Plot
A group of white and black baseball players play a game in Roswell, New Mexico. One of the players, Josh Exley (Jesse L. Martin), hits a foul ball. Some of the players think Exley has the ability to play in the major leagues, but he does not want to as he is unwilling to draw attention to himself. Suddenly a group of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members arrive on horseback, seeking Exley. Players from both teams fight back and when the mask of the KKK leader falls off, he is seen to have the face of an alien.
In 1999, agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) look through Roswell newspapers from the 1940s. Mulder spots an article showing a young Arthur Dales (Frederic Lane), Josh Exley and the Alien Bounty Hunter (Brian Thompson), and he seeks out Dales at his Washington D.C. apartment. Mulder finds Dales has moved to Florida, but meets his brother (M. Emmet Walsh), who is also named Arthur. Dales begins tells Mulder of when he met Exley back in 1947. The episode then jumps back in time; Dales (portrayed as a young man by Frederic Lane), a member of the Roswell Police Department, has been assigned to protect Exley, who is hesitant about the idea. That night on the bus with Exley and his teammates, Dales sees the sleeping Exley reflected in a window; Exley's reflection has the face of an alien. The next day during a game Exley is hit by a pitch and starts uttering a strange language before returning to his senses. Dales sees green ooze where Exley's bleeding head had rested.
Dales investigates Exley's hometown of Macon, Georgia, and finds that a boy with Exley's name vanished about five years ago. When scouts for the New York Yankees arrive at one of Exley's games, he deliberately plays badly and denies doing so when Dales approaches him about it. That night at the hotel, Dales hears noises from Exley's hotel room, breaks in and sees Exley in his true form; that of an alien. Exley tells Dales that he is forbidden from intermingling with the human race, but fell in love with the game of baseball and remained on Earth. Meanwhile, the Alien Bounty Hunter, who is pursuing Exley, takes his form and murders a scientist investigating the green ooze that Dales found. Dales warns Exley that he is now wanted and Exley goes into hiding.
The narrative returns to the start of the episode. The KKK leader is revealed as the Alien Bounty Hunter, who tells Exley that he must die, and demands that Exley reverts to his true form before he dies, but Exley refuses. As Dales arrives, the Bounty Hunter kills Exley, and the surprise of both, Exley bleeds human blood instead of alien blood. Back in the present, Mulder invites Scully to hit baseballs with him on an empty field.
Read more about this topic: The Unnatural (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)