A young Muslim man, Shiraz, does his prayers. He makes himself a PB&J sandwich; washes it down with milk. Next he goes for a drive, flirts with a couple cowgirls, ignores some derogatory snipes from the driver next to him. He arrives at a motel, where he greets another man warmly in Arabic. The pair go to an art gallery, saying a prayer before they enter. A minute later, there is an enormous explosion. As much as I would like to say that this was just a red herring, these two Muslim men are, in fact, suicide bombers. But Shiraz doesn’t die.
At the FBI, Mulder and Scully are watching a video in which people report hearing trumpet sounds, seemingly from nowhere. They debate the possibility of this being a trumpet of god, heralding the end of days. Scully is surprised to hear Mulder considering this theory, but he insists that this isn’t a profession of his belief in a god; merely that he is reporting what the people were saying. The theology lesson is interrupted by a knock on the door. “Nobody here but the FBI’s most unwanted,” Scully calls in response. To Mulder, she says, “I’ve been waiting twenty-three years to say that.” “How did it feel?” Mulder asks. “Pretty good,” Scully confirms.
Two young agents walk in, and it’s like looking back in time twenty years (or at least, that is the vibe that Chris Carter & co. are going for). Agent Miller is a dark-haired young man with a square jaw and a penchant for paranoid obsessions with the unexplained; Agent Einstein (a distant relation to Albert) is a young redhead female who, in addition to being an FBI agent, is also a medical doctor. Cute, right? They are on the Texas bomber case, and one of the two bombers is in a persistent vegetative state. The theory is that these two bombers were part of a larger cell, who are planning a bigger attack. Miller thinks Mulder might know someone who can communicate with him in the coma. Mulder doesn’t (those who could have been of help are either dead or have been debunked) and Miller leaves him his card in case he thinks of something.
At the airport, waiting for their flights to Texas, the younger agents discuss Mulder and Scully. The X-Files would be Miller’s dream assignment; Einstein pities Scully, and decides she must be in love with Mulder. “Nothing else would explain why she would waste a career down there.” Miller gets a call, which he takes in private. It is Scully. She has an idea of how they might communicate with the bomber, something she wished she had tried when her mom was still alive. Miller agrees to meet her in Texas. At the same time, Einstein gets a call from Mulder, who has his own idea how she can communicate with the bomber. After assuring her he needs her, not Miller, and buttering her up with praise from Skinner, Einstein agrees to delay her leg of the trip to meet with Mulder in his office. All she tells Miller is that she is “catching the crazy train.”
Einstein meets Mulder, and they have a looong discussion in which Mulder tries to introduce a vague concept to her: believing that thoughts and words have mass. He goes about it in a roundabout way, rather than just telling her what he is thinking. That technique works with Scully because they have a great chemistry, but with Einstein, it just feels painful. He finally gets to the point: magic mushrooms. Respectable science has taken up studying them again. He wants Einstein, as a medical doctor, to administer to him magic mushrooms in the hopes that he will be able to “communicate” with the comatose bomber on “another plane of existence.” Mulder doesn’t want to “bother” Scully with this, but Einstein is having none of it. She refuses, makes a veiled threat to call internal affairs, and promises never to darken his basement door again. “So that’s a maybe?”
Scully meets Miller in Texas, and explains the technique she wants to try. Doctors have been able to communicate with a patient in a vegetative state, known as Patient 23, by putting him in an MRI and asking him questions. Portions of the brain would light up, indicating responses that could be construed as yes or no. (This is actually based on a real-life experiment with a real-life Patient 23.) The pair don’t even get started when a couple of Department of Homeland Security agents enter the room and declare jurisdiction. As far as they are concerned, Shiraz is not even a human. Scully refuses to leave, and the two agents speak to one another in what I assume is Arabic. This makes me think that it is all a set-up, especially when Miller starts snapping photos of them and they back off. But it is never revisited.
Einstein arrives and is denied entry into Shiraz’s hospital room. She does see that Scully is in there with her partner, and jealousy seems to sneak up on her. She calls Mulder and tells him to come to Texas. Einstein picks him up at the airport with a gift: two doses of scientific-grade magic mushrooms, ground up into pills. She admits that she changed her mind when she saw Scully was there, working with Miller.
Back at the hospital, another agent tries to pull Scully and Miller out. Agent Brem claims there is a terror threat against the hospital and the entire wing is being evacuated. Brem launches into an Islamophobic rant, about how the local Muslim community wants to wipe America off the map. “Not all Muslims are extremists,” Scully points out, which makes Brem even angrier. He doesn’t want this bomber to die; he wants to keep him from his 72 virgins in heaven. He gives up on trying to evacuate Scully and Miller, but wants them to “keep the killer alive.” The agents end up leaving, but Shiraz’s nurse stays behind to “care for him.” She actually turns his respirator off, and watches as he flatlines. Before he can die, Mulder and Einstein walk in, and the nurse quickly turns the respirator back on. She starts complaining to them that she has never seen someone receive so much attention, then slips into a xenophobic rant about how immigrants are stealing all the jobs. Einstein suggests they come back later, but Mulder reveals he has taken his mushroom pills, so Einstein takes the nurse into the hall to continue her diatribe. I swear, as they leave, the nurse is railing against “guvmint” programs.
Mulder loosens his tie and has a seat, waiting for the drugs to kick in.
Out in the hall, the nurse’s ranting is interrupted when she notices that Einstein’s “partner” is gone.
Now we enter Mulder drug-o-vision. He is grooving down the hospital hallway, dancing, singing to himself, slapping high fives, all to the confused looks of hospital employees. Next he is out on the street, laughing as cars swerve around him. He finds himself at a cowboy bar, gets a cowboy hat, and line dances. His line dancing evolves into the Pulp Fiction dance, and ends with a backflip. As his visions intensify, he is big pimpin’ at a dance club, surrounded by hot girls in teeny tiny shorts, wearing knuckle dusters that say MUSH and ROOM on them. Skinner is with him, as are the Lone Gunmen, all boozing in cowboy hats.
Things grow more intense when he is next on a red, glowing table that looks like it could be an alien ship. He is shirtless, and Einstein is standing over him in dominatrix gear, whipping him with a riding crop. The whipping continues in the next scene, but the whipping is at the hands of Cigarette Smoking Man, who is treating Mulder like an actual slave (not a sexual one). They are on a boat, surrounded by people in black cloaks rowing. “You want answers?” he taunts Mulder, “You’ve come to the right place.” At the back of the boat is a woman in white robes, holding Shiraz on her lap. I sense this might be referencing some religious iconography, but not being a religious person, I cannot say for sure. The bomber tries to whisper something, and Mulder leans in close to hear.
Mulder wakes. He is in the hospital, being watched over by an annoyed – yet not surprised – Skinner. “Dude, I was on fire!” Mulder insists, disappointed that a rational adult pulled him out. “Dude, you were an embarrassment,” Skinner informs him. Einstein comes in, and she reveals the truth: she gave him a placebo. Those tablets contained nothing more than niacin. Mulder doesn’t believe it. He insists he spoke to Shiraz, but he didn’t know what he said; he spoke in Arabic. Skinner goes to get Mulder discharged, and Mulder tries to convince Einstein he really was tripping: “You were there. You were 50 shades of bad.”
Einstein wheels Mulder towards the lobby in a wheelchair. He still thinks she is covering her own ass; she thinks she will be banished to her own basement office after this. A commotion outside the hospital draws Mulder’s attention. There is a woman outside that he recognizes. This is the woman who was holding Shiraz in his hallucination. He tells the agents at the door that he knows her and takes her inside.
Back in Shiraz’s room, Scully and Miller have the coma patient hooked up to an MRI machine. Miller speaks to him in Arabic, and though the needles are moving, it might mean nothing. Before Scully can set up baseline questions, Einstein, Mulder, and Noora show up. Noora is Shiraz’s mother, and she is shocked when she sees the condition he is in. She speaks to him, and his brain activity spikes. Noora doesn’t believe he could kill. This is not how she raised him; his heart is too big to go through with it. Noora insists Shiraz tells her so in her dreams. Shiraz goes into cardiac arrest, and Miller thinks that he is trying to tell them something. He dies, and Mulder insists that, placebo or not, this was the scene he saw when Shiraz whispered to him. Mulder desperately searches his memory for the Arabic words Shiraz told him in his vision (I guess this is one of those situations where a photographic memory doesn’t help). He finally finds the words, and Miller translates them: Babylon the hotel.
An enormous team of agents raid the Babylon Motel, where Shiraz first met his friend. There they find the rest of the terror cell, all strapped with bomb vests, ready to go.
Miller and Einstein regroup at the airport, both patting each other on the back, humbly insisting the other was the real hero. Einstein now believes that words have weight.
Lucky for us, Mulder and Scully have their own moment. Mulder is sitting on his porch when Scully drives up. She wants to talk to him about his “little scheme.” He knows she wouldn’t have bought it, and he would be right. Scully applauds Einstein’s use of a placebo, and Mulder wants to know how that worked. “Wonders never cease with you,” Scully muses. Mulder saw deep and unconditional love in his hallucination state, while Scully, stuck in the real world, saw “unqualified hate that appears to have no end.” He stands and takes her hand. “Walk with me, Scully.”
They walk hand-in-hand, talking about god, the lessons that didn’t stick, and the anger that remains. Mulder wonders about what words could be so powerful to turn a young man into a killer. He believes that the only thing that could trump the hatred is a mother’s love, as it did in this case (yes, Shiraz blew up a lot of people, but in his mother’s presence, he tried to warn them about a far worse attack yet to take place). Mulder believes mothers have a greater purpose for all of us. “Maybe it is beyond words,” Scully suggests. “Maybe we should open our hearts and truly listen.” Yes, ‘shippers, they should have kissed here, but instead, Mulder hears trumpets. Scully does not.
I bet Scully doesn’t go home tonight. As far as I am concerned, they are back together.
You can watch a preview for the season finale, titled “My Struggle II,” using the player below.
