“The List” is episode five of season three of The X-Files.
A car is travelling on a foggy road at night. A man is waiting and the car stops. The driver invites the man in.
At the Eastpoint State Penitentiary in Florida, a guard heads to see the warden. He tells him it’s 5 o’clock. The warden asks about someone called Neech. Neech’s wife is apparently with him and he has refused to eat his meal or see the chaplain. The hired man is travelling. It’s time for Neech to be prepped.
The guard arrives at a cell inside which there is a man and a woman. The woman is telling the man that she will never love another man. She’s going on about this to a perhaps excessive degree. As in protesting too much. The man, Neech, is escorted to an execution chamber and tied into an electric chair. When asked if he has any last words, he says that his murder is neither merciful nor just. He will return to avenge the tyranny; he will be reincarnated. Five men will die. The warden tells a hooded man – the man picked up by the car, going by the clothes – to pull the switch.
Mulder is telling Scully about Napoleon ‘Neech’ Manly who was convicted of a double murder during the hold up of a liquor store. Neech wasn’t the gunman. He drove the getaway care but the gunman was killed during the pursuit. He was executed three days ago, after getting stays twice. Neech was well read and charismatic. Mulder explains Neech’s final threat. Yesterday, one of the death row guards was found inside Neech’s cell. It’s an unexplained death.
At the prison, the warden says that suffocation was the cause. Although he has no idea how it happened. The guard didn’t hit his panic button either. The warden doesn’t believe Neech came back. He does say that Neech was very smart and, on the outside, might have won a Nobel Prize eventually. Put a man that smart inside, and it will cause problems.
The guard’s body hasn’t been autopsied yet; they are waiting for the state pathologist. Scully takes a look at the body and calls the warden over. If the body isn’t refrigerated soon, there won’t be an autopsy. It’s covered with maggots and is decomposing.
Another death row inmate, John Speranza, is questioned. He believes Neech is coming back. No-one could have got in death row to kill the guard, because there’s always guards watching. Lately, even more, because everyone is afraid of what they say can’t be true. Neech is back. The guard opens up Neech’s cell for Scully. She notices flies on stains on the pillow. The guard doesn’t know who killed the other, but he knows who didn’t. He leaves to check on Mulder and Scully hears a sound and goes looking. Someone grabs her from behind. He says he just want to talk. There’s a list that Roque has got of who Neech is going to kill. The man who grabbed Scully is a guard, Parmelly.
The next morning, several men are working on part of the prison. One opens a paint can. Inside is the severed head, covered in maggots, of the guard who showed Mulder and Scully around death row.
They only have the head. The pathologist tells Scully it’s difficult to determine the exact cause of death, without the rest of the body, but the head was severed by stabbing blows with a putty knife. He says the fly larvae are not altogether unusual. The greenbottle fly can lay its eggs a minute after death, and more flies breed when it’s hot and humid. The dead guard’s lungs were filled with them. As nest as he can tell, the guard was suffocated.
Roque doesn’t want to tell Mulder about the list on the block. Outside, he claims he heard Neech telling Speranza who was on the list. The dead guards were. Roque won’t say who else was on the list without a transfer out of there.
The warden won’t make such a deal, because every con with half a brain would try something similar if he did. They don’t run the prison; they just control it. Anything a prisoner wants finds its way in. If a prisoner is wanted dead, someone finds a way. Agreeing to the deal would send the message about the benefits of killing guards. He opens his office door, revealing the missing body sitting behind his desk. Mulder comments to Scully that they can do the autopsy now.
Looking through Neech’s books shows that he was obsessed with reincarnation. Scully prefers the idea of a complex scheme involving inmates and guards. They head to see the wife, who appears rather worried. She thinks Neech could have come back. Several people are keeping secrets and bodies are piling up. Always, there are flies around.