It's Groundhog Day with an X-Files twist, but without the leaking waterbed. A man relives his life backward in an attempt to prevent his wife's murder.

Teleplay by Steven Maeda
Story by Steven Maeda & Daniel Arkin
Directed by Peter Markle

GUEST STARS

Joe Morton - Martin Wells
Bellamy Young - Janet Wilson
Guy Torry - Prisoner
Joanna Sanchez - Trina Galvez
Jack Shearer - Judge Kinberg
Cynthia Martells - Vicki Wells
Danny Trejo - Cesar Ocampo

* This is not the first time Joe Morton has messed around with time travel, or with Robert Patrick for that matter. He also played Miles Bennett Dyson -- the man who would one day create Skynet -- in Terminator 2.

Martin Wells wakes up in a jail cell in Baltimore with a large cut on his cheek. Guards escort him out of the cell and put him in a bulletproof vest. Scully and Doggett are on the scene to supervise his transfer to another prison.

There isn't much for Scully and Doggett to do this episode. Our favorite FBI agents spend the first two acts on the sidelines, relegated to advancing the plot through the selective application of expository dialogue.

Despite this light duty, Scully and Doggett approach Wells' outlandish story with the benefit of past experience. Scully, already grounded in the impossible, accepts the possibility that Wells is telling the truth.

In contrast, Doggett reacts according to his experience as a police officer. He's obviously seen more than his share of guilty men trying to scam or dodge their way out of taking responsibility for their actions. Even though Wells is a friend, Doggett approaches him -- at least in the first two acts -- as he would any other criminal.

Even when Scully and Doggett are on screen, they don't interact much with one another. With both agents focused on Wells, "Redrum" doesn't reveal much, if anything, about Scully and Doggett's developing working relationship.

This is not to suggest there is a Scully-and-Doggett-size hole in the middle of the episode. Joe Morton, who plays Martin Wells, is an actor with tremendous presence. When he is on the screen, everyone and everything else just fades into the background.

This presence is especially powerful in this episode, where Morton spends most of his time in narrow, confined spaces. His performance is so commanding that it reinforces the sense of the character's confinement and leaves the viewer with a visceral sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the walls are closing in.

Charisma aside, Morton shows admirable restraint. Although Martin Wells is faced with a desperate, impossible situation, Morton chooses not to take his performance over the top. His situation is desperate, but Wells never acts with the sort of undue desperation that a less confident actor might have chosen to depict.

As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that Martin Wells isn't simply a garden-variety innocent victim. His encounters with other criminals demonstrate that Wells is overzealous in pursuit of his career.

He tells one of the prisoners that he sends people to jail "ten times a week every week of the year." Like Doggett, Wells has spent so much time around criminals that he naturally assumes that even if they aren't guilty of the crime for which they stand accused, they are almost certainly guilty of something.

With this frame of reference, Wells takes the law into his own hands. He suppresses evidence and ignores the possibility of innocence in his pursuit of yet another conviction.

Given his own criminal behavior, what is it about Martin Wells that makes him worthy of a second chance to save his wife? Is it simply that Wells is willing to take responsibility for his actions, to sacrifice everything -- his life, his career, his reputation -- to set things right?

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

What force chose to give Martin Wells his second chance?

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK

Doggett becomes the pawn of an assassin who invades his dreams and makes him doubt the nature of his reality. As if that weren't scary enough "Via Negativa" also features the return of the Lone Gunmen.