Simply Irresistible

Continuing with my X-Files theme on earthly people the duo is faced with. As promised here is my blog about Donnie Pfaster. The episode opens with the funeral of a school girl and then cuts to the funeral home where a character is cutting the hair on the corpse of the school girl. This is Donnie who is played with chilling realism by Nick Chinlund who also starred in Con Air with Nicolas Cage and company.

The pair is called in when the agent in charge of the investigation brings them to a graveside desecration, and he suspects that there are super natural forces at work. But Mulder quickly realises that a person is responsible. This is the first time we witness Scully's fragility and humanness. I don't no where the inspiration for this episode came from, but around the time this episode was written there were cases of bodies being stolen from graveyards, for reasons that were never determined.

Mulder quickly tells the man in charge to issue a city wide warning that there could be an escalating fetishist operating in the area. Who may go from defiling the dead to carrying out homicide to aid him in his perversion of cutting the hair and nails from the dead. Sure enough Pfaster does exactly what Fox had predicted and he kills a working girl for his evil intentions. Chinlund plays this character almost like a child who is searching for something but does not know what. He is studying at night school and gets arrested for attempting to attack one of his classmates. And Agent Box thinks he has the perpetrator in custody after a working girl had cut his face with a blade. Here in the lock up Pfaster sets his sights on his next victim who turns out to be Agent Scully.

Scully returns to Washington with body of the dead prostitute to see if they can pull any prints from it. They find a latent print on the fingernail and Scully returns to meet up with Mulder and Box to continue with the manhunt. As she leaves the airport in her rental car she is forced of the road by the maniac in question and abducted. At this point Scully starts having flash backs of her abduction experiences. She sees Pfaster as one of the aliens, a grotesque looking demonised character that he actually turns out to be.

After some research Agents Mulder and Box discover that Pfaster is driving around in his mother's old car and that she has a property in the area. They then go and raid the place and find that Scully is trying to fight of her attacker. This episode is one of the most disturbing because it depicts us at our most primeval. Displaying man's most basic and primitive instincts that show our true animal form can be realised and indeed personified.

This episode, as with the episode about Toombs has another well defined soundtrack, composed by Mark Snow. It also has one of the best Mulder monologues at the end of the episode where he tries to explain Pfaster's motives and how he became the monster he is. Simply saying "The only thing extraordinary about Donnie Pfaster was his ordinariness"