“Orison” is episode seven of season seven of The X-Files.
A preacher is sermonising in a prison chapel. All the prisoners are joining in with his paean of ‘Glory, Amen’ and stamping their feet. All but one; Donnie Pfaster, caught in “Irresistible”.
Later, the prisoners are working in the garment shop and one is repeating ‘Glory, Amen’ and stamping his feet when he accidentally cuts off all his fingers. Everyone but Pfaster runs over, moving slowly. Donnie just casually walks out.
Scully wakens to a draft from her window. Her digital clock says it’s 6:66, then the power goes out. When it comes back on, the clock says 6:06.
At the penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, a U.S. Marshall is recapping Donnie’s deeds to Mulder and Scully. They put him away in the first place and any help would be appreciated. Mulder explains that Donnie is a death fetishist. The marshal calls him sick. Mulder agrees that would describe him. It’s just women he’s after and in five years he will have worked up quite an appetite. The marshal mentions their involvement in supernatural things but Scully says there’s nothing supernatural about Pfaster. He’s just plain evil.
Scully enters the chapel and Mulder follows. Donnie walked out of a maximum-security facility and no-one knows how he did it. Mulder is concerned about Scully’s state of mind; it’s okay to walk away. Scully won’t; she has to stay. Mulder says this is the third escape of this type and Donnie escaped at 6:06. Dozens of witnesses, guards and prisoners, and no-one remembers what happened in any case. None have been apprehended. Or seen again
Mulder interviews the prisoner from the garment shop who cut off all his fingers. Except he has them all. He saw and felt them cut off and the guards saw it too. Mulder raises his hand and the prisoner repeats ‘Glory, Amen’ and stamps his foot. He does that every time Mulder raises his hand.
After the interview, Mulder tells Scully it’s post-hypnotic suggestion. Programmed behaviour. And he doesn’t think Donnie is responsible. One man has had possible contact with all three missing prisoners, the prison chaplain. Scully hears a song; she says she hasn’t heard it since high school and this is the second time today.
Donnie enters a bus station diner in Harrisburg, Illinois. He’s watching the waitress’ hands when a young woman comes over, clearly looking for business. Donnie offers to give her a buff and a polish. He then hears the chaplain behind him. The marshals arrive as well and the chaplain says he has a car. The marshals get distracted, somehow, by the chaplain possibly hypnotising them. However, when the chaplain leaves, Donnie runs him over with the preacher’s own car, with the young woman beside him.
Mulder and Scully arrive at the diner and speak to the marshal. The marshal, is confused, to say the least. He isn’t sure if they saw Donnie or not. But Reverend Orison, the prison chaplain, got hit by his own car and is in hospital. Scully hears the song again.
Scully speaks to Orison at the hospital about the missing prisoners. He tells her not to be concerned; God has them. Orison is making Scully wonder about things when Mulder entered. With a photo of the young woman Donnie drove off with. dead. Orison is shocked; she wasn’t supposed to die. Mulder asks if Donnie is the one supposed to die. Is that why Orison freed him? Orison, under another name, served 22 years for murder.
Mulder thinks Orison is freeing inmates to kill them. Scully points out Donnie isn’t dead; maybe the others aren’t. She also thinks Orison believes what he says when he says God is working though him. The song made her remember something. She was 13 and her father was stationed in San Diego and was listening to the song when her mother told her that her Sunday school teacher was murdered in his front yard. Orison called Scully ‘Scout’ the same as the teacher did. And she woke up at 6:06.
It does seem as if Orison is freeing prisoners so that they can be punished further than they have been by the law. In Donnie, he may have bitten off more than he can chew.