4.02 Unruhe

Original Air Date: 10/27/96

Scott Heindl as the boyfriend

Sharon Alexander as Mary LeFante

Walter Marsh as the druggist

William MacDonald as Officer Trott

Ron Chartier as Inspector Puett

Michele Melland as the doctor

Angela Donahue as Alice

Pretty cool episode.

Northern Michigan: A young woman and her boyfriend are leaving the country. But before they leave they need passports. They take the passport-pictures in a small local store. But right after the pictures are taken, the womans boyfriend is killed and the woman kidnapped. The womans passport-pictures have also changed: they don't show the expected smiling portraits, but display nightmarish images of the terrified girl.

The photographs fascinate Mulder. He thinks the pictures are examples of "psychic photography", the paranormal ability to create images on film with the mind. Mulder theorizes that the suspect doesn't even know he possesses this gift, and that the photographs reveal the killer's darkest fantasies.

The kidnapped woman is found alive, but her abductor has given her a primitive, botched lobotomy with an ice pick inserted through her eyes. She is almost brain-dead, and she endlessly repeats the german word "unruhe", which means "trouble" or "unrest".

Some days later, the same thing happens again.

Mulder is still interested in the photographs, and travels to Washington to examine them at the FBI lab. Meanwhile, Scully figures out that a construction company was working near each crime scene. Scully talks to the foreman, Gerry Schnauz. When confronted with the word "unruhe", he is terrified. Therefore, she arrests him.

Schnauz is a formerly institutionalized paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence. When confronted by the photographs of his victims, he's startled at the sight of his own paranoid delusions brought to life on film. He admitts the crime, and tells them where to find his other victim, also lobotomized.

Schnauz kills a guard and escapes from jail. He returns to the scene of his first crime to steal the camera and film. Mulder's blood runs cold when he sees exposed photographs of Schnauz's next victim, Scully! His only hope of saving her is to study the photographs to get inside Schnauz's mind.

Schnauz kidnapps her on a parking lot and takes her to his car. There, he wants to get rid of the "unruhe" he believes is tormenting her, with an ice pick (I think I would prefer "unruhe" in my mind). But in the last minute Mulder comes to Scully's rescue, and shoots Schnauz. They find one last series of psychic photographs: Schnauz shot dead on the floor.

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