“Agua Mala” is episode thirteen of season six of The X-Files.
A storm is hitting Goodland, Florida, and a woman is boarding up a house’s door. She’s calling out for someone called Ethan. Ethan, her son, is in the cellar trying to stop a pipe. She heads downstairs as the radio is talking about a hurricane. In the cellar, water starts coming up through a grate in the floor and the woman and her son try to put the washing machine over it. It’s too heavy and white tentacles grab Ethan, then his mother.
Arthur Dale, the former FBI agent seen in “Travelers”, leaves a message on Mulder’s answerphone from Florida. He heard a distress call from a neighbour down the road that set his teeth on edge. There’s not much time to get to the airport, but if Mulder is the X-Files man he says he is, he’ll get there.
In Florida, someone is listening to the radio, then a police scanner. Police went to a house that hadn’t been evacuated and found it empty, but the car was still there. The man, Dale, is in Terra Nueva Trailer Park in Goodland, and answer the door. Mulder and Scully are outside. Dale says they can come in but they’ll want to get right back out there. Scully questions this. Didn’t Mulder tell her what Dale told him? Yes, but she’s not easily persuaded. Or, as Scully puts it, doesn’t take a story of a sea monster to be gospel proof. Scully agrees that Dale is right to be concerned about his friend.
The woman, Sarah, called Dale and said that someone had grabbed her husband in the bathroom. Something had tentacles wrapped around his neck and was choking him. Dale says that she and her husband are marine biologists. He fears the worst. Dale called the police; they were not useful. Mulder and Scully will need to head out.
They head to the house and break in. Mulder says it was boarded up from the inside, so how did the people get out? Mulder heads to the cellar and finds slime by the washer. There’s something inside the washer, trying to get out. Turns out it’s the cat.
Upstairs, the door to the bathroom is boarded up and are they are trying to prise it open when a local deputy, Greer, arrives. He doesn’t believe they are FBI and is arresting them when the cat startles him. Mulder grabs Greer’s gun and the deputy assumes he’s going to be killed. No, though Mulder would like to. Scully shows Greer her ID, then leaves. Mulder wants Greer’s help with the door.
Mulder returns to their car; the only thing in the bathroom was slime and 3″ of water on the floor. Scully had been talking to the airport. It’s going to be closed; they need to leave. Scully doesn’t believe in sea monsters and thinks missing people are a job for local law enforcement. Inside the house, Greer is in the cellar. The grate bubbles again and he prises it open, then fishes inside. He finds a shirt in the pipe. Ethan’s shirt, that Ethan was wearing, though Greer doesn’t know that. How did it get in there?
Mulder and Scully run into a roadblock on the way to the airport. Despite Scully’s protests about how they really need to leave on official business, they can’t get through; the road is washed out.
Greer has turned up at a condominium. His dispatcher says cars are being pulled off the road; Greer wants to check the place out first, because he thinks there are people inside. He knocks on the doors and one swings open. In the bathroom, there’s a mass of slime sat on the toilet, looking like it would if there was a person underneath it. Though there doesn’t appear to be a person. There are tentacles, however, that come out of the slime as if what was once a person is now a monster.
Scully is on the phone, going to get directions from the local police to an emergency shelter, when she loses signal. She wants Mulder to stop because they don’t know where they are going. Mulder spots Greer’s car and does stop. Greer is still inside, not dead but choking. There are marks around his neck and the shape on the toilet has gone, just leaving slime. Mulder fishes out a watch from it.
They are now stuck in the condominium with several other people with some sort of monster on the loose. Even if Scully doesn’t believe in sea monsters. Despite everything, one of the less serious episodes.