Plot
Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) asks to be a part of the investigation looking for a little girl, Amber Lynn LaPierre, who disappeared from her home. Mulder's superior, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) denies his request, noting that the investigation is not an X-Files, but simply a missing persons case. Mulder, however, does not listen and investigates anyway. The parents of Amber, Billie and Bud, tell Mulder that they found a note in the girls bedroom, but the teaser for the episode revealed that the note was written by Billie herself. The notes contains a mention of Santa Claus, which everyone finds out of place. Although the family is held for questioning, Mulder does not believe they did it. Looking through previous cases, Mulder finds a similar note, with a reference to Santa Claus, from a missing person case in Idaho from 1987. In the case, the mother was convicted and sentenced to twelve years. The files notes that she had a vision of her son dead before he disappeared, as did Bud on the night his daughter disappeared.
Meanwhile, Mulder's mother Teena is found dead in her home. It is found she overdosed on sleeping pills after she burned all her pictures of Samantha and placed tape around her baseboards and turned the gas in the oven on. Mulder believes she was murdered and has Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) do an autopsy. Later, Mulder visits the mother who was convicted twelve years prior. She tells him that Samantha is a walk-in, a kind spirit who takes children so that they may be shielded from potential harm in their life. The mother tells Mulder that the children are safe, but she has no idea where they are. After hearing this, Mulder believes his mother probably also wrote a note after his sister's disappearance. He begins to thinks that the alien abduction never happened, and this his mother figured this out, which is why she was murdered. However, after performing the autopsy Scully tells Mulder that it was definitely suicide, because she was ill with Paget's carcinoma.
During the happenings of the episode, a man playing Santa at a Christmas themed ranch is shown videotaping the children at his ranch. Billie later tells Mulder that she saw a vision of her daughter in her room and she said the number 74. Mulder decides he cannot finish the case and wants to take time off because he's too close to make any sound judgment. On their way to the airport, Scully comes across the Santa park and decides to stop because of the reference to Santa Claus in the notes. Here they find the videotape setup and tapes dating all the way back to the '60s, including one of Amber Lynn LaPierre. The man who runs the park is promptly arrested and Mulder finds graves of children all over his ranch.
Read more about this topic: Sein Und Zeit (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“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)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)