Awesome episode so far! I noticed that Scully finally has Mulder's number on speed dial... and I think that Sprint commercial during the second break was over-voiced by David Duchovny. Oh! Show's back on! More later...

Field Trip indeed.

Great work.

Rushed ending in my opinion. Lots of Cool Twists.

ANP

Just how long was this episode anyway? 12 hrs? A day? Two? Given how the Shifts were stripped so completely in just three days, out heroes looked remarkably undigested to me.

Okay, this isn't a nit, but who didn't love Mulder's speech about how often he was right (98.9%, I think) over the past six years and that his theories should get a little more credibility? Haven't we been saying that all along?

And please don't tell me that was Duchovny's voice in that Sprint commercial....

My, Chris Carter and company are taking a page out of Star Trek's playbook, using nested hallucinations to create an episode deviously difficult to nitpick. Won't stop me from trying.

I don't go around dipping my fingers into digestive juices every day like Mulder and Scully do, but would such juices not cause even the slightest tingle or burn on exposed skin, so that they might react?

Okay, it happened in a hallucination, but Mulder tells us that the Gray he captured doesn't like light, when it seems all the aliens do on this show is shine very powerful lights around.

Just as I was writing down a nit about M&S not being chemically burned by their time in digestion, Mulder suddenly realized they hadn't been chemically burned while being digested. I was impressed ... until they pulled M&S out of the ground the second time, and they didn't look particularly burned that time either.

Not that it's vitally important, but whose hallucination was that for most of the second half of the show? Mulder's? Scully's? Both??? (If so, how could they share a hallucination?)

Field trip indeed, with the empasis on the word trip. It reminded me a lot of the TNG episode Frame of Mind. great line: "Scully, It sounds crappy when you say it."

Woohoo! Now _that_ was what I call an x-file. Kudos to Frank Spotnitz for creating a good one for once this season... meanwhile, the season finalle is next week! That's way too soon! I know Duchovny is going to be busy with his new daughter, but, but, but...

Which reminds me, I'd like to send my good wishes out to Duchovny, his wife Tea Leoni, and their newborn daughter whose name escapes me. Congratulations!

I'm wondering about the timeline of this ep too, Mandy. M&S must've been missing for awhile for Skinner to make a trip down from DC, but when they were pulled out of the caves they looked a little muddy but otherwise unharmed. Even thier clothes were undigested! I'd love to find out what kind of material that was... just think... It's comfortable, it's wrinkle-free, it prevents unsightly burns from the digestive secretions of 12-acre-wide underground fungus!

And speaking of clothes, I loved the pseudo-suit t-shirt Langly wore to Mulder's wake. It's such a Langly-ish thing to wear... which makes me wonder. The dreams/hallucinations M&S were having had the people they know acting strangly, so why were they dressing and moving normally? Not that I'd want to have seen Skinner conduct his review with Scully wearing a clownsuit and juggling bowling pins. That would have been bad.

So, Brown Mountain is a carnivorous human-trap. Hmm, interesting. What better way to avoid indigestion than to make your food hallucinate and put up less of a fight. Reminds me of the ST:VOY episode (Bliss) where they enter the huge cloud-thing.
Now that they know about it, what are they going to do about it ... Brown Mt. I mean?
One thing though, why was the skeleton of the couple spewed out? After all Mulder saw some skeletons in the cave right? Or was that part of his hallucination? Oh well, at least they figured out that they were still inside that thing, whatever it was.
That's my $.02 worth for tonight. C'yah.

You could tell when things were hallucinations. There was a yellow tint to the entire scene... Or is that true? Perhaps they are hallucinating that they are rescued at the end? Sort of like Seasons 4-7 of TNG after Brothers?

-12-

A few nits:

1. Asheville is not located in Boone County. There is no Boone County in North Carolina. There is the town of Boone but that's in Watauga County. Asheville is in Buncombe County.

2. The way I understand it, you can't see the Brown Mountain lights when you are on Brown Mountain. You have to be somewhere higher an to the north (say, Boone) to see them.

3. Indeed, plants such as the Venus Flytrap, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and the Pitcher Plant are native to North Carolina but several hundred miles the the east. These plants developed their carnivorous habits because of the poor quality of the Coastal Plains dirt. Mountain dirt is not that poor.

4. If I recall my biology correctly mushrooms and puffballs (what we saw breaking open), while both fungi, are two separate yet equally important groups.

I really enjoyed this episode. The ending was interesting: putting the two in a van with no attendants with all the rescuers standing in the background. Yes, I'm sure this was for "contamination" purposes, but it certainly gives CC a Bob Newhart style out for next season. An episode sucks? Oops, they were still underground hallucinating and NOW they've finally been rescued.

Also, I'd imagine that the reason why green goo came out of Skinner when Mulder shot him was because Mulder was trying to fight through the hallucination, but if this stuff was so powerful, couldn't it also make you hallucinate a death?

Anyway, great episode. And I didn't even have any dreams last night....

Hey that was really good! Of course, one could argue that Mulder and Scully never got out of the fungus... once they were on to it, it just gave them a more convincing hallucination.

Why did Mulder think that shooting Skinner would somehow prove that he and Scully were still trapped?

What if Mulder was wrong when he shot Skinner? That would have been bad.

This was a very good, thrilling episode...for the first half hour. Then, I caught on. And then, it was a simple "None of you are real!" type of show, with the predictable ending.

I started off thinking, "Ho-hum. Flesh eating plant...la de da. Oh, extras dead. Ho-hum." THEN, Mulder found the dead guy alive. It became rather interesting with me left wondering "So, what happened to the killer plant?" Then, the second the Grey came out of Mulder's kitchen, I caught on. Wait a minute: It's a fake!

But it was still interesting character drama. It explored each character's dream: Mulder to be recognized for being right, Scully to have her rational beliefs taken seriously. They came true. But when they did, both characters became uncomfortable with it.

The first, "fake" ending annoyed me, mainly because it was a standard cliche of this sort of episode. I really wanted to see Mulder be told that--"No, we escaped." And end it there. But then Mulder shoots Skinner--and he dies! Moohahahahhaha! But, noooooo...

As others have noted--now anytime an episode is bad, they cut to the cave. "We never escaped." They break free, and start anew. For that matter, how long have they been in the cave? Perhaps they imagined all of season six! (Fine with me)

LITTLE BITS
*Who were all those people in Mulder's apartment? Did he even know them all?

*Whoever was playing the doctor did the nicest guest part in the show.

*I have to admit that line "Ritualistic slaying. The corpse was stripped, then deskeletonized," was starting to become strangely appealing before the show was over.

Notice how the common denominator in all the hallucinations was the green slime. I knew when Mulder was having his hallucination because of the bedroom and how often do we see that?

The puff balls act oddly in this episode. The ones here are white tne turn brown and pop open when stepped on or driven over. I remember poping the open as a child.

Well, obviously, Ccabe, we are all hallucinations, and you are being digested!

-12-

OK, it's a hallucination, but I still wonder....

1. Yes, Wally's having a bad day, but once he figures out Mulder's not an alien why doesn't he ask who Mulder is?

2. How rude of either Mulder or Scully not to include Teena Mulder at the wake.

3. If the rescue team is masked and protected from contamination, why don't they just enter the cave instead of HEAV-ing them out of the ground?

Interesting episode. I liked it. However, if I was Scully, I would get a different pair of shoes to walk around in. Her feet must hurt from walking around in heels for 6 years. Also, I found it interesting that Scully was the first one to doubt her hallucinations. And, congratulations to David Duchovny , Tea Leoni and their baby girl.

Why wasn't Agent Fowley at the wake?

Who is Teena Mulder?

Teena Mulder is Mulder's mom. Agent Fowley was probably not at the wake because she's working with CSM in some bizarre scheme to stop the Rebel Colonists. Wally didn't ask who Mulder was because it's Mulder's dream, and he knows who he is.

Just to clear a few questions.

In response to Lauren and Mandy re: how long before Skinner would have noticed M&S missing and gone down there? I just re-watched the show--Scully takes the doctor's truck. So it'd be the doctor missing his truck that would get the ball rolling to look for them. That wouldn't have to have taken very long.

Also, Mulder tells the guy that male abductees don't get implants. What about Duane Barry?

And doesn't this fungus thing seem kind of intelligent? It seems to somehow influence the fantasy every time Mulder or Scully begin to doubt the hallucination. The other characters always try to deflect the concerns. Hmmmmmmm.

Donna, I don't think the fungus thing is that intelligent. I guess it just double pumps hallucinogenic stuff when its prey starts to snap out of euphoria as evident when we see the slime or when the images dissolve.

My memory is deteriorating rapidly, but I seem to recall someone saying that the goo was gastric juices, with HCl, pepsin, trypsin, and other enzymes. But gastric juice doesn't have trypsin; trypsin comes into play in the duodenum. And no they can't all just work together because pepsin requires an acidic pH of about 2 (which exists in the stomach), and trypsin requires a basic pH of about 8 (which exists in the small intestine). If you put either enzyme in an environment with such a different pH, the enzyme gets denatured and doesn't do anything. Which could explain why Mulder and Scully never showed any burns, I suppose!

Also, when Scully is trying to persuade Mulder of the possibility of carniverous fungi, she cites carniverous plants as examples. Bad Scully! Plants and fungi are different kingdoms, and kingdoms are the largest biological division. There is no reason to assume that something about plants must hold true for fungi.

My "nit-picks" are as numerically proceeds:
1) Special Agent Fox Mulder emerges from that fungally hallucinative state in direct contradiction to what he previously indicated--this being how peculiar it is for a victim to awaken from a drugged influence after such realization.
2) How convenient it is for our duo to be stored away within the same vicinity.
3) Special Agent Fox Mulder reaches out his hand in the ambulance, and Special Agent Dana Scully almost premonitorily places her hand into his without having to glance over and notice his hand.
4) The time that elapses from the time the ambulance's doors are closed and the ambulance drives off and the next time we see the background is an awfully brief duration to be so short a distance for such miles to be travelled.
5) What ever did happen to those newlyweds? Were the encounters Special Agent Fox Mulder had with them hallucinations as well?

At the end, wehn we see Mulder's hand emerge, then he and Scully are pulled to safety . . . was anyone else thinking of the "lightning sand" scene in The Princess Bride?

When the M.E. is giving Scully the report from the gas spectrometer analyis of the "goo," he says that it contains a digestive enzyme called chitinase. He then says that this is exclusive to plants. This raises two issues:

1. Chitinase also occurs in certain bacteria.

2. A larger issues: the "man-eating plant" isn't a plant at all, but a fungus. Fungi aren't plants; they're in an entirely separate kingdom (K. Fungae instead of K. Plantae).