Does anyone with electricity really clean carpets with one of those push things anymore? And when she hid in the closet, shushing the baby, she was wimpering louder than the kid. Reminded me of the end of M*A*S*H a little (shushing the baby and all). But if she was the demon, how did she manage to scare herself?

For the first time in a long time, XF actually surprised me. I did not see that wound on her shoulder coming.

Mulder should know vasectomies aren't foolproof. Neither are birth control pills.

Did Scully sit that 24 hr stakeout all by herself? I'd kill Mulder if he did that to me!

"Not in the widely-accepted definition." Gotta love it :)

How did Martha obtain the pills??? Ok, she may have obtained them via the web, however how did Martha get the prescription? The last time I checked, you had to go to a doctor for a prescription. Since Martha was a housewife, that would have meant traveling to another town, since this town "talked". (And, there are other reasons to take pills besides birth control: menopause or regulation of periods.) Also, why did Mulder give the key to Sherrif Adler? Mulder seemed to take a long time to fit the key to the lock, and then he found Jenny's body rather conveniently. Still, like Mandy, loved "not in the widely-accepted definition".

Not that I know firsthand, but if you are willing to pay, you can get practically any medication on the Web.

Anyway, Martha could have gone to her regular doctor for the pills and gotten them filled out of town. After all, the physician is bound by confidentiality laws.

There were two things I noticed about this episode until about the halfway mark.

First, I thought the performances all were a little over-the-top and unbelievable. However, that turned out to be exactly what it should have been. The sheriff and his wife were merely playing the helpful, loving couple. The sheriff was play-acting, and the wife was bottling up emotions.

Secondly, I thought the plot was going to be predictable (angry woman has revenge on those she hates). I know you're saying that "The X-Files" isn't predictable, but I must point out that recently, it...well is. "Theef", for example.

All in all, though, a solid, fine show. Only a few problems.

1. What was up with Mulder? Why did he seem so...odd? Was Duchovny not into it? He seemed fine in some scenes, but he mumbled and drifted in a lot of expository scenes.

2. That really is annoying, trying to cover up a mystery by not playing fair. It's like if Bruce Willis was seen talking to his wife in "The Sixth Sense". We shouldn't have seen the creature attack Mrs. Adderly.

3. This seemed rather similar to "Arcadia", just in style (hiding in the closet), the creature (big claws), and the perfect community. This was less predictable, however.

>>1. What was up with Mulder? Why did he seem so...odd? Was Duchovny not into it? He seemed fine in some scenes, but he mumbled and drifted in a lot of expository scenes.>>

I think part of it was guilt (or disappointment, wink, wink) of leaving Scully on HIS "prositute" case.

Just how realistic is to have blooming flowers in April in Vermont? There's just as likely to be snow on the ground.

What conference would be meeting Easter weekend?

Keep Seven of Nine away from that Vermont town.

Another theory:

Duchovny is tired of working on the show.

HI Mandy!
AS for your question about the carpet sweeper,while we do hve one that I use to clean the rug in my bedroom and it is a lot more effiecent and easier to use than the vaccuum cleaner.:)

Why wouldn't there be flowers blooming in Vermont in April even with a little bit of snow?I live in
Northeast Washington state and we still have a bit of snow outside and it's the 3rd of April and
the flowers are starting to show up,so why can't they have it the same way in Vermont?(And it happens to be almost 70 degrees out today FYI!:))

Any way speaking of Washington:I think that this
ep really does injustice to ravens they are a very
noble bird.The raven is also the crest of the Washington family,as well as being the symbol of Odin.

I really think that the real reason Skinner pulled
Mulder off of survelliance duty was the fact that
Mulder was having way too much fun playing peeping
tom!!!!:)

Ok,so if the sherrif's wife was the killer who or
what exactly was it that invaded HER house?

Another carpet sweeper theory: Ellen didn't want to wake up Katie with the noise from the vacuum.

::That really is annoying, trying to cover up a mystery by not playing fair. It's like if Bruce Willis was seen talking to his wife in "The Sixth Sense". We shouldn't have seen the creature attack Mrs. Adderly. ::MikeC

::Ok,so if the sherrif's wife was the killer who or what exactly was it that invaded HER house? ::Scott McClenny

One of the elements of Mrs. A's situation was her self-delusion (as in the 6th Sense, actually). It would be entirely consistent with the premise that she really THOUGHT she saw the killer. In fact, it was her subconscious mind creating a fiction that helped her rationalize what she was doing.

Not really a nit, but when Chimera(?)
was about to turn into a demon, her eyes
looked exactly the same as Rob Robert's
(Hungry) "real" eyes.

After trying to read the disk (for about
a minute, sheesh :), the hacker got a "Volume
is mpty message. Personaly, I would've done
a manual sector by sector scan before giving up,
knowing the possibility that the disk could
be corrupt, erased, or formatted for a
different OS. (the latter would normaly produce
an error message though).

I goofed. The above was ment for the En-Ami
board (never leave too many windows open at
once :)

Maybe in the X-files universe, those are the standard issue "about to become a monster" eyes. All the evil and misunderstood monsters are required by law to have them.

The cut on the woman's back, casued by the shard of mirror... does it switch shoulders at some point or were all the mirrors confusing me?

Just my oppinion, but Scully had some lines that I just cracked up on:

"I'm going to burn the clothes I'm wearing. Shower for 8 or 9 hours. Then sleep until late spring."

I'm not sure of the line exactly on this one, but it had something to do with finding her dead body in an alley and how her last thoughts would be of him....I laughed so hard I about fell out of my chair.

Okay, so the main sequence is: chimera attacks Martha (who was a friend of Ellen, but threatening because she was sleeping with the sheriff) at around 9 pm at Martha's home. (I'll have another nitpick about this attack)
Then, two weeks later, when Mulder is assigned and shows up, Ellen is distributing flyers, and sees the chimera behind her in the reflection from the car window, which shatters.

At that point, we suspect Joanne, which is angry and resentful.

Then, Ellen sees the Chimera in her baby's room, first in the reflection in the mirror, which shatters, but when she turns around, the chimera tries to grab her or the baby, so Ellen hides.

So we suspect the Sheriff.

Then, the Chimera attacks and kills Joanna at the motel - leaving a mess! - and we see the corresponding wound on her shoulder, so it is in someway Ellen herself, not an astral projection/ telekinesis or similar.

At the end, Mulder tries to explain it with multiple personality disorder (which by now has been pretty much disproven, read more here.

Quote: The common understanding of DID is that the alters are independent of one another and don't share memories and other cognitive processes, but demonstrating this has proven difficult. Speech and behavior are under conscious control, so changes can readily be faked. Even things like brain-wave patterns may vary not because of a genuine personality switch but because alleged alters cultivate different emotional states and different ways of acting out. In a recent study of several DID patients, successive alters were asked to memorize different sets of words. When alter B was asked whether she recognized a word memorized only by alter A, she often hesitated. That suggests a conscious process--I'm not supposed to know this--indicating the personalities aren't truly independent.

This would also be a nit for "Field where I died."

However, while this allows the possibility that Ellen's subconscious made her see the hallucinations or visions of the chimera, it doesn't explain how the monster can physically exist outside of her, since she transforms into the monster (as we see in the final attack on Mulder).

Furthermore, the chimera has no motive for attacking the baby. The two women were threatening her marriage and family by cheating with the sheriff. The baby was bonding the sheriff to Ellen, so killing it wouldn't have made sense.

So I think this is an ICBN: the writers wanted to throw us off-base, with a red herring, but goofed up.

For that matter, when Mulder gets the coroner's report, he learns that Martha was pregnant for four weeks, but not what really killed her. Slashing her with the claws would've taken some time and spilled liters of blood everywhere. Choking would be possible, but also takes several minutes during which the victim struggles, and is certainly not that supernatural.

About the first attack on Martha in her house: First, since Ellen becomes the monster, this means she must have been physically there at 9 pm, yet nobody saw her. In the third attack on Joanne at the motel, we also saw what a mess that attack made. Unless Martha fainted on the spot (unlikely, I think), and the monster dragged her outside in the garden, I don't see how the monster could've killed her with the claws without leaving one drop of blood anywhere, and no sign of struggling while Martha fought for her life. I think this is another attempt by the writers to make it more mysterious than really works.

Also, why does the monster bury Martha's body, but doesn't get rid of Joanne's? Only because Joanne stabbed her??? That's not such a serious wound. Unless you posit that Ellen's subconcious wanted the whole thing to be found out, and it also attracted the ravens.

(And I don't believe that after the monster changed back into nice housewive Ellen, she cleaned the whole place and buried Martha to make things orderly - she would have known conciously, and that would have affected her.)

About the ravens: did the monster part of Ellen call to them in some way? Were the ravens some sort of projections? (Unlikely, since one left scratch marks in Martha's house). And why did the ravens *help* Martha's husband find the body, if they are called by Ellen's monster personality, which buried the body in the first place to avoid discovery? (Or why else?) Were the ravens drawn by the carcass? Would it smell that good and eadable to ravens after two weeks, but not yet noticeable by humans in the house?
I guess this falls under the "Criminals help Mulder and Scully solve the case" rule from Phil's guide.

At the end, Ellen is in a mental hospital, away from her family. But how exactly is she prevented from turning into the monster again? Given the strenght with which she threw Mulder across the room, I think she could easily break the door off the hinges and escape. Unless you say that once Ellen realized she becomes a monster, she's so horrified, she stops herself from doing it again, but that doesn't explain why the mental hospital doesn't seem to care very much.

For that matter, when we suspect the Sheriff, and Mulder explains about calling up dark forces somehow that kill people, the Sheriff asks very worried "But what if the person who called them didn't even know it?" I wonder under what law Ellen was sentenced for murder. Or did her next relative, her husband the sheriff, simply committ her for mental imbalance and danger of attack (her attack on Mulder?)

Did the fingerprints of the monster in the motel match her own? (Since it might be hard to believe that fingerprints change with personality ... but on the other hand, her physical changes are highly unusual already.)


I, too, miss Mulder given the ravens a better explanation - he mentions the Nordic myths, but Raven play a very positive role for Odin: they bring news to him. Also, not in all Indian myths is the Raven an omen for death. Given that there were about 600 tribes with different cultures, one can hardly make any blanket statement about their religions, myths and so on. In some tribes, the Raven was a trickster, a joker, and positive.

Mulder says that Raven eat carcasses, and that's why they are associated with death. I haven't heard that before.

BTW, I want to applaud Scully's dedication to work, and to solve a puzzle: despite all her complaining about the cold, and how lonely she's sat in that dump place... when Mulder offers her on the phone to do an autopsy for him and join him, *she* cuts him off because she's found the solution to the disappearing ladies (and also gives a Mulder a valuable hint about a wolf in sheep's clothing.)

I guess this ep. shows once again why women should have a perspective and life outside the family. There's more to life and more goals to reach than just being a housewife and mother. Otherwise, if that doesn't work out, you become a monster, instead of taking a new career.

And I, too, love the rundabout way Mulder refers to his relationship with Scully