his lizard skin, enjoying the moonlight, when a couple of men appear, fighting. One of the men, Pasha, bites him, and Guy fought him off. When Guy woke in the morning, he was in human form. He heard his voice in his head, was suddenly conscious of his own self-consciousness and nudity, and immediately felt the need to clothe himself. He took the clothing off one of the dead bodies around him, and once he did, he became “possessed” with the idea that he had to hunt down a job. He did, at the phone store. Now that he is human (at least some of the time) he possesses the ability to BS his way through anything.
That night, Guy was so exhausted, he “killed a cow”: ordered a burger and fries from a drive-thru, even though he didn’t have a car. Guy, as a lizard, is an insectivore. He took his “kill” and checked into a motel, where he spent the rest of the day watching human porn. As night approached, he slowly shifted into his lizard form again, and was very excited, stripping down to his briefs. He slept peacefully, but when he woke in the morning, he was human again, and had a desperate need for coffee. He returned to work, desperate to quit, but fearful that he wouldn’t be able to pay bills or afford a mortgage, which he suddenly wanted desperately. He visited a “witch doctor” (the psychiatrist) and hoped the meds he was given would change him back to his lizard form permanently. They didn’t, so he did something insane: he got a puppy. He named the little terrier Dagoo, and was immensely happy playing with the little guy, until he came home from work the next day and discovered that the maid had let him out. Guy was heartbroken and went searching for him, which was what led him to the truck stop.
It was at the truck stop that Guy found him, the human who bit him. Seeing Pasha filled him with the most human of emotions: the desire for revenge. He stalked Pasha, planning to strangle him and eat his flesh, but as Guy approached, he saw Pasha doing just that to another human. He was horrified, shed his human clothes, and decided to return to the wild. Alas, he turned back into a human, so he felt compelled to return to work. This is when Scully comes into the shop, but in Guy’s version, Scully comes in for help with her phone because guys aren’t sending her pics, and she lures him into the back room where they have sex against a wall. Clearly he has watched too much porn. Mulder stops Guy’s story, knowing he lied about that part. Guy relents. “Ever since I became human I feel the need to lie about my sex life,” he admits, but insists that is the only lie he has told. Mulder takes this all in, finds it fantastic and silly but he wants to believe. Guy now begs him to kill him but discovers Mulder’s badge in his coat, and is offended that Mulder is the fuzz, a “human rat fink,” and calls him a monster.
With nothing left to do, Mulder drinks. He semi-passes out on the graves, and wakes when his cell phone starts playing The X-Files theme song. It is Scully, of course, and he tells her the tale of the lizard who became a man, not a man who became a lizard. Both scenarios feel equally foolish to him, and he sadly deletes the photos on his phone. Scully doesn’t sense his sad tone. She is at the animal shelter, waiting to speak to Pasha, and playing with a little terrier in a cage (the same one that Guy lost), reminiscing about when she had a puppy. She misses having a dog, but suddenly Pasha slips out and hooks her in his snare pole. Mulder calls for backup and rushes to the shelter.
The fight is over by the time Mulder gets there. The place is a disaster, with many dogs out of their kennels. Scully has Pasha on the ground, cuffing him. The autopsy revealed that the victims had been killed by strangulation, the marks of which she matched to the snare pole. The bites were post-mortem. Mulder realized that it wasn’t the were-lizard when, in examining the photos, he noticed the bite on lizard-Guy was a human bite. Mulder’s brain starts churning and he rushes out. Scully checks to make sure no one is looking, and takes the puppy home with her.
Mulder returns to the woods, where he finds Guy stripping out of his human clothes. He tells Guy that he knows he was telling the truth; they caught the real killer. It is time for Guy’s kind to go into hibernation, which he estimates lasts 10,000 years. Despite the circumstances, Guy is glad to have met Mulder. They shake hands, and Guy reverts to his lizard form. Mulder is frozen as the creature scampers off into the forest.
You can watch a preview for next week’s episode, titled “Home Again,” using the player below.
