“Nothing Lasts Forever” is episode nine of season eleven of The X-Files.
The episode opens in what looks like a surgery with one man telling another about a patient that was brought in 30 minutes ago. The second man tells the first to just give him a scalpel, and starts cutting. He doesn’t look very good at it. Hanging below the surgical bed is a container to collect the, rather profusely flowing, blood.
In the Bronx at night, a woman in black is on a roof overlooking a van. In the surgery, the patient’s chest is cranked open, and the heart stops. One man removes the heart and places it in an organ transport container. This is not a surgery, but some sort of old building, and it looks like the two have just killed someone. The woman on the roof utters a prayer. More organs are removed and bagged, except the pancreas, which one of the men licks. A third man enters and takes the box.
The woman outside enters the building and stabs the man with the box, driving home whatever weapon she used with a hammer. She stabs a second man also whilst the third escapes outside and leaves in the van from earlier. The woman questions the last man she stabbed, but he says he doesn’t know anything, so she utters a prayer of some type and hammers the spike into him. The box itself is dropped off outside the emergency room of a hospital by the woman. The box has ‘I will repay’ written on it.
Scully is attending mass at the Cathedral of the Sacraments in Washington, D.C. when she gets a text message and leaves. The woman who attacked the not-surgeons is meanwhile in a bathroom, washing the blood of her and crying.
At the crime scene in the Bronx, the local office of the FBI is not happy to have Mulder and Scully on the scene; the feeling is that they complicate things. Both of the victims of the woman have been killed by a metal stake through the heart. The organs delivered to the hospital are apparently still viable, but no hospital will touch them. The liver and pancreas are missing. Livers have a limited timeline for viability, so perhaps it’s already been used. Scully thinks that it might be organlegging, and associated with organised crime, not an X-File.
The organs were being harvested by a strange cult. Who seem to be eating them. The man and woman that head the cult claim to be older than they appear. By a lot. The man, a doctor, is surgically attached to a much younger woman. He seems to be claiming to have found a means of prolonging youth, by using blood and organs from others. They also have apparently cured the younger cultists of various physical deformities.
The spikes that were used to kill the organ harvesters were taken from a church fence. The church is the one that the young woman goes to. It seems that her sister is missing, and by the sounds of it has joined the cult.
With Mulder wearing new glasses and the involvement of religion, both ageing and religion are discussed by Mulder and Scully.