A series of brutal attacks in a small Idaho town suggests there is a human bat on the loose. Can Scully and Doggett put aside their personal differences long enough to solve the case?

Written and directed by Chris Carter

Who Let the Dog(gett) Out? (Woof)

DOGGETT: You know, I'm not Oxford educated. About all I know about theparanormal is men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but I don't think you're wrong, Agent Scully.

DOGGETT: I have to admit, Agent Scully, I'm at a loss.

DOGGETT: You're familiar with the principle of Occam's Razor?    More Stories What's Ahead for the X-Files? The X-Files - 'Patience' (spoilers) The X-Files - 'Without' The X-Files - 'Within' (season premiere)    Related Links The X-Files (official) SCULLY: Yeah, you take every possible explanation and you choose the simplest one. Agent Mulder used to refer to it as Occam's Principle of Limited Imagination.

It is a dark and stormy night in Burley, Idaho. A gaunt man gets out of a vintage Cadillac and walks into an old house. As he walks upstairs, a woman sleeping in the bedroom wakes up and asks, "Land sakes, George, what are you trying to do?"

His wife makes George -- the local mortician -- go outside to change out of his embalming-fluid-soaked suit. As he stands by the front door, George hears a noise. He looks up and sees a batlike creature hanging above him

Despite the fact that we viewers are supposed to dislike the new guy, Doggett and Scully make better partners -- at least on paper -- than she and Mulder ever did.

Do I have your attention, Mulder loyalists? Good. Let's continue.

Just in terms of pure methodology, Scully has more in common with Doggett than she ever did with Mulder. While the characters are just learning the limits and impediments to that commonality, it suggests the possibility of a powerful working relationship.

"Patience" is a necessary passing-of-the-torch episode. The X-Files are Scully's domain now, and she needs to handle them in her own way. By learning a little "Patience", Scully proves she is up to the task.

The question, "What would Mulder do?" hangs over Scully's head like a cloud throughout the episode. Having seemingly decided that since Doggett has taken her traditional role of refusing to believe, she has no choice but to believe even harder. As a result, she tries so hard to be Mulder in the face of Doggett's skepticism that she forgets everything that makes her a good agent in her own right.

In this, she forgets that the working relationship between agents isn't set in stone. She doesn't need to exude compensatory belief to balance Doggett's doubts -- there's no law that says the show's supply of skepticism is limited, and the palpable absence of Mulder exerts enough of a tug toward the "belief" side without Scully's help.

Belief just doesn't come easily to Scully, even after her experiences at Mulder's side made her a true believer. Mulder's leaps of acceptance and conviction have been a struggle for her throughout the series, and will probably always be difficult.

However, unlike Mulder, Scully is open to the possibility that she might be wrong. This is an impediment to belief, but may just be what we need to get closer to that "truth" out there that the show is supposedly looking for.

By the end of the episode, we see Scully making a limited peace with Mulder's example.

Did Agent Dales investigate the 1956 human bat case? If so, did Doggett find a record of the attacks during his perusal of the X-Files?

What's going on with that pesky mythology arc? Where's Mulder? Why is Scully's pregnant?

Does anyone really believe that Scully and Doggett killed the Bat-Man?

Will other agents begin referring to Dana as Spooky Scully?

It's up to Doggett to save the day when the denizens of a village of the damned set their sights on Scully in "Roadrunners", another self-contained monster-of-the-week epic.