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Trevor
Guess what it is. And your first hint is the episode's title.
Written by Jim Guttridge & Ken Hawryliw
Directed by Rob Bowman
Directed by Rob Bowman
Scully: [Rawls] walks through solid objects?
Mulder: Changing their composition fundamentally - making steel brittle, turning lead bullets into powder.
Scully: And flesh into carbon.
Mulder: Changing their composition fundamentally - making steel brittle, turning lead bullets into powder.
Scully: And flesh into carbon.
Mulder and Scully pursue an escaped convict (John Diehl) with the power to walk through walls.
Tropes:
- Alas, Poor Villain: What we see from Rawls is not a remorseless murderer, but just a man willing to do anything to find an unknown son and become a father. But his violent tendencies prevent him from having a healthy father-son relationship, and when he realises this, all he can do is commit suicide by phasing through a car and being shredded by its glass windscreen.
- Asshole Victim: Whaley, who taunts Rawls, and Superintendent Fellowes, who puts Rawls in the Punishment Box. During a tornado. Whaley ends up with a nail hammered through his hand while Fellowes gets ripped in half. And arguably Rawls himself, considering it's pretty cruel to put someone in an unsecured sweat box in the middle of a tornado.
- Ax-Crazy: Rawls is extremely unstable, quick to anger, and prone to violence, and June cites an incident where he followed a motorist who cut him off over sixty miles to his home just to smash him over the head with a fencepost as a defining character moment.
- Bittersweet Ending: Or Downer Ending depending on your interpretation. Rawls is stopped (or rather stops) but nobody is happy about it.
- Character Title: In a variation from previous character titles on the show, "Trevor" is not the person of interest, but instead the son that Monster of the Week's broken out of prison to see.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Rawls' son was living with June's sister, whom he interrogated earlier.
- Combat Pragmatist: In an impressive display of planning, how does Mulder fight the intangible man that normal bullets pass through? He gets a shotgun with rubber bullets in it, a material his intangibility doesn't work on.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Rawls couldn't care less about his missing $90,000, his entire motivation is to find the child his ex had declined to mention she'd even had.
- Full-Frontal Assault: Rawls spends much of the episode completely naked. Justified, as his phasing powers don't extend to his clothing.
- Gunman with Three Names: Wilson Pinker Rawls.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: After the tornado blows over, this is discovered to be the fate of Superintendent Fellowes. Also Rawls himself, when he allows himself to be bisected by June's car.
- Heel Realisation: After seeing just how terrified his son is of him, Rawls gives up the fight with Scully and allows June to kill him.
- Intangibility: Rawls has this ability as a power, as well as the ability to reduce anything he passes through to ash. It's demonstrated with some Technobabble that it's electricity-based and doesn't work against insulating materials, and he's eventually done in when he tries to phase through a speeding car and gets fatally smacked by the windshield.
- Laughably Evil: Rawls has his moments. He breaks into a store to get some new clothes and does so with childish glee. He doesn't even bother killing the humourless officer who arrests him for breaking and entering, he just steals his car and waves his new shoes at him before driving off.
- Motive Misidentification: The early assumption is that after escaping prison Rawls was looking for the stolen $90,000 that was never recovered. Scully is the first to realize Rawls might be after something else, pointing out that Rawls could just steal money from anywhere with his abilities, but he went through the effort to ransack his ex-girlfriend's home in search of something.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Rawls has this moment silently when he realizes how much he has terrified his son, and what he has become.
- Preemptive "Shut Up": Scully to Mulder, after she acknowledges the possibility of Spontaneous Human Combustion.
- Punishment Box: Rawls is being punished for attacking another inmate by being locked in a small shed right before a tornado hits.
- Spontaneous Human Combustion: Scully finally mentions it as a possibility here.Mulder: "Dear Diary: Today my heart leapt when Agent Scully suggested spontaneous human combustion."
- Take That!: One to David Copperfield on seeing the Superintendent's split in half corpse:Scully: "Should we arrest David Copperfield?"Mulder: "Yes we should. But not for this."
- Telefrag: Rawls kills himself in the end with a variation, phasing through a moving car then unphasing in the middle, gibbing him instantly.
- Tragic Villain: Rawls, in the end.
- Villainous BSoD: When Rawls sees how much he's terrified his own son, he wanders into the street and allows June to hit him with a car.
June: He would have hurt Trevor. He would... God only knows what he was thinking. What did he want?
Mulder: Maybe another chance.
Mulder: Maybe another chance.
