The writers for these X-Files stories can sometimes be a bunch of merry pranksters; just check out the title for this one. In a way that's a good thing, because it forces you to do some legwork to find out the meaning of a word like 'oubliette'. Turns out it's a French name for a dungeon where the only opening used for entrance or exit is available through the ceiling above it. The story itself had a variable thrown in with the abducted girl Amy Rogers (Jewel Staite) clawing her way through a boarded up window, but the basic idea was there.
This was a pretty fine showing with Mulder at the center of a case involving some sort of empathic transference between a recent abduction victim and another one who suffered the same trauma at the hands of the same perpetrator some seventeen years earlier. All throughout, Mulder's emotions are tested relative to the abduction experience of his own sister when they were both just kids, and Scully suspects that the issue is clouding his judgment. A unique twist in the episode involves Mulder finding the deranged abductor's forest cabin, and the person he finds in the oubliette is Lucy Householder (Tracey Ellis), the earlier victim of Carl Wade (Michael Chieffo), and not the high school teen the local authorities are looking for.
The local detective on the case naturally assumes Lucy was a partner in the abduction scheme of Amy, but as she comes around to trust Mulder, his instincts tell him to follow up on the empathic link between the two women to solve the case. Had the women been inexorably linked, It would have made sense that Lucy would have survived the ordeal, but as Mulder reasonably concluded, her death was a means of escaping whatever hold the evil Carl Wade maintained over his prior victim, thereby finally finding some peace.
This was a pretty fine showing with Mulder at the center of a case involving some sort of empathic transference between a recent abduction victim and another one who suffered the same trauma at the hands of the same perpetrator some seventeen years earlier. All throughout, Mulder's emotions are tested relative to the abduction experience of his own sister when they were both just kids, and Scully suspects that the issue is clouding his judgment. A unique twist in the episode involves Mulder finding the deranged abductor's forest cabin, and the person he finds in the oubliette is Lucy Householder (Tracey Ellis), the earlier victim of Carl Wade (Michael Chieffo), and not the high school teen the local authorities are looking for.
The local detective on the case naturally assumes Lucy was a partner in the abduction scheme of Amy, but as she comes around to trust Mulder, his instincts tell him to follow up on the empathic link between the two women to solve the case. Had the women been inexorably linked, It would have made sense that Lucy would have survived the ordeal, but as Mulder reasonably concluded, her death was a means of escaping whatever hold the evil Carl Wade maintained over his prior victim, thereby finally finding some peace.