In Washington, Mulder reposes in his padded cell. Nearby, Skinner consults with a doctor, who says the patient has been quiet for 36 hours but is experiencing intense temporal-lobe activity that eventually will wear his brain out.

Entering the padded room, Skinner tries to talk to Mulder, who at first is unresponsive but then tackles Skinner and tries to strangle him. Orderlies quickly drag the crazed patient away. Skinner walks out, shaken, then finds a note (written in blood) that says: "Help me."

Back in the Ivory Coast, biologist Amina Ingabe, accompanied by a group of workers, visits Scully to help with the investigation. Scully tells Amina she saw a man lurking around, but the biologist warns that the workers are animists who would panic at the rumor of strange apparitions.

Skinner again visits Mulder, who's now strapped to a bed for the protection of himself and others. Mulder writes on Skinner's hand. It's a name: Kritschgau, whom X-Files afficionados recognize as the Defense Department operative who helped spread government disinformation about UFOs.

Outside her tent, Scully is startled yet again, this time by Barnes, a U.S. archaeologist she suspects of murdering the African academic who first discovered the offshore debris.

Any tension between the two researchers is defused by a call to look back down to the shore, where the water has turned the color of blood.

Cut to a shabby apartment complex back in the United States. Skinner knocks on Kritschgau's door. Although the man is understandably bitter after leaking information to Mulder destroyed his career, he agrees to lend his aid anyway.

The two men go to the hospital, where Kritschgau recognizes Mulder's wild brain-wave patterns from CIA remote-viewing studies. As such, he believes that Mulder has become telepathic in a vague but potentially verifiable sense.

He convinces Skinner to inject Mulder with phenytoin, an anti-epilepsy drug that can slow Mulder's brain activity to a normal rate. Once injected, Mulder murmurs: "They're coming."

FBI Agent Diana Fowley shows up in the hospital, only to be put out when the doctors can't find Mulder (his cohorts have moved him to carry on their investigation in private). However, by the time she barges into the room to see for herself, Mulder is back in bed.

Skinner says he'd only taken Mulder down the hall for a change of pace, but she clearly doesn't believe the story. As her superior, Skinner orders her and the doctor to leave the room.

Mulder, meanwhile, seems to have benefited from the change in medication, and expresses suspicion of Fowley. This leads Skinner to buy into the theory that Mulder can now in fact read minds.

Unaware of any of this, Scully continues to analyze symbols on the washed-up debris. She finds that the symbols are not only a peculiar variant of the "Navaho alphabet" -- as Barnes claims -- but the complete human genome.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of reading the symbols on the bottom of the wrecked craft makes it hard to learn more, but what little she has deciphered is still "staggering." The writing spells out passages from Christian and pagan documents, "science and religion conjoined." A stunned Amina observes that some of the symbols spell out a passage from the Koran, which was only written 13 centuries ago. How would this material appear on a ship that had been buried in the sand for a very long time? And why?

Barnes dismisses any notion that these symbols are the work of God. It's only "what we call God," he raves.

Amina thinks Barnes is "mad from the sun," but Barnes says he now "understand[s] everything -- Alpha and Omega and everything in between. But the Word is extraterrestrial."

Thereby feeling absolved of responsibility to mortal laws, Barnes threatens Scully and Amina with a knife. No one will leave before him and claim credit for his discoveries, he declares.

Stateside, Kritschgau has set up three video monitors facing away from Mulder. It's a test of remote-viewing capability -- as three monitors randomly cycle through images, the subject must tap the monitor that shows a flying saucer. Mulder does poorly at first, but then Skinner orders the test sped up, at which point Mulder scores well, banging the monitors like bongo drums.

Night in the African tent. The two women try to sleep while Barnes tries to stay awake to keep an eye on them. Suddenly the tables shake, leading an exuberant Barnes to proclaim that some fish have come back to life before Scully smashes him over the head with a chair and makes good her escape.

Scully and Amina drive toward Abidjan to get help. Scully sees a man standing in the road and slams on the brakes. But the man's gone. Then he's in the passenger seat -- a gaunt apparition in traditional garb. He says "Some truths are not for you," and places his hand on Scully's face. This leads Scully to conclude it's time to go back to the States.

Mulder has become unresponsive again. Skinner questions whether Kritschgau has Mulder's best interests at heart, but then reluctantly agrees to give the patient another shot of phenytoin. Mulder becomes lucid.

Agent Fowley and some doctors enter and confront Skinner and Kritschgau over the unauthorized treatment, but Mulder goes into a seizure and has to be held down.

Later, Fowley returns to pay a solitary visit. She tells Mulder she knows that he knows she is loyal to a man he's "grown to despise," but says, "Fox, I love you. I've loved you for so long."

Scully arrives at the airport and goes straight to FBI headquarters, where she talks to Skinner. He is more glum than she is about Mulder's prognosis. Both agree Mulder's problem is "extraterrestrial in origin."

Back in Africa, Barnes kills a worker, then the leaves the body under some dripping liquid in the tent, apparently to test his resurrection hypothesis. Soon the body is gone. Barnes follows footprints out of the tent, only to find the worker, who slashes Barnes, killing him.

In the hospital, Scully visits the supine Mulder. She says she's found "a key -- the key -- to every question that's ever been asked." She appeals to Mulder to "hold on" to life.

In Africa, Amina finds Barnes' corpse on the beach. She looks out pensively over the water.

TO BE CONTINUED...