“Talitha Cumi” is episode twenty-four of season three of The X-Files and the season finale.
The episode opens in a fast food restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, and a man is talking to himself, complaining about what’s been done to him. Then he stands up and draws a gun and tells everyone to stay. He allows the children to leave and one of the staff calls the police. A man stands and walks over to the man with the gun and tells him to please not to kill anyone, that he’s frightening these people and they’ve done nothing to him. The man is calmly talking the gunman into lowering his gun as the police arrive. Then someone tries going out of the door and the gunman shoots him and several others before the police shoot him. The gunman says he’s going to die, whilst the calm man says nobody is and places his hand on the gunman’s wound. The blood vanishes.
Mulder and Scully arrive and ask where the wounded are, the people who were shot. The medic tells them everyone is inside, but there aren’t any wounded. They got a call about a shooting but, when they arrived, there was nothing to do. Inside, Scully asks the detective if he can tell her what happened. He can tell her what he saw, but he doesn’t think anybody can tell her what happened. He directs her to the first man shot. Who has a bullet hole in his top, and remembers being shot, but has no injury. The same guy who tried to talk the shooter down healed him. Mulder speaks to the in-custody gunman. He claims that god spared his life. He reached down and healed him with the palm of his hand. A holy man; it must have been the good lord himself. Scully wants to talk to the man who healed everyone, but he isn’t there. The detective glanced down at his notebook and, when he looked up again, he’d vanished.
Mulder’s mother is on Rhode Island. She enters a summer house that has been sealed up, but the back door is open. Outside is the Cigarette Smoking Man. They know each other. Mrs Mulder has nothing to say to him, but the Smoking Man wants to reminisce about old times. Water-skiing with Bill; the latter was good but not as good as the Smoking Man (William B. Davis was a champion water-skier). But that could be said about so many things. He wants Mrs Mulder to remember something. As they argue, someone photographs the argument.
Back at the fast food restaurant, Mulder and Scully are trying to find out more about the missing man, Jeremiah Smith. The detective was talking to him when he vanished when he glanced down. Mulder gets a call from Skinner’s office; Skinner tells him he received a call about Mulder’s mother being in hospital in serious condition. He can’t pronounce the name where she was found but Mulder knows it.
At the hospital, Scully tells Mulder that the nurse said she had a stroke. Scully reassures him that people recover from those all the time. The doctor tells them that Mrs Mulder isn’t able to speak and is in and out of consciousness. There was a 911 call and the medics found her on the floor of the house. Mulder’s mother comes round and wants to write something down – ‘PALM’.
As Mrs Mulder is taken off in an ambulance, Scully reassures Mulder that things are hopeful and she will get the best care in Providence. It could be a lot worse. Mulder thinks there’s a connection to what happened in the fast food restaurant. Because his mother wrote ‘PALM’ and the missing Smith healed people with his palm. He asks Scully if she thinks that a leap. She does. Given Mulder’s mother’s condition, it could mean anything or nothing.
Back at the office, they have all the footage shot by the first news crew at the shooting. They see the detective speaking to Smith. Several people pass in front of the camera, and Smith is gone. There is another man there instead – and he’s wearing the same clothes.
At the Social Security Administration, various people with earpieces enter. Smith is there and he tries slipping out by a back door. He’s grabbed by men as the Smoking Man was expecting it and taken away somewhere, restrained.
Mulder has headed to the summerhouse and Mr X comes out. The latter explains that he, the Cancer Man, was there with Mulder’s mother. Mr X was the cameraman and he shows Mulder the photographs. Surely Mulder was aware they knew each other? Mr X reassures Mulder that the Smoking Man didn’t hurt his mother; she collapsed after he left and Mr X was the one who called the ambulance. Mr X believes that the Smoking Man wanted something that was kept in the house. Mulder has no idea what it is.
Jeremiah Smith arrives at the FBI, but is it him? He, at the very least, seems to have the ability to change his appearance, and so does the alien bounty hunter. So, it might not be him. Mulder searches the summerhouse and finds something familiar, though not to him. Smith manages to get under the Smoking Man’s skin. (Interesting, in the 60s, Roy Thinnes, who plays Smith, starred in The Invaders, a series about aliens trying to conquer the planet.)
The story continues in season four and the next episode, “Herrenvolk”.