Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Walter Skinner’s Personal Life

Avatar was the first episode to revolve around Assistant Director Walter Skinner. It gave the audience a greater understanding to who the man behind the badge was which was great for us since the series had the tendency to make us question whether Skinner was on the right side of history.

As it turns out, Skinner was married for 17 years before being served divorce papers at the beginning of the episode. He handles it by hiring a prostitute and wakes up the following morning to find her dead in the bed next to him. He becomes the prime suspect in her death.

Against Skinner’s wishes, Mulder and Scully jump on the case and try to help him. During the autopsy, Scully finds phosphorescent material around the prostitutes lips and nose indicating that she had warn some kind of chemical lipstick. The agents find out that Skinner’s marriage failed because he was emotionally distant and had trouble sleeping because he had dreams about suffocating an old woman. While Scully believes Skinner may have inadvertently strangled the prostitute in her sleep, Mulder believes he was being visited by a female demon.

Skinner’ wife, Sharon, is run down on the road and is severely injured. During an interview with Mulder in an interrogation room after it is found that it was Skinner’s car that hit Sharon, Skinner admits to seeing the old woman when he was in Vietnam but played it off as drug induced hysteria. The Smoking Man is on the other side of the two-way mirror, listening. Gaining information. Because that is what he does. After Skinner is fired, Mulder believes it was done to weaken his investigation into the X-Files since Skinner had become an ally to him and Scully.

The agents look at the airbag from Skinner’s car and find that the face print in it is not Skinner’s so he was not the person driving. After setting up a meeting with a woman who saw the man who actually hired the prostitute who would die in Skinner’s bed and an assassin tries to kill her, Skinner saves the day by killing the assassin. He is rehired in a whirlwind episode that put Mitch Pileggi at the forefront of the show.

Skinner had become increasingly popular during that third season so making him and his past the subject of an entire episode was a great way for us to get to know him better. While things are a little too tidy at the end with him getting rehired, I for the most part like this episode for it managed to incorporate some paranormal into it even though it wasn’t Mulder/Scully centric. While this makes the man a little less enigmatic, Skinner’s internal tug of war while he helps Mulder and Scully but also tries to make the Smoking Man happy becomes a larger part of the show.

Until next week, the truth is out there.