Give it up, Mulder! You’ve got no chance!
- Damn it. - My sniper zombies are everywhere.
I'll offer you a deal.
You give me the Lazarus bowl and I’ll give you Scully.
Mulder!
How about this deal?
You give me Scully, I don't smash the bowl
and shove the pieces where the Son of God don't shine.
You cigarette-smoking mackerel snapper.
I break the Lazarus bowl and all your sniper zombies
go back to being good little well-behaved corpses.
You don’t fool me, Mulder That bowl is your Holy Grail.
Encoded in its ancient ceramic grooves are the words Jesus spake
when he raised Lazarus from the dead.
Still capable of raising the dead 2, 000 years later.
Proof positive of the paranormal.
You could no sooner destroy that than let the redhead die.
Come on, man. Don‘t break the bowl.
We don't wanna go back to being dead.
There’s no food, no women, no dancing.
Save the bowl. Then we'll dump that ciggy-smoking stooge for you.
And you’ll be the new king of the dead.
I’d rather serve in heaven than rule in hell.
Is that your flashlight, Mulder, or are you just happy to be lying on top of me?
Oh, that.
For seven long years We been waiting for the right moment, Scully.
Oh, you’re a sick man, Mulder Go on.
I love you, Scully.
- No ifs, ands, or... - Bees.
Yesterday, a bomb ripped through the crypt of Christ's Church here in DC.
There were no casualties, no thefts, no note making any demand.
- Who's taking credit for it? - Nobody.
She, Jodie Fosters foster child on a payless budget.
He's like a Jehovah's witness meets Harrison Ford's Witness.
Uh. Christ's Church. Isn't that Cardinal O'Fallon’s church?
O'Fallon's residence is adjacent to the crypt.
- Who's Cardinal O'Fallon? - Cardinal O'Fallen, perhaps.
He's one of the most powerful men in the church today.
His name often comes up as a possibility for the first American Pope.
Oh.
I don't want to be myopic here, sir, but this looks like a terrorist act for the ATF.
Myopic.
- Yes, it does. - Are you gonna answer your phone?
Me? I didn't wanna be rude.
- So who the hell is this guy? - Wayne Federman. An old buddy of mine.
He's a writer in Hollywood and he's working on an FBI-based movie.
He's asked me to give him access.
- A screenwriter? - It's actually as a writer-slash-producer.
He looks actually just a hindrance-slash-pain in the neck.
Agent Mulder, I don't wanna eat your lunch. I'm just here for some procedural flavour.
I've no idea what you've just said.
Well, the Skin Man's tilled me in on your particular bent.
He said that you come at things maybe a little fahkatke, a little Star Trekkie.
Which is the exact vibe I'm looking for.
It's a Silence of the Lambs meets Greatest Story Ever Told type thing.
It's beautiful and I will not be in your way.
I'll be strictly Heisenbergian.
A hologram.
Mr Federman will accompany you to Christ Church. He will act as an observer.
You will extend to him every courtesy and protection you would a friend of mine.
Agent Scully, I require your services here for the morning.
Sir, have I pissed you off in a way that's more than normal?
I'm just curious if she's more than your partner. Hey, whatever.
Cardinal O'Fallon, can you think of anyone who might make an attempt on your life?
The Church always has enemies, Agent Mulder.
The size of the bomb would have limited its destruction to the crypt.
- Is there anything there worth targeting? - Not really.
Just some old bones, artifacts, relics,
documents that we store down there in the cold.
I like to think of it as God's refrigerator.
- That's a great line. - Thank you.
- God's refrigerator. - Wayne, shut up.
No treasures to the outside world.
Things of negligible monetary value,
but great spiritual value to the Church.
Ancient devotional texts, medieval relics.
How about the shroud of Turin?
No, afraid not.
But we do have the bathrobe of St Peter.
- You're kidding? - Yes, I am.
- That's a good line. - Wayne. Shut up.
Who comes down to the crypt here?
Only myself.
We have half a mile of catacombs here.
I like to walk here during lunch.
That's where the bomb went off.
Well, my instinct, is to see this desecration of the dead less as a murder attempt
and more as a terrorist act.
A message...
Uh, this isn't me. I think it's you.
Excuse me.
- That's... that's not me. - Let me check.
Not me.
We never get reception here.
Would that be St Jude's cellphone, Cardinal?
No.
That's Micah Hoffman.
Micah Hoffman, Willie Mays and Frank Serpico,
that's my holy trinity, Scully.
Of course, I'm too young to remember, but wasn't he a '60s campus radical
like a Jerry Ruben or a Mario Savio?
Name a '60s counterculture movement, and Hoffman was at or near the center of it.
He was one of the original Weathermen. He was the first yippie.
He was a better poet that Ginsberg and the starting shortstop for his baseball team.
Then in the '70s, didn't he go real low profile?
Right after Altamont. He was never heard from again.
The Stones get blamed for everything. I don't get it.
This should be it, here.
- What did Skinner want you for? - Just paperwork.
Mm. Hm-hm.
- Mulder, we should have a warrant. - Hey, it's only the Constitution. No big deal.
- Wow. - Dis-feng shui.
Sorry to denigrate a third of your trinity,
but it looks like Hoffman was killed by one of his own bombs.
Well, from dharma bum to dharma bomb.
I knew Hoffman was a master potter.
It appears he was a master calligrapher as well.
Look, Mulder, we've got gurn arabic and sodium hydroxide here.
Ooof. These would be used to age the ink and the paper prematurely.
It's a forger's trick.
Well, from counterculture to counterfeiter.
All right, one more pun and I pull out my gun.
Scully, look at that. "Christos". Looks like a religious text. Can you read Greek at all?
Well, it's pretty rusty.
But it looks like some kind of lost Gospel.
A Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
And an account of Christ's life on earth after the Resurrection.
- After? - Yeah. It's a heretical text, Mulder.
Mythical, but long rumoured to be in existence.
What would Hoffman be doing with heretical religious texts?
The question is what would he be doing forging them?
I think the real question is what might O'Fallon be doing with Hoffman's forgeries?
You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Don't shoot.
I like the way you guys work. No warrants, no permission, no research.
You're like studio executives with guns.
Should I call you Agent Mulder or Mr Mulder?
Or, like, do you have a nickname?
Shh, shh, shh.
Like Skin Man?
- Just ignore me. - What's that?
It looks like the same Gospel of Mary Scully ID'd over at Hoffman's place.
So, is this a forgery or is this the real thing?
There is no real gospel of Mary, Federman. The original would be a fake.
All right, so it this a real fake or a fake fake?
It's me,
I can hear you.
It's just your voice is... It's like a crackly sound and then I hear a syllable.
Stop yelling. Yelling isn't helping the situation. Just talk.
You're breaking up.
No. Let me call you back. OK.
Yeah, I'm telling you. I'm going through a crypt.
Oh!
Wow.
Oh, my God.
Now, Wayne, I'm sure that it was dark in there,
and that your eyes were playing tricks on you.
And you've been influenced by ghost stories and horror movies
that take place in crypts and graveyards.
And you hallucinated this vision of these dancing bones
trying to reconstruct this bowl.
No, I didn't hallucinate. That was mechanical or CGI.
Federman, that wasn't a movie. That was real life.
The difference being?
Well, I have got my flavour here.
So, I appreciate all your help. I've got a movie to write.
You don't want to get to the bottom of this?
Not especially.
Well, you know, sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction.
Well, fiction is quicker than truth and cheaper.
You want my advice? You're both crazy.
Why do you say that?
You're crazy for believing what you believe.
And you're crazy for not believing what he believes.
I'll leave you with that. Thank you.
I miss him already.
I know that Federman's BS-ing you.
So I'm really hesitant to mention this.
But... um, his story reminds me of the Lazarus bowl.
- The Lazarus bowl? - We had this wacky nun in Catholic school.
We called her Sister Spooky, cos she told us scary stories.
Twisted Sister. That's my kind of nun, you know
She'd hold up an old piece of wood with a rusty nail in it
and say "This is a piece of the cross that Christ's wrist was nailed to."
Or she'd show us a vial of red liquid and say that it was John the Baptist's blood.
She'd be in prison today. You realize that?
Well, she'd tell the story of when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.
And she said that there was this old woman who was Lazarus' aunt or something...
- Lazarus' aunt? - Spinning a clay bowl on a wheel nearby.
And that Christ's words, the actual incantation to raise the dead,
were recorded in the grooves of the pottery,
just like the way music is recorded into vinyl.
You see? It's just not true that you can't get good science at Catholic school. It's a lie.
Well, Sister Spooky says that these words in the clay
still have the power to raise the dead.
- Just like Jesus raised Lazarus. - That is a very cool story coming from you.
I'll have Chuck Burks meet you, see if this clay has Christ's greatest hits on it.
And I'm gonna go have another audience with Cardinal O'Fallon.
There's music in the air, Agent Scully.
See, everything that exists vibrates and therefore sings.
The street, your internal organs, electricity, everything.
And... Here, I'll show ya.
You see, this is my voice, bouncing around in the red here.
And all this yellow is ambient sound that we habitually tune out.
It's the hum of my hardware, Mulder's porn tapes on pause, the sounds from the street.
Everything we hear, but we don't know we hear, I can hear it with this machine.
Oh!
What is it?
- Who made this? - We're not sure.
Either a forger by the name of Micah Hoffman
or someone else in the vicinity of Jesus Christ.
Bazingo.
Whoever did it is a musical genius.
This is vibrating in all the keys at once. It's heavenly.
Can you translate what it says there for me, please?
Did you recover them from the crypt?
Yes.
"And then Jesus took his beloved Mary Magdalene in an embrace."
"An embrace not of God and woman, but of man and woman."
"And Jesus said to Mary, 'love the body,
for it is all of the soul that our senses can perceive.“
And how about these?
These would appear to be copies of the original.
And rough drafts.
- How? - They're all forgeries, sir.
Did you buy these from Micah Hoffman?
- I thought they were real. - I can understand that. He was a master.
They're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
The paper is authentic, the ink, the hand, the diction.
Hoffman was also an explosives expert.
Do you have any idea what he might have been doing with a bomb in the crypt?
Can you think of anybody who might have wanted to kill Micah Hoffman?
No.
Why were you hiding the documents, sir?
When Micah came to me with these, as I then thought, ancient texts,
and our experts verified them,
it exploded a bomb in my heart.
The Christ that I loved was not the Christ in these texts.
So you bought them in order to hide them?
To keep others from feeling the despair and the anger that I felt.
To protect people from what I can now see they needed no protection from.
Why didn't you just destroy the documents yourself?
I thought they were real.
I hated them, I despised them.
I would have liked to have destroyed them, but I couldn't.
Is being made a fool of a crime, Agent Mulder?
I'd be doing life if it were, sir.
- Scully. - Hey, Scully, it's me.
Can you horn in on the Hoffman autopsy for me?
- Why? - I got a feeling he was dead before he died.
He was blackmailing O'Fallon. Maybe O'Fallon retaliated.
Mulder, this bowl.
Your buddy Chuck Burks says it has properties he's never seen before.
If... Hold on a second. That's my other line.
- Yeah, Mulder. - It's Wayne-slash-Federman out in LA.
- I can't really talk about the case. - Skin Man's keeping me in the loop.
Listen, who do you see playing you in the movie?
- I'm in the movie? - Ah, it’s a character loosely based on you.
It’s more of an amalgamation.
Hold on a second, Wayne.
- Hey, Sister Spooky, I gotta take this. - I'll call you after the autopsy.
Thanks.
How about Richard Gere?
Yeah, OK. Seriously. What if I said to you the name, Garry Shandling?
It sounded like you said Garry Shandling.
Garry Shandling signed on to play the amalgamation loosely based on you.
And Téa Leoni playing the amalgamation loosely based on your partner.
- You stud, it's called "The Lazarus Bowl". - How do you know about the Lazarus bowl?
The Skin Man. Listen, Shandling and Leoni wanna meet you guys.
Get your flavour. It's an actor-type thing.
Come on out to the studio on our dime. We'll make it nice.
Hey, who's... then, who's gonna play Skinner in the movie?
Richard Gere.
Fracturing of skull and surface abrasions
initially consistent with concussive force injuries.
I am now weighing the heart, which is relatively normal.
Although somewhat large.
I'm gonna need that when you're done with it.
Oh, my God.
- Who are you? - I am who I am.
Uh-uh. Noli me tangere, baby.
0w. Damn it.
What'd you find?
In Micah Hoffman's stomach there were traces of red wine and strychnine.
Man, oh, Manischevitz communion wine, I bet.
I bet O'Fallon poisoned him and then put his body near the explosion to cover his tracks.
- That's possible, Mulder. - I could get a warrant for O'Fallon.
You are the one God living in truth.
Through all eternity, you live in unapproachable light.
Let's allow the man some dignity.
You fill your creatures with every blessing
and lead all men to the joyful vision of your life.
In our joy, we sing to your glory with all the choirs of angels.
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
Consummatum est.
Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles "I leave you in peace. My peace I give you."
Let's get this over with.
And grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom. Amen.
Augustine O'Fallon, you're under arrest for the murder of Micah Hoffman,
- You have the right to remain silent. - Oh, my God.
Mulder...
Do you see what I see?
- Yes, I do. - Is that Micah Hoffman?
Yes, it is.
Misidentification of a corpse and subsequent unrequested autopsy.
Sir, the dead man looked very much like Micah Hoffman.
He had Hoffman's ID on him.
Scully, if I'm carrying Marilyn Monroe's purse,
would you assume that I slept with JFK?
Mulder, the FBI has always prided itself in the speedy expedition of its cases.
But this is the first time that we've ever attempted to pursue a murder case
where the victim was alive.
A bomb went off. A crime's been committed.
There's a dead body nobody gives a damn about.
O'Fallon's been less than forthcoming, and Hoffman is guilty of forgery and extortion.
Agent Mulder, you will leave O'Fallon and Hoffman alone!
And, Agent Scully, you'll put your trigger-happy scalpel away!
Best-case scenario, you get to keep your jobs.
Worst-case, the Church brings a huge, embarrassing lawsuit against us,
which will feature you two as the sacrificial lambs!
As of right now,
I'm forcing you to take a four-week leave effective immediately, pending review.
This Richard Gere thing is going to Skinner's head.
- We're off this case, Mulder. - Compadres.
I've teased out something very fabulous from your pottery there.
Layered in under the ambience. There. Guess what language that is?
- Chuck, I've had a bad day. - It's a dead language.
I had a linguist in here to listen to the recording. It's Aramaic.
That's the language that Christ spoke. Did your linguist happen to translate it?
It's in two parts.
The first part here roughly translates as "I am the walrus. I am the walrus."
"Paul is dead. Goo goo goo joob."
Although there is no Aramaic word for walrus. So it literally says:
"I am the bearded cow-like sea beast."
- What's the second part? - The second parts a little freakier. Here.
- What is it? - It appears to be one man
commanding another to rise from the dead.
Lazarus?
I am become Jesus Christ.
I am become sceptical.
There I was, totally bumming after Altamont.
And I thought "Throw in the towel and go to law school
or continue the fight and become a forger of scandalous religious documents."
I suppose that's a choice every young gifted American male is faced with.
I knew O'Fallon from college.
- He was a divinity professor of mine. - At Columbia?
And he's a decent man, but with an overweening pride
and sense of responsibility born of a lack of respect for the human animal.
He believes in God, but not in man and man's ability to choose to live in freedom.
He has Christ in his brain but not in his heart.
So you created a Christ that was more suited to your particular world-view
But before I could write like Him, I had to become Him,
in much the same way I imagine an actor who plays a part becomes that part.
So I immersed myself in Jesus Christ.
Not just the Church and teachings, but the man, the custom of his time,
the language, the vibe, the feeling of Christ.
So why didn't O'Fallon and the elders go outside the Church for authentification?
Because the forgeries are too damning of the Church. They couldn't risk the exposure.
But then something truly weird came over me,
Remorse?
Conversion, Agent Scully.
The lightning bolt that transformed Saul to Paul on the road to Damascus.
One day I was not just impersonating Jesus Christ,
I had become him.
That's why I blew up the crypt.
The forgeries were blasphemous and needed to be destroyed.
How did your cellphone get on the dead man in the crypt?
God works in mysterious ways.
As long as they can think, we'll have our problems.
But those whom we are using cannot think. They are the dead
brought to assimilate life by our electrode attempts. It's open!
You know, it's an interesting thing when you consider the earth people who can think
..are so frightened by those who cannot. The dead.
Couldn't sleep either, huh?
Plan 9 from Outer Space?
Yeah. It's the Ed Wood investigative method.
This movie is so profoundly bad in such a childlike way
that it hypnotizes my mind and frees up my right brain to make associo-poetic leaps.
I started flashing on Hoffman and O'Fallon.
How there's this archetypal relationship. Like Hoffman's Jesus to O'Fallon's Judas.
Hoffman's Jesus to O'Fallon's Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor
or Hoffman's Jesus to O'Fallon's St Paul.
How about Hoffman's Road Runner to O'Fallon's Wile E Coyote?
- Mulder? - Yeah?
Do you think it's at all possible that Hoffman is really Jesus Christ?
- Are you making fun of me? - No.
Well, no, I don't. But crazy people can be very persuasive.
Well, yes, I know that.
Maybe true faith is really a form of insanity.
And at Ed Wood.
Well, you know, even a broken clock is right 730 times a year.
- How...? - 42.
You've seen this movie 42 times?
- Yes. - Doesn't that make you sad?
- It makes me sad. - You ever been to Hollywood?
Oh, a couple of times a few years ago.
You're going to be there in the morning.
Just a few minutes from Hollywood in the town of San Fernando,
reports have come in of saucers flying so low the...
You know, we've got four weeks' probation vacation and nothing to do.
And Wayne's invited us to LA to watch his movie being filmed.
And God knows I could use a little sunshine.
Scully?
California, here we come.
Agents, I'm so glad you could hang.
I want you to meet the people that are gonna play you.
Garry Shandling, Téa Leoni, this is Agents Mulder and Scully.
- Nice to meet you. - Big fan. Fox Mulder.
No kidding? Huh.
While I've got you here, maybe you could show me how to run in these things.
Right over here, I was thinking... I tell you, I'm having a hell of a time in these heels.
- Hey. Uh, uh... - Hi.
How are you? Listen, can I ask you something?
- Sure. - Do you dress to the left or to the right?
What do you mean?
When I play a character, I need to find his center, his sort of rudder, so to say.
And then everything comes from that.
Uh...
I guess mostly to the left.
- Mostly? - Most of the time.
- Most of the time... to the left. - Mm-hm.
Wardrobe!
- Rolling! - And rollando!
Come on, now. Kick it in the arse. And, action zombies!
- What is this? - Cut! Go ahead, ruin my career.
What seems to be the problem, Mr Zombie, sir?
What the hell's in my mouth?
- What's Tea Leoni's shoulder made out of? - Uh, what is Téa Leoni's shoulder made of?
- Turkey, just like you asked for. - Miss Leoni's shoulder's made of turkey.
Tofurkey! I asked for Tofurkey! I'm a vegetarian!
Half the zombies are vegetarian! Oh, my God!
The people are made out of turkey!
- Hello? - Hey, Mulder, it's me. What are you doing?
I'm working at the computer, what are you doing?
I'm packing. Just, you know, getting ready for our trip back to DC tomorrow.
You know, I was just thinking about Lazarus,
Ed Wood and those Tofurkey zombies.
How come when people come back from the dead,
they always wanna hurt the living?
That's because people can't really come back from the dead.
I mean, ghosts and zombies are just projections of our own cannibalistic
and sexual fears and desires.
They are who we fear that we are at heart.
Just mindless automatons who can only kill and eat.
Party pooper. Well, I got a new theory.
I say that when zombies try to eat people it's just the first stage.
They've just come back, so they'll do all the things they missed from being alive.
So first they're gonna eat. Then they'll drink.
Then they'll dance and make love.
Oh, I see. So we never get to stay with them long enough to see the gentler side of them.
Exactly. Hold on a second. It's my other line.
- Hello? - It's Assistant Director Skinner.
- I hope I didn't catch you at a bad time. - No, sir, I'm just at the computer.
I want to apologize for coming down so hard on you
over the Hoffman-slash-O'Fallon case.
- I appreciate that, Skin Man. - Don't call me that.
Um, where are you now?
I'm underneath you. I'm at the same hotel as you.
Right below you and Agent Scully.
Federman got me an associate producer credit on the movie.
AP Skinner, huh?
Uh, so what are you up to right now, sir?
I'm taking a bubble bath.
Oh, hold on just one second, sir.
Hey, Scully, Skin Man is calling me from a bubble bath.
- It's still me, Mulder. - Uh, sorry. Just hold on one second, sir.
Scully? Yeah, Skinner is calling me from a bubble bath.
- Wow. He's really gone Hollywood. - Totally.
You know, Mulder, speaking of Hollywood, I think Tea Leoni has a little crush on you.
Oh, yeah, right. Like Téa Leoni's ever gonna have a crush on me.
- I think that Shandling likes you a bit, too. - Really?
I love you, Scully.
- No ifs, ands, or... - Bees.
Wait... wait, Mulder... I can't.
I know this feels wrong because we're friends and we treat each other as equals.
No, it’s not that, it’s not that.
Well, what, then?
I'm in love with Assistant Director Walter Skinner.
- That's it, I just can't take it any more. - Shh, Mulder. Sit down.
What does he have that i don't have?
A bigger flashlight.
I've been looking all over for you.
They got it so wrong, Scully.
I got a page from the Washington Bureau.
Micah Hoffman was murdered tonight.
Murdered in his own home by Cardinal O'Fallon,
who then hanged himself.
- A murder-suicide. - It's Jesus and Judas, Scully.
Well, it's all over now.
No, no.
It's just beginning.
Hoffman and O'Fallon were these complicated, flawed, beautiful people.
And now they'll be remembered as jokes cos of this movie.
The character based on O'Fallon is in the credits as cigarette-smoking pontiff.
How silly is that?
- Pretty silly. - What about us?
How are we gonna be remembered now because of this movie?
- Hopefully the movie'll tank. - What about the dead
who are silent and can't tell their stories any more?
They'll have to rely on Hollywood to show how we lived.
And it'll all become oversimplified and trivialized
and cigarette-smoking pontiff-icised.
And become as plastic and meaningless as this stupid plastic Lazarus bowl.
I think the dead are beyond caring what people think about them.
Hopefully, we can adopt the same attitude.
You do know that there aren't real dead people out there, right?
That this is a movie set?
The dead are everywhere, Scully.
Well, we're alive.
And we're relatively young. And Skinner was so tickled by the movie...
- I bet he was. - That he's given us a Bureau credit card
to use for the evening.
Come on.
- Mulder, I have something to confess. - What's that?
I'm in love with Associate Producer Walter Skinner.
Ah, me too.
I made this!