Fresh Bones - Plot

Plot

In Folkstone, North Carolina, Jack McAlpin, an agitated Marine Corps private, drives his car into a tree after several hallucinatory episodes and is apparently killed. On the tree is a veve, a drawn voodoo religious symbol.

Later, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully head to North Carolina to investigate. McAlpin is the second purported suicide among troops stationed at an INS compound processing refugees from Haiti. When the agents visit the compound, they meet a young boy named Chester Bonaparte, who sells Mulder a good luck charm. After meeting with Colonel Wharton, head of the compound, Mulder meets with an imprisoned refugee, Pierre Bauvais, and an associate of private McAlpin, Harry Dunham.

Scully attempts to see McAlpin's corpse, but finds a dog carcass in its place at the morgue. Later, while driving down the road, the agents discover a still-living McAlpin, doesn't remember what has happened to him. Tetrodotoxin, a chemical Mulder believes is part of Haitian zombification rituals, is found in McAlpin's blood. The agents go to the local graveyard to investigate the corpse of the other dead soldier, but find the grave robbed. They also find Chester, who collects frogs at the cemetery and sells them to Bauvais.

Dunham approaches Mulder, telling him that Wharton has begun abusing the refugees as a means of retaliation against Bauvais. Wharton denies the allegations, but later has Bauvais beaten to death. Scully cuts her hand on a thorn of a twig left in her car. When she drives off, a voodoo symbol is seen on the ground under her car. Mulder has a clandestine meeting with X, who tells him that he and Scully will be called back to Washington on a priority matter and that the camp will be restricted to military personnel only. Mulder believes Wharton is getting his revenge on Haiti after the suicide of some of his soldiers during a previous trip there. Scully finds Dunham dead in a bathtub, and Mulder catches McAlpin with a knife nearby. Albeit having no recollection of the event, McAlpin confesses to the murder, under the influence of Wharton. Wharton tells the agents that Bauvais committed suicide and that their investigation is over. Mrs. McAlpin provides the agents with a photo of Wharton with Bauvais in Haiti, causing the agents to go through his office, finding that both Dunham and the other dead soldier were going to testify against him.

The agents head to the cemetery, where Wharton is performing a voodoo rite over Bauvais's coffin. When Mulder confronts him, Wharton harms him through sympathetic magic. Meanwhile, in a hallucinatory episode, a man emerges out of the small cut in Scully's hand and strangles her, but by grabbing the charm Mulder had bought from Chester earlier, the illusion disappears. Bauvais then appears and stops Wharton. The next day the agents say goodbye to McAlpin, who reveals that Chester was a boy who had died in the riot 6 weeks earlier. The episode ends with Wharton being unwittingly buried alive by the graveyard watchman.