“Max” is episode eighteen of season four of The X-Files.
At the end of the previous episode, “Tempus Fugit”, Mulder was diving down to the site of the second crash, and had discovered an alien body on it. This episode opens with more divers heading down to Mulder. He drops his scuba tanks and makes it to shire, but a Humvee and soldiers are waiting and catch him.
At the bar, someone had attempted to kill Sgt. Frisch but Agent Pendrell had accidentally stepped in the way. Scully got a shot off and wounded the attacker. She checks on Pendrell, then looks for the shooter, who has disappeared. When the police show up, Scully gets them to call for an EMT. She tells Pendrell he’s going to be okay and that to the paramedics that he has a punctured right lung. When they see the gun, Scully tells them Pendrell is an FBI agent Then notices she’s bleeding from the nose.
Scully asks Frisch what he said to his girlfriend when he called her and if he mentioned he was in DC. He didn’t. She says there must be someone on the inside. Skinner arrives as Pendrell is being taken away. When asked, Scully says she doesn’t know who shot Pendrell and that Frisch was the intended target. There was supposed to be a federal marshal meeting them. Skinner tells her that order was countermanded. Frisch is being put under military arrest under the suspicion of murder and giving false testimony. Scully says Frisch has testimony damaging to the military and his life is in danger. The order came down from the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mulder is also under arrest by the military, for interfering in the investigation into the downing of a commercial airliner. Scully says the military was responsible for that. The military have admitted to this, but are not telling the same story as Frisch.
Scully heads to pick Mulder up and they discuss the military’s cover story. Scully listened to the recordings and it seems the coordinates the control tower gave the fighter pilot were for the exact path Flight 549 was on. They didn’t see Flight 549 until too late. The other controller killed himself out of guilt and Frisch was pursued to bring him to justice. Mulder asks if Scully believes the story. Despite it being the sort of thing she normally believes, it doesn’t look like she does. Perhaps sending assassins to kill a witness seems to put the lie to it.
The military claimed the fighter was an F15 Eagle. Mulder asks if Scully thinks some marks on him look as if they came from an F15. They look like radiation burns. Mulder got them at the second crash site, and what he found looked like nothing that would take off from an air force base. Mulder believes the F15 shot down a UFO and that took down the plane as well. There isn’t any physical evidence to support this, according to Millar. Does Scully think he’s telling the truth? He seems to be the one man who truly wants to figure out what happened and came to Scully with information he had no reason to share. He found Sharon wandering in a daze around the crash site after seeing lights in the area. But she’s not Max’s sister; she’s an unemployed aeronautical engineer who spent some time in a mental hospital where she met Max. And Pendrell is dead. Which is a bit of a surprise. Scully explains how it happened.
They head to Max’s trailer to look for explanations as to why he was on the plane. Scully asks Mulder how he knows Max was coming to see him. Because Mulder found his card on Max’s body. A VHS tape, once played, has Max talking about getting proof. Elsewhere, at the second crash site, a military team is salvaging the wrecked UFO.
Millar is briefing his team that the evidence doesn’t support anything more conclusively than the military’s claim. Afterwards, Mulder and Scully speak to him. Mulder thinks the facts are a matter of speculation, and he thinks Millar agrees. He has a story to tell, if Millar is interested. Scully disagrees with the story, but not the motives. Max had physical proof of the existence of extra-terrestrials and the plane was brought down whilst a UFO was abducting Max.
There were several pieces of evidence that Max had, and he only had one on him when the plane went down. Or, rather, he had it prior to the plane crashing but not when it crashed. There are other bits out there, and there are others who want them.