“Mind’s Eye” is episode sixteen of season five of The X-Files.
A woman returns to her apartment in Wilmington, Delaware. She turns on the television, lights a cigarette and sits down. She then sees a man somewhere else yelling, and a briefcase that looks to contain drugs. The man heads to a bathroom and the viewpoint follows, taking out a switchblade.
A police car turns up at the Paradise Motel and two officers enter a room. In the bathroom there’s a body and there’s clearly someone in the shower. It’s the woman from earlier. She’s bloody and holding a bloody sponge. The first officer sees something odd and tells the second to shine his torch on the woman. He thinks she’s blind.
Scully has a slide of the dead man, a street dealer who used schoolkids and couriers nicknamed ‘Little Monster.’ Out on bail for possession with intent. Mulder asks who exterminated him. Detective Pennock (Blu Mankuma) says that’s the subject of some debate. Little Monster died of fatal blood loss in under 30 seconds. A woman, Marty Glen, was found on the scene. Under normal circumstances, they’d have her dead to rights. Except there’s a snag. She’s been blind since birth. She does have an extensive rap sheet, including a sealed juvie record for drugs.
The problem is a blind girl got the drop on an ex-con, killing him with almost surgical precision. She took a $60 cab ride to the room. Pennock doesn’t know if she did it, but he has a theory. Marty has a sixth sense; maybe she can see in the dark like a bat. They’ve got 48 hours to convince the DA to charge her.
Arriving at Marty’s cell, she recognises Pennock. Not magic; his cheap cologne. Mulder greets her and Marty asks who the lady is. She also asks Mulder what he’s staring at. An innocent woman, he hopes. Marty has refused the right to an attorney, because she doesn’t need one unless charged. She’s not being terribly helpful regarding what she was doing at the motel, and knows there was a single stab wound. A lucky guess. There’s also no murder weapon. Mulder is curious as to why she was at a crime scene cleaning up, and doing a poor job of it. Marty won’t say who did kill Little Monster.
Mulder thinks Marty has just adapted very well to her blindness. Pennock thinks she’s taunting them. Mulder says Marty wants to be seen as strong and independent. And he doesn’t think she did it. Pennock asks why she isn’t helping, then; in his experience, innocent people don’t act that way. If they can find the weapon with her fingerprints on, she’s as good as convicted. Scully wants to go to the crime scene. Mulder wants to investigate something.
That being wiring Marty up to a polygraph. She’s still not being particularly cooperative, but the polygraph jumps when she’s asked if she saw Little Monster. Mulder asks a question: Did she see the murder? That causes a definite reaction.
Mulder rings Scully, who is at the motel with Pennock. He explains the polygraph result. Scully reminds him there’s a reason polygraphs aren’t admissible in court. Mulder thinks she saw something, but not with her eyes. Scully has found a pair of bloody gloves. Marty, meanwhile, sees a woman in a bar being hassled. She calls for a phone; she’s allowed to call a lawyer. Instead, she calls the bar and tells the man who was hassling the woman that she is watching him.
The gloves have Marty’s fingerprints on, and they fit her. They still lack a weapon. Scully thinks Marty is arrogant. Mulder doesn’t. She lives in poverty yet has never taken advantage of any of the disability benefits available to her. Any suggestion of not being a complete person is offensive. It’s not arrogance; it’s pride. Scully wants to run a test to see if Marty is really blind. The test is run and, according to the examiner, she is. Then Mulder notices Marty’s pupil contract on the monitor. She’s seeing through the killer’s eyes again. The DA, with the results of the test, wants her kicked loose.
Mulder admires and likes Marty, despite how prickly she is. He also gets called sceptical by Detective Pennock. Something he says no-one has ever called him before. This is due to his continuing insistence that the evidence pointing at Marty doesn’t prove she did it. Because, of course, she didn’t.