A mysterious force may be involved in murders in a small Virginia town. And what are local adolescents doing out in the woods?

Additional credits
written by David Amann
directed by Rob Lieberman

What happened
Virginia. A car stops near some woods at night. A high-school-age boy gets out and meets two of his peers, Max and Chastity. Max makes the boy, Tony, take a vow of secrecy since there's "more here than just trees." A police car pulls up, and suddenly Max and Chastity are gone.

Quotable moments
Scully: I'm not saying he's guilty, Mulder. I'm inclined to agree that Tony Reade did not commit murder. But I think that he saw the person who did and he may be covering up for him.
Mulder: I'm not sure there was a person to see. I think there was a force at work here.
Scully: What kind of force?
Mulder: I don't know. Some kind of territorial or spiritual entity maybe. Poltergeists have long been associated with violent acts like this and they tend to manifest around young people. They seem to be drawn to the turmoil of adolescence.
Scully: Mulder, rather than spirits, can we at least start with Tony's friends? Please? Just for me.

Analysis
This episode unfolds with a bland sense of familiarity. Once again, troubled adolescents are toying with paranormal forces that can only get them into further trouble. Sadly, these adolescents lack interesting personalities, and the force in question remains wholly mysterious.

Mulder's penetrating insight into what's happening -- based on rather limited and ambiguous evidence -- is uncanny and lacks credibility.

Moreover, as with other recent "standalone" episodes, this one suffers from its seeming detachment to the momentous extraterrestrial colonization that's apparently about to begin. To be fair, it's conceivable that the vertical shaft of light in the cave was the product of an alien experiment to test the limits of human bodily acceleration -- but for what purpose?

Anyway, Chastity's performance with the bullet demonstrates admirable competence on her part.

Dangling plot threads
Was it really their relatively advanced age that prevented Mulder and Scully from enjoying heightened speed? Or did they simply not spend enough time in the cave's shaft of light?

And if the latter is the case, could that be because someone turned off the light before the agents had a chance to bathe in it?

Anyway, why does the notoriously wary Mulder trust the conclusion of a "USGS" team of geologists that nothing was found in the cave? Might not the U.S. Geological Survey, a government agency, be compromised by the vast conspiracy manifested elsewhere in the series?

Reality check
Shafts of light that enable humans to move at extremely high speeds are unfamiliar to contemporary science. However, a similar speeding-up of characters' movements occurred once in the original Star Trek series, so perhaps only time will tell.

Tune in next week
Mulder and Scully continue to ignore the ramifications of the aliens' plans for humanity by chasing a very lucky man through Chicago in "The Goldberg Variation".