“3” is episode seven of season two of The X-Files.
The episode opens with a man drinking wine looking at some fires in the distance at night. He complains that there is ash in the wine from the fires in Malibu Canyon. There is a woman in the shadows. She lights a candle and the man says he doesn’t do this; he isn’t one of those guys who sends his family on vacation just so he can be with another woman. Although, given that is apparently what he’s done, that seems rather hypocritical. The woman tells him to hush and it will be worth it. She will do things with him no-one has ever done before. They enter a hot tub together and there’s a man watching from the shadows. Then the woman bites the man and she, and a couple of others, attack him.
In the previous episode, “Ascension”, after Scully’s disappearance and Krycek disappearing as well after Mulder realised he was a plant, AD Skinner reopened the X-Files. Mulder is entering his office, where everything is under plastic, and changes the calendar to the correct month. He also opens a new X-File in Scully’s name.
In Los Angeles, an LAPD officer is in charge of a crime scene. It looks like the woman spoke the truth when she said she would do things to the man that no-one has ever done to him before. Seeing as he’s dead. He doesn’t want the media to know about the writing on the wall, then spies someone outside. Which is Mulder. Even though the bureau wasn’t called, Mulder says they should have been. But he isn’t bothered about credit. In the past year, the killers have murdered six people in two states. By the end of the week two more will be dead here and they will be gone. Mulder has a file on the murders and has been waiting three months for them to reappear. He recounts that the victims had bitemarks, every mirror in the house has been smashed, which were on the wire. Also, that something was written on the wall in the victim’s blood, which wasn’t on the wire. Written was ‘John 52:54’ a Bible passage that Mulder recites about eating the flesh and drinking the blood and living forever. Mulder isn’t impressed at the biblical knowledge displayed (rightly; the quote is actually John 6:54).
Mulder recounts the people killed to date. Each set of three is roughly comprised of a father, a son and a Holy Spirit. He opens the filter by the tub and fishes around, removing a needle. Mulder calls the killers the Unholy Trinity. They extract the victim’s blood to store later for a quick fix. The officer apologises, and agrees to help, but he can’t really spare people thanks to the fires, which continue in the background of the episode. Mulder doesn’t need anyone.
What he does need is a phone and a phonebook. Mulder rings up blood banks, settling on one. There, he heads into the darkened basement; a man who startled him explains that the freaky night watchman keeps breaking the light bulbs. The night watchman is in a room sucking blood from a packet and attacks, but Mulder restrains him.
In the interrogation room, the watchman is freaking out about the light, saying it is killing him. Two detectives are watching when Mulder enters. Mulder plugs in a reddened light and turns off the overhead. The man will now talk, but only to Mulder.
The man claims that the three of them are the Father, Son – himself – and the Unholy Spirit. Killing the man wasn’t a crime, any more than a snake eating a fly is murder. Mulder points out that it’s frogs that eat flies. He claims he will never die, and there is no afterlife. He knows that, from seeing the realisation in the eyes of their victims; the three prolong their lives by taking theirs. Mulder isn’t terribly impressed by all this, and wants to know the names of the other two.
Dawn is coming and Mulder will cover the windows, if the Son tells him where the other two are. In a couple of hours there will be no escape from it. Mulder tells Detective Gwynn (Tom McBeath) that when the Son wants to talk to cover the windows. No, Mulder doesn’t think he will turn into a bat and fly away. He’s clearly delusional and, on some level, doesn’t believe his claim. When the sunlight strikes the Son, though, he starts smoking and then screaming. His skin turns red and he collapses to the floor, dead.
Mulder returns and the ME says that the body shows the signs of long exposure to extreme temperatures. Not 15 seconds of sunburn. The ME mentions porphyria, which Mulder is aware of and believes is responsible for the vampire myths. But he dismissed the existence of such creatures as myth. Evidently there are some things Mulder doesn’t believe in. There’s a purple stain on the Son’s hand, and the ME says it could be a club ink stamp, and that the heat may have burned the ink permanently into the lower layers. The stamp is for Club Tepes. As in Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Count Dracula.
This leads Mulder to a young woman who is at the club. The Unholy Spirit was never seen clearly, so this could be her. She certainly has a fixation on blood. Mulder ends up a bit too closely fixated in her. He’s clearly still vulnerable after Scully’s disappearance. Now, he seems to be going after real life vampires.