“Salvage” is episode nine of season eight of The X-Files.
A man and a woman are talking. The woman, Norma’s, husband Ray has died. She’s sure he was sick from fighting in the Gulf. She wants to find out and prove it so that someone pays for Ray’s death. The man, Curt, leaves and someone watches him leave in his car. He glances down and when he glances up there’s a man in the road. He hits the man and the car very definitely comes off second best. Curt says ‘Ray?’ as the other reaches through the windscreen.
Scully is examining the bloody windscreen as Doggett reports the car’s owner is a Curt Delario who is unreachable. Scully doubts that Delario feels like picking up the phone, wherever he is. Doggett says it seems the car was going at least 40mph when it hit, and this much damage would need something 4,300 times the density of steel. The car is moved and Scully spots footprints in the road surface. Doggett hopes she isn’t suggesting the car hit whoever left the prints. Well, there impressions are fresh and the car clearly hit something. The only evidence is the prints. Doggett is sure the driver would have stopped if there was a man standing there. It looks like he tried to. Doggett thinks a man would have moved out of the way. Scully suggests the man may have wanted to stop the car.
Norma runs up and Doggett goes to speak to her. Curt worked with her husband at the salvage yard; he came over after the funeral. Scully has found something in a wheelie bin. Curt, with five deep holes in his head.
Doggett enters the morgue and Scully tells him that Curt was alive when he was pulled through the windscreen. There are five puncture marks, matching the five fingers of a hand. It doesn’t seem humanly possible, for an ordinary man, and Doggett says Curt was less than ordinary. They lifted a print from the glass, which matches that of Ray Pierce, Norma’s dead husband. And fresh blood from him, too.
Ray is in a halfway house. He ends up using nail trimmers to remove what looks like metal stubble from where his face was hurt.
Doggett goes to see Norma again; Ray and Curt’s boss, Harry Odell, is there as well. Norma says Ray died after a long, debilitating illness from Gulf War Syndrome and she aims to prove it. Doggett has checked into Ray’s cremation. He wasn’t cremated and the crematorium can’t find a record of his body. Is it possible he is still alive? There’s evidence linking him to Curt’s death. Norma watched him die; by the end he couldn’t lift his head.
Ray is eating in the halfway house and a woman, Larina, a volunteer, tries to engage him in conversation. She says she’s been where he is. That seems unlikely. The only thing Ray says is to leave him alone.
That night, at Southside Salvage, Harry Odell is painting over parts of barrels. He heads to his office and starts shredding paperwork. Ray arrives and Harry pulls out a shotgun and unloads both barrels. Ray is knocked through the door and Harry heads outside. Ray’s arm is lying there and metal is growing from it. Then Ray attacks.
The next day, Doggett calls Scully from the scene to ask if there’s blue paint on Curt’s fingers. There isn’t. Doggett says that Harry hit someone and they suffered massive bloodless. How did they survive? Scully thinks the question they need to ask is why they are killing. Doggett finds part of an invoice in the shredder from Chamber Technologies. Ray, meanwhile, has two arms again and much more metal on his body.
Doggett is told at Chambers Technologies that they’re working on smart metals; when damaged, they could regain their original forms. The man’s predecessor is no longer with the company and all the work is purely theoretical at the moment. That looks like it isn’t exactly true.
Ray looks like he was killed by being exposed to some sort of experimental smart metal. Only he didn’t stay dead and now he’s turning to metal. Which Doggett – played by the actor who played the T1000 in Terminator 2 – says only happens in the movies.