Back at FBI headquarters, Scully reviews video of a younger, longhaired (but not very young-looking) Mulder being "regressed" to unlock memories of his sister Samantha’s disappearance. Scully then consults with an older FBI man, apparently a psychiatrist. He notes there was big search for Samantha back in 1973, with even the Treasury Department involved.
He says "Why bring this back up now?" and notes that some wounds are too painful to re-open. Scully says this wound never closed, and Mulder deserves closure.
From angels to apes
Just after 3 a.m., Mulder is watching a Planet of the Apes film when there’s a knock on his door. It’s Harold. The psychic presses Mulder to take up pen and pad, because someone – indeed, the agent’s dead mother – is in the room and wants to say something.
Harold squints over Mulder’s shoulder. Teena Mulder is standing in the room, ghostly.
Mulder gets skeptical, then annoyed, and tells Harold to leave. But then it turns out there’s a hastily scribbled note – a message from Mom, written unconsciously by Mulder.
Scully, meanwhile, searches Teena’s apartment, only to find a curiously significant scrap of paper.
She calls Mulder on his cell phone, tells him this document matches a Treasury Department file calling off the search for Samantha, signed "CGBS." That’s C.G.B. Spender, also known as the Cigarette Smoking Man, or CSM.
Road trip to the truth
Mulder is unimpressed, turns aside Scully’s suggestion that it’s time to really press CSM for info. Besides, he’s pursuing the case his own way.
He’s driving on a lonely highway. Harold is in the passenger seat. They stop at a fence, apparently one that surrounds a military base.
They loiter about, Mulder growing skeptical again about Harold’s interest in all this. Then a car with police lights drives up behind the fence. A uniformed man orders them away.
The phone rings in Scully’s apartment as she enters. She misses it but finds something else. CSM is there, waiting for her. He says Mulder and Scully should stop looking for Samantha.
"I believe she’s dead," he says.
All my misdemeanors
Under cover of darkness, Harold and Mulder hop the fence.
They stalk among a row of houses, hiding as a police car cruises by. Mulder says this was "the house."
In the cement, he finds a handprint and two names: Samantha and Jeffrey. (The latter, faithful viewers will recall, is CSM’s son, Agent Jeffrey Spender, now dead at the hands of his father.)
Mulder and Scully meet and exchange info.
He’s unimpressed by CSM’s statement that Samantha is dead. She says Harold misled him; the psychic is a suspect in his own son’s death, and has a history of schizophrenia.
When the agents confront Harold with this, he says he just wants to find his son, and that all this is happening for a reason, and the reason must have to do with helping. He wants to help.
Apparently placated, the agents go with Harold to an empty house. At Harold’s suggestion, the three close their eyes and join hands for a séance.
Scully remains dubious, and even Mulder wonders if this high-school antic will be followed by a game of spin-the-bottle.
Shapes of absent children
But they are surrounded by ghostly figures. Mulder opens his eyes and a spectral boy (apparently the son of Cathy Lee, female prisoner) leads him by hand to another room.
Scully opens her eyes, but the ghosts are gone. She follows Mulder, who tells her a boy led him here. He rummages in a drawer and finds a diary. "It’s your sister’s," Harold says helpfully.
Mulder reads excerpts aloud, while Scully listens.
"They did more tests today, but not the horrible kind," one passage reads. The diary was written in 1979, when Samantha was 14. She writes of hating her captors, who may have erased some of her memories.
The girl who wrote the diary vaguely recalls having a brother.
Mulder wanders the streets a bit. Then he goes to bed. Once he is asleep, his dead mother appears and whispers in his ear.
Scully knocks on Mulder’s door. He answers. He’s slept late.
She’s found a police note from 1979 that leads them to the archives of a hospital where the authorities found Samantha after she ran away. There is no record of her checking out.
Fear of resolution
Night in California. Mulder, Scully and Harold approach the house of the nurse who checked Samantha into the hospital two decades ago.
Mulder senses he’s about to get the truth and hesitates. At Scully’s suggestion, he stands back by the car while she and Harold knock. The nurse, now elderly and retired, comes to the door. She remembers the strange case of that 14-year-old girl -- such a pretty young girl, and frightened.
Harold asks if the nurse has had any visions of the girl, much like occurred with Amber Lynn LaPierre. The nurse says yes, she had seen a brief vision of the girl dead, but no one had believed her.
And the vision made sense, she says. Because men came to pick up the girl late that night. One of them gave a chilling stare when asked to put out his cigarette.
Although these men intended to take Samantha, they never got the chance, because the girl had disappeared from her locked hospital room.
Scully turns and sees that Mulder is gone.
Behind the screen of memory
Mulder is walking in the woods. The fog seems to glow.
He sees the boy and takes his outstretched hand. The boy leads him to a field of ghostly children. They are playing, happy. Amber Lynn walks by, smiling.
Then it happens. Samantha runs up. She too is spectral yet radiant with happiness. She appears to be 14. She hugs her brother and they give each other a long, contented look.
Mulder returns to the nurse’s front yard. "Where’d you go?" asks Scully.
"End of the road," says Mulder. He turns to Harold and says his son is all right, albeit dead.
As Mulder explains, Samantha, Amber Lynn and Harold’s son are all dead. But they’re "protected" and "in a better place." He tells Harold "you have to let go."
The psychic angrily asserts that Mulder’s wrong. He stalks off into the night.
Scully says: "Mulder, what happened? Are you sure you’re all right?"
Mulder replies calmly: "I’m fine. I’m free."
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