Mulder and Scully appeal to criminal profiler Frank Black to help track down a necromancer who is raising ex-FBI agents from the dead.
Additional credits
Lance Henriksen -- Frank Black
written by Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz
directed by Thomas Wright
What happened
It's a few days before the year 2000. A funeral has just taken place. Mrs. Crouch, the tearful widow, stands near the casket accepting condolences. A "Mr. Johnson," whom she does not know, expresses sympathy, saying he worked with her late husband. The husband, it turns out, "didn’t even leave a note" -- suicide.
Once everyone has left, Johnson returns, swaps clothing with the corpse and puts a cell phone (with luminous display) into the coffin. He repeatedly mutters "I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he be dead … shall never die."
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Quotable moments
Agent [at an FBI meeting]: So that's what this wacko thought he was doing -- raising the dead?
Mulder: That's what he was doing. [Holds up picture from cemetery.] That's a magic circle. The rain washed most of it away. The blood attracts the spirits of the dead while the circle focuses the necromancer's power while protecting him from the spirits he's conjuring.
Agent [dubious]: Okay.
Mulder: He may also desire to wear the clothes of the dead man in order to create a bond between them. You would not want to be this man's dry cleaner.
Analysis
This episode suffers from a contrived story line and an association with creator Chris Carter's uneven follow-up series "Millennium." Even so, this showdown with slow-moving zombies in a Maryland basement represents a pathetic anticlimax to that cancelled show's apocalyptic pretensions.
Over and above this aesthetic grievance, one must wonder how this near-miss to Armageddon fits into the X-Files' own "mythology arc." Are the extraterrestrials -- who ended last season poised for global domination and the eradication of humanity as we know it -- disturbed to learn that the End Time could have been brought about without any input from themselves?
Or could the aliens have subtly manipulated events from behind the scenes to prevent such an occurrence?
After all, given the rather weak powers possessed by the zombies (arguably less formidable than ordinary humans), it seems plausible that supernatural forces in "The X-Files" are of a lesser order than those sinister aliens, who can change shape, possess the living and blithely disregard the laws of everyday physics.
Dangling plot threads
Wasn't the deputy's head found severed beside the highway? And wasn't it back on his shoulders at the morgue?
Will Frank Black get custody of his daughter, or just visitation rights?
Reality check
As Scully says, she "can not even begin to explain" how she could've been attacked by a walking corpse.
One-time zombie outbreaks aside, this episode vividly demonstrates that what Carl Sagan once called "
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