A QUIET NIGHT AT HOME| We open on a car zooming down a dark road, the Ramones’ cover of “California Sun” blaring while three armed men prepare for… something. It’s a very different scene inside Mulder’s house, where he and Scully are snoozing on the couch, apparently having fallen asleep while checking out a Ramones documentary (?) which plays, muted, on the TV. A static-y, electronic sound begins to issue from Mulder’s phone, and when the pair wake, Scully is stymied to realize it seems like Langly is trying to contact Mulder.
“Lone Gunmen Langly?” Mulder asks, and indeed, a pixelated version of the friendly hacker blinks on and off on the screen as the message repeats. “Mulder, I need to know,” Langly pleads. “Am I dead? If I am, they know that I know.” Before the agents can figure out what’s up, the door opens a crack, and the men from the car bust into the house and start shooting it up. In a truly awesome move, Scully slides under the kitchen table, flips it on its side and starts using it as a shield while she fires at the intruders. Mulder, meanwhile, scrambles upstairs to get a better vantagepoint. When they’re done, they’ve killed two of the would-be assassins; the third, a scary-looking guy with long, curly hair, gets away.
After they’ve ascertained that they’re not hurt, Scully calls the incident into the FBI while Mulder looks for a good place to hide the phone: He doesn’t want it taken into evidence for fear that it’ll sit in a locker somewhere for years, and he’ll lose his link to Langly (or whatever that is). So he tosses it in the oven, and while he’s grilling Scully for details about The Lone Gunmen’s deaths — remember, Mulder was gone then — two military-style Humvees drive up and idle menacingly in the front yard.
NO PHONE, WHO ‘DIS?| The men in the vehicles won’t identify themselves, though one speaks with a heavy Russian accent. Mulder and Scully draw their guns and refuse to come out of the house, but when Scully calls Skinner for guidance, she doesn’t even have to explain what’s going on before he says, “Listen to me, Scully: Surrender.” Pretty soon, the standoff ends when the men outside — who are armed and wearing fatigues — enter the premises and have Mulder and Scully handcuffed and on the floor in about a minute flat.
In Russian, the leader mentions to another operative how Price won’t like the fact that Scully and Mulder took out two of their best men, and that as soon as Mulder’s phone is located, Fox and Dana are toast. The guys find the device in the stove, thanks to another noisy Langly broadcast, but Mulder uses the distraction to get the jump on the dude in front of him. And even though Mulder is literally linked to Scully and his hands are tied, he somehow manages to escape with his partner.
They run into the woods near the house, and that’s where Skinner finds them. He unlocks their cuffs and clues the agents in: The military thugs were from a private security contractor based in Moscow and hired by the American government, and they’re not supposed to kill intelligence agents, but it seems like they have little trouble bending the rules. Scully is super wary of her boss, and when she and Mulder decline his invitation to come with him, Skinner hands them all the money in his pocket and subtly deflects their questions about Langly by mentioning that the man is buried in Arlington. (Side note: This is so not important here, but it’s worth a mention: Scully’s leisure wear has gotten a serious upgrade — in fit, if nothing else — since back in the day. Good riddance to all of those giant sweaters and shirts. Girlfriend’s body be bangin’!)
SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER| Prof. Hamby’s not happy to see them, because she knows what their visit means. Here’s the gist: The company that’s after Mulder and Scully came to Langly and her 15 years before “with the science and the math to prove we could live forever.” Basically, they signed a contract, had their brains scanned and had their virtual minds uploaded into a server that would only be activated after their natural deaths. But Langly built a backup that would help him in case the simulation turned out to be different from what the contractors offered. If he’s reaching out, Karah theorizes, “they must have lied.” She’s in the middle of showing Mulder how to alter her cell phone in order to contact Langly again when the scraggly-haired assassin (!) enters the classroom and shoots her dead. Then Scully does the same to him.
They decamp to a bar, where Scully naps (and looks “adorbs,” Mulder notes when she startles awake) while he tries to rig up Hamby’s phone. And it works! Langly breaks through and has a conversation with both of them, sadly realizing “I’m not real though? That right? You are real, and I’m not?” When they say he’s in a simulation, he describes it as “like I designed Heaven. I eat hot dogs and donuts all day long… And the Ramones are here! And they don’t fight!” That said, he begs them to destroy it, calling it a “work camp” where the greatest minds of our time are being forced to work on theoretical space colonization. (Hmm, sound familiar?) Anyway, he points the agents toward Titanpointe. “Please, for all of us, shut this down.”
