“Lazarus” is episode fifteen of season one of The X-Files.
The episode opens in the Maryland Marine Bank, 5:55 PM, and Scully is pretending to be doing bank customer stuff. She is accompanied by another agent, Jack Willis, who she tells to relax, they’ll be here. She also asks if he’s sure it wasn’t a bogus tip. He is; he knows the difference. He can feel it; he’s inside their heads. Scully recommends Lewis keep his.
Outside in a car a man is loading a shotgun. The woman in the car is nervous; she says she just doesn’t want their luck to run out. He replies that she is his luck. The man puts on a mask and heads inside the bank, knocking the security guard down with his shotgun. Willis stands and tells the robber to drop his gun and Scully draws as well. The robber starts lowering his weapon – then raises it and shoots Willis. He turns towards Scully but she shoots him.
In the hospital, the robber is dead and Willis has been flatlined for over 12 minutes. The doctors are ready to pronounce but Scully insists that they keep going. Or she will do it herself. Each time they use the defibrillator on Willis, the dead robber’s body jerks. Then they get a heartbeat back for Willis.
At Bethesda Naval Hospital two days later, Willis is rigged to a ventilator when he wakes. He gets out of bed and steals some clothes, hiding from a nurse. He sees himself being shot, then looks in a mirror and checks his face. Next, Willis goes to the morgue and cuts off the bank robber’s fingers to get at the wedding ring.
Mulder meets Scully in the morgue; there has been no sign of Willis. Mulder heard something about a mutilation; yes, three fingers on the robber, Dupre’s, hand were severed with surgical shears and Willis’s prints are on them. Scully thinks it could be post trauma psychosis; Willis had been hunting the robbers for over a year.
Mulder asks about Dupre’s partner, Lula Phillips. They met whilst she was serving a ten-year sentence for manslaughter; he was a prison guard. She was released on May 2nd 1993, one week before the first robbery. In which a teller was pistol-whipped to death. They take it in turns, one robbing the bank, the other driving the getaway vehicle. So far, they have killed seven people and stolen over $100K. Mulder notices that the robbers were married, and says that the fingers weren’t mutilation; they were to get at the wedding ring. Willis arrives at a house, and calls for an absent Lula. He also checks inside the fireplace; whatever he was looking for, probably the money, is gone. A tattoo, Dupre’s tattoo, is forming on his arm.
Mulder tells Scully that Willis used his left hand to sever the fingers. Willis is right-handed. Dupre is lefthanded. He shows Scully Willis’s EKG strip, and asks what it looks like. It could be a number of things. But what does it look like? Two heartbeats. Both men went into cardiac arrest at the exact same time. Both men were technically dead; two men died and one came back. But which one? A doctor at the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland explains to Scully that there is a window of time when a body is vulnerable and could be inhabited by someone else. Scully believes there will be a psychological, not supernatural, explanation. She also had a relationship with Willis.
Willis breaks into a room belonging to a man, Tommy, Lula’s brother. He says he misses her, that’s why he came back. Tommy doesn’t know where Lula is, and was watching the news to find out. Willis – or Dupre – believes Tommy set them up and shoots him.
This is at the Desmond Arms Residential Hotel, and another agent fills in Scully. Tommy had priors, small stuff, not like his big sister. Mulder thinks that someone could have touched the television, and fingerprints it. Willis turns up at this point, and remembers Scully shooting Dupre. Scully wants him to have a full medical evaluation and Mulder says they have a print on the television – which Willis touched – that wasn’t the victim’s.
Later, Mulder heads to the shooting range where Willis is getting recertified. He asks Jack to sign Scully’s birthday card, which he does. Earlier, Scully had said they shared the same birthday. Scully, when given the card, says Mulder is two months early. Mulder thought she and Willis had the same birthday. If so, it’s news to Willis. Plus, the evidence from the television is missing. And Willis’s signature has changed. Scully thinks stress explains this.
Willis, now back at the bureau, is looking for Lula. But with a different goal in mind than the other agents. Is the real Willis still inside him, or is it all Dupre now? Scully, given she’s the one who killed Dupre, is in danger as well.