“Dæmonicus” is episode three of season nine of The X-Files.
A pickup stops overlooking a house at night. Inside, a couple are playing Scrabble. Their dog is wanting to go out and the wife lets it out. It’s hard snarling at something, followed by a whimper and quiet. Then the power goes out. The man heads upstairs to get a gun; meanwhile, someone has grabbed his wife. When he comes down, he sees a figure and when it doesn’t stop, he shoots. It was his wife, bound and gagged with tape. He hears a sound and behind him are two figures wearing demonic masks.
Reyes arrives at the scene in Weston, West Virginia. She heads inside where the couple are posed at their Scrabble board. The wife has the gun; the man has been shot in the head. ‘DAEMONICUS’ is spelled out on the board. Reyes looks up as the van over her head has stopped spinning. Doggett startles her and the fan starts spinning again. He recaps what happened and says it’s the couple’s dog outside with its neck broken. By the looks of it, there were two killers.
The murder suicide staging looks ritualist. The word on the board is Latin, according to Reyes, and means Satan or demonic possession. Reyes thinks there may be something more. Doggett doesn’t believe it’s an X-file. Reyes says she felt something strange before he came in. Two people are going to take the bodies when one jerks back. There are snakes in the wife’s bullet wounds.
Scully is at the FBI training academy introducing herself to a class on forensic pathology. Doggett enters at the back. Scully explains her background with the X-files and that an X-file is one deemed unsolvable by the bureau. Most evil comes from men, and men are caught with science. Only after that has been exhausted do they consider more extreme possibilities.
Reyes finds Scully and Doggett with the bodies. Scully has found tape residue on the wife. Her husband was tricked into shooting her. Fingerprint bruising on him show he was held down in a chair and shot. The snakes are a non-venomous local species sewn post mortem into the body cavity with household thread by someone with surgical skill. Scully knows Reyes isn’t saying everything; Reyes said she felt a strong presence of evil. Doggett says they were only called in because of Reyes’s experience with cases like this. And Reyes has never found anything to support satanism. But she’s never felt like this before.
Doggett answers his phone as Reyes asks Scully if she’s ever felt things. Yes; and she’s learned not to ignore it. Trust your instincts. Doggett says the call was from a mental hospital; they think an escaped patient did this.
The pickup stops in the woods. The men get out with the masks; one takes a rope.
At the hospital, Dr Sampson is asked why she thinks their escapee is responsible. He killed three patients by sewing strychnine into their stomach linings during surgery. She’s asked if she has any idea who the second man is. She doesn’t. Reyes starts asking questions related to satanism and possession and no, she’s not talking about mental illness. The doctor looks as if she thinks Reyes should be a patient. The missing doctor showed no experience with satanism. Sampson is then told the second man may be a guard of 12 years who is missing.
In the forest, the man with the rope drops it and stops. The other man keeps walking then turns around. Staying completely still as the first shoots him.
Doggett and Reyes speak to the patient who was the last person to see the two missing men together, Josef Kobold. He makes cryptic responses and ask if they believe in the power of the devil. If they don’t, how can they protect him?
Night, and the killer is wiping blood from his hands. Inside the pickup and there’s a whispering, which seems to affect Kobold.
Doggett and Reyes return. Kobold has been talking about the prince of the apostles and has been restrained for his own safety. Dr Sampson hasn’t sedated him yet. Kobold says he’s whispering in his ear. He’s killed again. He doesn’t know who, but can show them.
Kobold leads them to the woods, where they find a man strung by his ankles from a tree. Scully does the autopsy; it’s the missing guard. The prince of the apostles is St Peter, who was crucified upside down, a symbol later appropriated by satanists.
Doggett is convinced that Kobold, a man convicted of grinding up six co-eds to use as fertiliser, is behind everything and is playing them. Reyes and Scully are not.