Sunday Mornings With Mulder and Scully – Elegy

An elegy is a poem expressing grief for someone who has died in your life. Something said at a funeral. It’s fitting that when this episode about people being able to see the ghost of someone who has recently died because they themselves are close to death’s door finally settled on using the word elegy as its title.

Mulder and Scully begin their investigation into this case at a bowling alley where a bowling alley owner sees a dying woman caught in the machinery that lowers pins onto the end of the bowling lanes only to discover that her actual body was out in the parking lot surrounded by a growing crowd. Mulder believes that the bowling alley owner saw her ghost because three similar occurrences surrounding murders had happened in the area recently. The agents discover the words “She is Me” written on the lane where the ghost was seen.

An anonymous phone call had reported one of the previous murders and this leads the agents to where Harold, an autistic bowling alley employee, is living in the New Horizon Psychiatric Center. Scully believes Harold fits the killer’s profile with his obsessive compulsive behavior. When she uses the restroom at the center to fix her nosebleed (that cancer is still there), she sees the ghost of a blonde woman. Mulder and Scully are informed that there is another victim, and guess what? It’s the blonde that Scully had seen in the restroom. This worries Scully for she is still in treatment for her brain cancer. She decides to get medical attention, leaving Mulder to deal with the investigation alone.

When Mulder questions Harold about the murders, he discovers that the suspect can recite strings of numbers that he later finds correlate with the bowling scores of people who bowl at the bowling alley he works at. At the alley, Harold affixed all the scores to a wall in a back area and Mulder asks him to recite the numbers. He can, but suddenly panics and runs out of the room. The owner of the bowling alley had a heart attack and was now dead. Harold had seen the man’s ghost right before he died. Mulder believes that Harold is unable to speak about his profound connection with the victims because of his autism.

When Scully finally rejoins Mulder on the case after seeing an FBI psychologist, she questions Harold’s roommate at the center and finds that one of the nurses is a huge bully and hates Harold more than most. When she investigates further, she discovers that it is the nurse who is guilty of the murders after she kept Harold’s meds and was taking them herself which triggered violent and erratic behavior. She committed the murders to destroy Harold’s happiness whose innocent demeanor and affection toward the women she killed seemed to make her angry.

After Harold is found dead in an alley, Scully believes he died from a broken heart because of what the nurse had done. Scully finally admits that she had seen the ghost of the last victim in the bathroom and she and Mulder have a tense discussion about trust. About the fear they both share about her health. The episode ends with Scully seeing Harold’s spirit in the back seat of her car.

Inspiration for this episode was pulled from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. One of Harold’s friends in this episode, actor Syndey Lassick, also starred in the film I just mentioned. Another coincidental connection that the show is known for to those of us who follow closely.

While I find Harold’s story interesting, I think the episode takes too long in getting to the nurse as the real killer. She really isn’t even part of the episode until the second half and there was no indication that anything was wrong with Harold until she was suddenly bullying him. That is where the episode falls apart for me. Its saving grace is Scully’s storyline. Her fear of dying from the cancer slowly killing her is finally front and center. It has largely been ignored aside from an occasional nosebleed so seeing how it is truly affecting her and her relationship with Mulder is what makes this episode a standout one.

Two years after this episode aired, The Sixth Sense was released to wide acclaim. The film about a little boy how can see dead people who don’t know their dead reminded me of this episode when the film was released. I think it tells the story of seeing the dead much better than the episode does and has a much better twist reveal at the end. Perhaps this X-File could have been about Harold helping those ghosts find closure instead of an over medicated evil nurse randomly killing women to get back at him for some unknown reason. It would have aligned better with the title – a man grieving the women he lost and helping them move on. That would have been a top tier episode. Instead, its mid. Neither great nor terrible.

Until next week, the truth is out there.