Tithonus (The X-Files) - Plot

Plot

In New York City, a man with a camera follows a woman from an elevator through a corridor to another elevator, where all the people appear to be gray. He gets off on a floor before the woman's and runs down the stairs. Lights flicker and the elevator cable snaps. As the man reaches the basement, the cab crashes and its door spills open to reveal the woman's wrist, covered with blood. The man begins to snap photos. Later, in Washington, D.C., FBI Assistant Director Alvin Kersh (James Pickens, Jr.) assigns Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), along with Agent Peyton Ritter from New York, to the case. Scully's partner Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) looks at the material on Scully's desk and points out that the case looks like an X-file—and that Kersh is obviously splitting them up.

Scully and Ritter soon discover that their prime suspect, Alfred Fellig, who has worked as a police photographer since 1964, has not aged at all in any of his official photos on his renewal applications. Elsewhere in the city, Fellig watches a criminal kill a youth for his sneakers. When he approaches to take photos of the dying young man, the murderer returns and repeatedly stabs Fellig, but he pulls the knife out of his back and walks away. Scully and Ritter learn of the crime and of the fact that Fellig's prints are on the knife. Ritter demands to know how Fellig always seems to be around when people die, but Scully realizes that the man is in pain and asks whether he was wounded in the attack which Fellig says he merely observed. When she sees the wounds on his back and sends him to the hospital, much to Ritter's chagrin. Ritter reminds Scully that they are trying to charge Fellig with murder, not let him go.

Ritter leaves Scully staking out Fellig's apartment, but Scully is unnerved when she sees Fellig shooting photos of her out his window and bangs on his door, demanding to know how he took photos at a crime scene before the police even knew the crime had been committed. He invites her to take a ride with him so he can show her. After driving, he sees a prostitute who appears to be gray to him. Fellig tells Scully that the woman will be dead very soon. A pimp approaches the woman and begins to harass her. Scully leaps out of the car with her gun, announcing that she is an FBI agent and handcuffing the pimp, but when the prostitute tries to flee, she is hit by a truck and killed.

Scully goes to warn Fellig that he is about to be charged for murder, and accuses him of profiting from people's deaths. In his darkroom, Fellig shows Scully a photo of a dead woman with an odd fuzzy shape around her head, which the photographer claims is Death. When asked why he bothers to try to photograph Death, Fellig says that it is so he can look Death in the face and finally die. He claims to be 149 years old, and says he cannot kill himself. Scully points out that most people would like to live forever, but Fellig says that he has experienced everything, and that even love does not last forever. When she asks about the science of his immortality, he says he was meant to die of yellow fever, but he refused to look Death in the face, so instead Death took the kind nurse who had taken care of him. Suddenly, he notices that Scully is gray, and says, "You're very lucky". Fellig takes a photo just as Ritter enters and shoots. The bullet passes right through the camera and through Fellig into Scully, who collapses. While Ritter rushes to call an ambulance, Fellig asks Scully whether she saw Death and begs her to close her eyes. He covers her hand with his own. The color returns to Scully's hand as Fellig's turns gray. Looking up, he dies.

At the hospital, Mulder watches through a window as Ritter apologizes to Scully, then tells the other agent that he is a lucky man. Going inside the room, Mulder reports to Scully that Fellig died of a single gunshot wound, while the doctors are amazed at her own rapid recovery.