FBI headquarters. 3:14 a.m. A team of agents has assembled in Skinner's office to investigate the apparent kidnapping, which occurred at the residence of a LaPierre family in Sacramento, California. Mulder wants to be involved; Skinner says it's "not an X-file," but then reluctantly grants this wish.

Daylight. Mulder drives up to the LaPierre house, which is surrounded by police and press. He finds the LaPierres already have a lawyer (whose real-estate specialty makes him a dubious choice), and conducts a brief interview with the couple They lie, claiming the ransom note was found in Amber Lynn's bedroom.

Mulder's mother calls, asks him to get in touch with her when he gets back from the road.

The couple is being held for questioning, Scully reports. Mulder thinks they're innocent, even though he thinks they lied about the note. Also, he doesn't think the girl is dead.

At FBI headquarters, handwriting analysis points to the mother but is inconclusive. Scully worries Mulder is "personalizing" the case because of its similarity to his sister's long-ago disappearance.

Mulder digs through his archives, finds a 1987 ransom note from a case that took place in Pocatello, Idaho. That note contains that same puzzling line: "No one shoots at Santa Claus."

Redding, California. A man in a car watches children play. There's a little plastic Santa on the dashboard.

Idaho Women's State Prison. Mulder and Scully visit a prisoner, a middle-aged woman with short brown hair. She's there because her 6-year-old son Dean disappeared. She'd pled "innocent," later changed her plea to "guilty," but Mulder thinks she's innocent and could corroborate the LaPierres' story. But she declines to get involved.

Walking out, Scully calls Mulder "irresponsible" for asserting this convicted prisoner's innocence, and again accuses him of "personalizing" the case. But back in the cell, the brown-haired woman…

…sees her son standing there, translucently. "Guard! Please get them back! I need to talk," she cries.

Mulder's mother leaves a message in his voicemail. She hasn't heard from him. She says there's much she's left "unsaid." We see she's burning the family photo albums.

Mulder visits the LaPierres and their lawyer, shows them a videotape. On it, the prisoner points out that her ransom note wrote itself just like theirs did. She also states her calm belief that their daughter and her son are doing fine, are protected, "in a better place."

The LaPierres are no longer the primary suspects, say some news anchors. A man is watching a bank of TVs. His belly protrudes before a screen.

Skinner, too, is watching TV, with Mulder. He's irritated at the latter for "gathering Grimm's fairy tales from convicted murderers," and thus interfering with other agents who think the LaPierres guilty. Scully enters.

"Mulder, your mom's dead," she says.

Greenwich, Connecticut. Mulder's mom's residence. Mulder and Scully are there. Cops and a coroner mill about. Mulder looks at an empty bottle of pills, laments he didn't call his mother back. He wonders if she really killed herself. Why are the pictures gone? It all seems so staged.

Idaho prison again. Mulder talks to the prisoner in her cell. She says that she and Mulder's mother both had experience with the "walk-ins" -- "old souls looking for new homes" -- who "live in the starlight." And somehow she feels confident the missing kids are O.K., wherever they are.

Cut to: Santa's North Pole Village. Kids are playing with a reindeer. A fat balding man oversees this seemingly pleasant scene, then goes to a room where many television sets are playing.

Mulder listens to his mother's last voicemail. It says she hopes someday he'll understand why she left so much unsaid. He thinks his mom knew what he'd find in California, and that she'd covered up certain aspects of her own past, such as automatic writing and visions of the missing Samantha.

He suspects this means that Samantha was never abducted by aliens -- that something else happened.

"I've been looking for my sister in the wrong place," he says. "That's what she was trying to tell me. That's why they killed her."

But Scully says "they" didn’t kill her -- she killed herself because, as the autopsy has confirmed, she'd suffered from a fatal, disfiguring disease. Mulder cries, hits a desk, asserts his mother wanted to tell him something. Scully says Mulder's mother was trying to tell him to let go the burden of looking for his sister.

The LaPierre home. 11:17 p.m. Lights out in the bedroom, but Billie sees something -- her daughter standing there, ghostlike.

Skinner tells Scully, who's been sitting up with the grieving Mulder, that the case has "heated up" and the LaPierres want to see Mulder. Skinner's booked two plane tickets, for him and Mulder. Make it three, Scully says, perhaps irritated at this uncharacteristic exclusion or perhaps just desiring to help.

They visit the LaPierre home. Billie's in bed, seemingly not happy to see that Scully has accompanied Mulder. She tells him she's seen her daughter, who was silently mouthing something: "Seventy-four."

The three agents drive up to Santa's in their white rental car. No one seems to be around. They notice there are lots of TV sets -- some doing closed-circuit monitoring of the premises -- and lots of videos. Some of the latter even date back to the 1960s (antedating common use of VCRs).

Mulder plays a video. It shows Amber Lynn, two days before her disappearance.

The bald man comes and shuts the door, locking Mulder and Scully in. He runs off, Skinner in pursuit, while Mulder breaks the door open. Skinner chases the man to a large field and fires his gun skyward.

The man drops to his knees and raises his hands. The agents converge to place him under arrest.

Then Mulder looks around, and we see the surroundings. There are numerous body-sized mounds of dirt.

To be continued.