The X-Files Season 4, Episode 10: Paper Hearts

When I get to the end of The X-Files, I will probably look back and consider 'Paper Hearts' one of the best episodes of the entire series. True, there are over a hundred episodes I haven't yet seen, but seriously, this was an amazing episode.

This is also one of the easiest to write about, especially coming off the obtuse 'Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man' and the confusing 'Tunguska'/'Terma'. 'Paper Hearts' is relatively straightforward, and entirely creepy.

There were a lot of elements here that reminded me of 'Beyond the Sea', but John Lee Roche is much more ordinary than Luther Lee Boggs (Lee must be the X-Files universe's equivalent of Wayne). He comes off as friendly and, well, normal. Boggs was portrayed as completely deranged, and it was more obvious that he was playing games with Scully than what Roche does to Mulder here.

I didn't think Roche had taken Samantha. The previous stories we'd heard about her abduction seemed to more or less line up, so there had to be something else going on. As Roche was describing the alleged abduction to Mulder in the house, I knew something wasn't right, and suspected Mulder had led him to the wrong house, which, as much as Roche tried to pass it off as an arbitrary error in geography anyone with a photographic memory could have made, Mulder knows better.

The other reason I never really thought Roche was involved was that Samantha's disappearance forms a huge basis for Mulder's characterisation. The idea of one day finding her is what drives Mulder, and the show is only in the fourth season of nine. While I know at this point there's more to the story anyway, it would be kind of weird both if Mulder got closure for his sister's disappearance and found out there weren't any aliens or government agents involved anyway. It would completely remove almost all his motivation for doing just about everything he does in the show.

So then, Roche had to somehow be tapping into Mulder's obsession with finding his sister. But I wasn't sure how he was doing it. How'd he even get any of the details? The only real explanation given is something I've touched on before, which is that Mulder, as a profiler, can get into the heads of serial killers and other criminals, to try to understand why they do what they do and who they'd target. And Mulder somehow got in psychically, and not only found details of unsolved cases, but also revealed his own thoughts to Roche via an apparently two-way connection.

Or maybe he was like Pusher, and deliberately led Mulder back to him because he wanted the closure in his sick, twisted way - the missing hearts. Because Mulder's later dreams led him to the old car, which he tore up for no good reason, but then to the camper shell, which had the book with the hearts.

In the end, it doesn't really matter whether Roche had any special abilities or not - like 'Irresistible' and 'Oubliette' and 'Unruhe', the tension really derives from the horrible things regular (more or less) people do to each other, as opposed to anything supernatural. There don't need to be witches or aliens or even psychic connections for there to be real evil in the world.

I also momentarily considered that there could have been a bit of an Inception vibe and that after Mulder 'awoke' from his dream about finding the body and then bringing in the forensics expert at five on a Sunday morning, he would again wake up and find that he was still in his apartment, sleeping on his couch because he doesn't have a bed apparently?

But it wasn't a dream within a dream, and of course it then turned out that there were two more previously unknown victims.

Those dream sequences were incredibly well done, and I think it's a testament to the production of this episode (and all the others, really) that even with the bizarre element of the red laser pointer light, it was not immediately clear that Mulder was dreaming. I guess I'm so conditioned to expect bizarre and unusual things to happen that I totally believed there could be a real red dot leading Mulder to the park, which is apparently near his apartment. He lives kind of far out for working in DC if he can jog to a park in Manassas.

The park, by the way, does not exist. Bosher Dam, for which the fictional park is named, is near Richmond, not Manassas, and Manassas is not in Fairfax County as implied by the phone book, but is an independent city entirely contained within the boundaries of Prince William County.

This has been your periodic lesson in Northern Virginia geography.