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Gethsemane
"You were only meant to see it, to make you believe the lie, so that you might finally commit and go public with the news."
Written by Chris Carter
Directed by R. W. Goodwin
Directed by R. W. Goodwin
"I come here today, four years later, to report on the illegitimacy of Agent Mulder's work. That it is my scientific opinion that he became over the course of these years a victim. A victim of his own false hopes and of his beliefs in the biggest of lies."
— Dana Scully
An expedition in Northwestern Canada finds an alien body frozen in the ice. Scully and Mulder meet a man named Michael Kritschgau (John Finn) who claims that all the evidence of alien life Mulder has ever encountered has been faked as part of a conspiracy covering up terrestrial wrong-doing. The episode ends with Scully reporting that Mulder has been found dead by his own hand.
Tropes:
- Alien Autopsy: Mulder is called to witness a retrieval of an alien body covered deep in ice and they perform an autopsy. However, an informant who worked for the Department of Defense claims that the subject of the autopsy was not a real alien but only what "they" wanted Mulder to see.
- How We Got Here: The episode opens with an inquiry into Mulder's alleged suicide, then goes to the beginning of the events that lead to the inquiry.
- Manly Tears: Mulder cries intensely after being convinced that aliens weren't real — it was (supposedly) a hoax, meaning that he had been chasing a lie all his life and in the process indirectly gave his partner terminal cancer.
- Metaphorically True: As later installments of the Myth Arc would reveal that the Colonists are actually Earth's original inhabitants, Kritschgau's comments about The Conspiracy not involving any actual aliens is this.
- Orphaned Punchline: Bill at the family dinner.
- Rule of Symbolism: The episode title refers to the garden where Judas betrayed Jesus. This episode shows how Mulder and Scully were set up as sacrificial lambs to exploit and discredit Mulder's beliefs.
- Unreliable Narrator: Scully, In-Universe.
- Wham Line: The final line of the episode delivered by Scully during the FBI hearing, which identifies the body found at the beginning of the episode.
