“Born Again” is episode twenty-two of season one of The X-Files.
The episode opens with a car pulling up at the 14th Precinct House, Buffalo, New York. Two detectives get out and head inside. One speaks to a female detective, Sharon Lazard, as she is leaving but, outside, the woman notices a little girl sitting on a pile of rubbish. She asks the girl if she’s lost and the girl nods. The detective takes her inside, then asks the detective who spoke to her, Barbala, to help. Barbala sits with the girl, who says her name is Michelle, as Lazard leaves. Then there’s a view from outside as it looks as if Barbala went through the window backwards, followed by a thump. Lazard returns to the room to find the window smashed and Barbala on the room of a car. Several stories below, and he’s a bit dead. Michelle is just sitting there.
Mulder asks Lazard how she heard of them; her brother is a Baltimore cop and mentioned Mulder and Scully’s work on the Tooms case. He told his sister that they had a good feel for thinks that were out of the ordinary. Barbala would have never won any popularity contests, but he was still a cop. Michelle is the only witness and she said there was another man in the room. Lazard says that nobody was in there but Barbala and the girl, and couldn’t have got in either. The department has ruled it a suicide, but Lazard says there is no way Barbala killed himself. Plus, in the room, Mulder mentions that jumpers tend to open the window before they jump. Michelle’s mother has picked her up. Lazard doesn’t know what to believe, but something isn’t right about the kid.
At Michelle’s home, Mulder is working with a composite artist and Michelle on a computer. Mulder suggests the artist fool around with the moustache, which he does, and Michelle laughs. Then the screen fritzes and the moustache returns to normal. Scully is speaking to Michelle’s mother, Judy, about how Michelle managed to get to the station. The first thing that knew about the situation was coming home and finding Judy’s nanny locked in the wine cellar. This is the fourth nanny this year, and it’s only April. Michelle is the problem; she’s a disturbed child, and sometimes frightens her mother. Michelle isn’t like other girls; she has no friends and hardly ever smiles. She sees things Judy can’t and hears people yelling in her head. Michelle’s father was going to teach her to swim, but every time the water was approached Michelle started screaming.
Mulder returns with the composite sketch, which Judy doesn’t recognise, and asks about a Sheila that Michelle mentioned. This is Dr Sheila Braun, a developmental psychiatrist that Michelle sees twice a week. Michelle is at an upstairs window, and throws down an origami bird. Judy has no idea where Michelle learned to do that. The composite is put int he system and Mulder is going to see the psychiatrist as Scully does the autopsy. He suggests she look for burns or lesions on the body; psychokinesis is often associated with an electrical charge. Because how else could a young girl throw a fully-grown man out of a window?
Dr Braun doesn’t recognise the composite either; Michelle could have fabricated it. She says that sometimes a person’s personality splits off. Michelle isn’t schizophrenic, though. Dr Braun has tried to discover the source of Michelle’s extreme rage. Normally, this would be a traumatic event in the person’s past but Braun hasn’t found one. She also leaves Michelle alone with a doll for part of a session and each time the doll is dismembered and disfigured the same way. Dr Braun thought abuse, but it’s something much deeper. Thorazine is regulating Michelle’s more extreme behaviour; Mulder doesn’t think much of this it seems. Dr Braun doesn’t think much of his questions about unexplained phenomena.
During the post mortem, Scully finds something that is consistent with localised electrocution. Lazard calls her; she’s found a match for the sketch. Officer Charlie Morris, who worked narcotics. He’s been dead for nine years.
Scully tells Mulder that Morris was killed in Chinatown, alleged to be the work of the triads but no arrests were made. She mentions the legions, but still doesn’t think it’s a poltergeist or anything like that. Because Michelle walked past a trophy with Morris’s photo on it. Mulder wants to know how Morris was murdered. An arm was severed just below the shoulder, presumably with a chainsaw, and the right eye was gouged out. Which is exactly how Michelle disfiguring the dolls.
They head to speak with Morris’s former partner, Tony Fiore (Brian Markinson). Fiore wants to speak outside so they don’t wake his wife. He can’t comment on Morris’s death, because the case is still ongoing, but Mulder tells him they have permission from the captain of the 14th, and they think Barbala’s death was connected. Fiore knew of Barbala by reputation, but that’s all. Morris was killed when off duty and Fiore thinks it was payback for a big drugs bust. His wife comes out at this point and, as Mulder and Scully leave, they comment to each other how she had flour dust on her, suggesting she wasn’t sleeping.
Fiore heads to see another man, Leon Felder. It seems Fiore is hiding something, something that involves quite a bit of money. Felder tells Fiore they are the only two left, and that means over a million each. They agreed to wait ten years. Fiore is less interested in the money and, that night, Felder has an unfortunate encounter with a bus.
Everyone who is dead proves to be connected in some way, and it seems clear that there is some connection between an officer’s murder 9 years ago and an 8-year-old girl. Mulder has a definite idea as to what the connection is.