Plot
In Minneapolis, a funeral is held for a young girl. The ceremony is observed by Donnie Pfaster, the eerie assistant director for the funeral home. Later that night, as the girl's body is being stored for burial the following day, Pfaster's boss finds him cutting off the corpse's hair. Pfaster is promptly fired.
Some time later, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are summoned to Minneapolis by Moe Bocks, an FBI field agent who is investigating the exhumation and desecration of a body in a local cemetery. Mulder discounts Bocks' theory that this act is a variation of extraterrestrial cattle mutilation, and suggests they search for a human culprit. Scully is disturbed at the sight of the disheveled corpse. Two more bodies are found exhumed, with their hair cut and fingernails removed. Mulder develops a psychological profile of the criminal, believing him to be an escalating "death fetishist" who may resort to murder to satisfy his desires. Scully keeps her discomfort with the case to herself, and writes up a field report on necrophilia.
Pfaster, who was behind the exhumations, proves Mulder's prediction correct when he brings a prostitute to his apartment. When the prostitute discovers a collection of funerary wreaths in Pfaster's bedroom, he kills her and removes her fingers. Later, Pfaster—having been hired as a frozen food delivery man—meets an appointment at a house, where he steals cut hair from the bathroom. Pfaster attends a night class at a community college, where a female classmate defends herself after he makes threatening advances. He is arrested and is placed in a jail cell across from a suspect being interrogated by Mulder, Scully, and Bocks. Pfaster learns Scully's name from the suspect after they leave. He is later released.
Scully is deeply troubled by Pfaster's crimes, and has unsettling hallucinations about the case. In Washington, she has a counseling session with a social worker, during which she shares her anxiety about the investigation. After the session, Scully learns that someone from Minnesota had called for her. When she contacts Mulder, she learns that neither he nor Bocks made the call. Tracing a fingerprint to Pfaster from his arrest, Bocks and Mulder raid his apartment, finding one of the prostitute's fingers in his refrigerator. Meanwhile, after Scully arrives in Minneapolis, Pfaster forces her car off the road. He kidnaps Scully and brings her to his late mother's abandoned house, where she is tied and gagged in a closet.
Mulder and Bocks discover that Pfaster's mother had owned a car which matches paint found on Scully's, tracking down her former residence. Meanwhile, Scully escapes from Pfaster as he prepares a bath for her, resulting in a pursuit through the house. Scully and Pfaster have a struggle that sends them falling down a staircase onto the foyer, where a task force led by Mulder and Bocks breaks in moments later and apprehends Pfaster. Scully initially insists that she is okay, but then breaks down and cries in Mulder's arms. In a voice-over narration, Mulder traces Pfaster's pathology to his childhood, when he was raised in a family of four older sisters. Mulder also reflects on Pfaster's nature and the nature of evil in general.
Read more about this topic: Irresistible (The X-Files)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)