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Elegy 4X22
Air date: May 4th, 1997
Written by: John Shiban
Directed by: James Charleston


Title Meaning: Song of mourning at a funeral
Tag Line: The Truth Is Out There

Other Information:

• "Haunted bowling alley" was a crazy idea that John Shiban had for a long time - now he had the chance to actually write an episode about it!
Steven M. Porter (Harold Spuller)
Alex Bruhanski (Angelo Pintero)
Sydney Lassick (Chuck Forsch)
Nancy Fish (Nurse Innes)
Daniel Kamin (Detective Hudak)
Lorena Gale (The Attorney)
Mike Puttonen (Martin Alpert)
Christine Willes (Karen Kosseff)
Ken Tremblett (Uniformed Officer)
Gerry Naim (Sergeant Conneff)

4X22Mulder and Scully track a serial killer which leads them to a home for the mentally ill. They also receive a clue that doesn't make one bit of sense; each of the victims had a warning from the dead. Hmm.....

At a bowling alley, Angie Pintero orders Harold Spuller, a mentally disturbed man to go home. Later after Spuller leaves, Angie finds a badly-injured young girl who has been wedged up against a pinstopper carriage trying to speak to Angie but no words come out of her mouth. Angie rushes outside to get help after spotting the police and finds that a crowd has gathered round someone. It turns out to be the dead body of the girl he saw moments earlier.

Mulder and Scully listen to the strange tale that Angie has to tell and after hearing it, Mulder is convinced that he saw the vision of the girl's ghost after she had died. Later, the agents investigate the bowling alley and find the words "She is me" written on the lane but they cannot make any sense out of it.

Later, Detective Hudak informs the agents of an anonymous 911 call which had come in about Penny Timmons who was one of the killer's victims and was alledgedly supposed to have said "She is me" as her dying words but yet the Detective notes that her larynx had been severed and that she wouldn't have been able to speak. They manage to trace the phone call to a psychiatric center where Mulder notices a suspicious looking man, Harold Spuller. Meanwhile, Scully realizes that Spuller in fact matches the profile of the killer.

Shortly after, Scully goes to the restroom to clean up a nose bleed she is having when she suddenly sees the vision of a blond girl's spirit. When she comes out, Mulder informs her that a body of another blond girl had just been found. Mulder manages to find Spuller in a room next to the bowling alley and finds that the walls of the room are covered in score sheets which belonged to his victims. Mulder realizes that he must have met all the women here, at the alley. Suddenly, Harold sees the vision of the ghost of Angie standing behind Mulder and finds Angie lying dead on the alley having had a fatal heart attack. Mulder hypothesizes that all the people who saw the spirits were about to die and that Harold may be next. Scully, having seen a vision herself, is scared at the thought.

Harold travels back to the psychiatric center where Nurse Innes starts tormenting him about his mental illness. Mulder later finds Innes on the floor having suffered a bizarre attack by Spuller. One of the other patients secretly tells Scully that Innes was trying to poison Harold so she suddenly realizes that Innes is really the one behind the killings. Scully confronts Innes who almost kills her with a scalpel but Scully manages to shoot her in time. Later, Scully tells Mulder that Innes had been taking Harold's medication which had triggered her strange behaviour and that she was actually killing the women who Harold felt something for. Later, Harold's dead body is discovered and Scully realizes that he must have died from what Innes took away from him.

Scully later tells Mulder that she saw the vision of the young girl who was murdered just before she sees the ghost of Harold sitting in the back seat of her car...

Rating: 6 out of 10
This is another of those episodes where on first viewing, I would have given it a 2 if it was lucky, and then after watching it again, my opinion changed. There's actually quite a lot of plot there and it is easily John Shiban's best episode (which isn't hard!). The only problem is that it's not pulled off well at all - the acting is outrageously bad and sometimes it does get a bit boring. Still, it's good to see how Scully deals with the very, very scary ghost in the bathroom and how she is coming to terms with her cancer which is really the episode's saving grace.
Nitpicking
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