An FBI agent tries to cross the Canadian border but is believed dead when his bike crashes and burns. However, he is still out there, with a piece of alien spacecraft, and he wants to kill Scully's baby.

I always get a feeling of dread when another mythology episode turns up and from this evidence there's still a damn good reason for that. Just as I was thinking things were starting to make sense, along comes the return of the spaceship Agent Scully found in season seven's The Sixth Extinction to clutter things up a bit. Okay, so that itself was pretty ill-explained (it had writing on it that was translated as scientific formulae and passages from holy books but we were never quite sure what that meant), but throwing it back into the mix here seems needlessly complicated. It's been suggested now that Mulder and Scully created baby William the natural way. It's been suggested that William is a super-soldier. Now there are suggestions that he's an alien, or somehow linked to an alien device. Can no-one on the writing team make up their mind? Then again, it's also been suggested that Mulder has/had alien DNA, so where does that leave us?

The episode itself isn't as bad as other recent efforts; we do eventually get something approximating answers, and from the evidence here there's a suggestion that we might find out more next week. However, the start is awfully slow, building gradually by throwing in what Doggett helpfully refers to as 'double talk'. We're still not really clear by the end why the FBI want their agent so badly, or have an interest in the spaceship writing, and we've been told Mulder might be dead but we don't know. On top of that, we have the ludicrous concept that an entire cult has arisen around 'threats to Mulder's life'. Is this some kind of religious experience now? What do they do to worship?

With the show now heading for a conclusion, we can but hope some of the answers start to come out bit by bit, but I'm not hopeful there will be much in the second half of this. The simple fact is that we've seen it all before. The recurring characters get put in jeopardy, lots of people say portentous things, and Doggett's ongoing scepticism when there are now alien ships around him is becoming increasingly difficult to buy when everyone else seems to suddenly be so accepting of what's going on. Not to mention that he should know better than to stand in front of a suspicious car; what were the chances that it wasn't going to aim right at him and run him down? You'd think he might at least have tried to leap out of the way. There's some good acting by Gillian Anderson, but most of the rest of the cast seem terribly superfluous and just there because 'it's the mythology'. Will we ever really find out what's going on? Does Chris Carter even know?

**

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