“Unrequited” is episode sixteen of season four of The X-Files.
The episode opens in the U.S. Capitol Mall near the Vietnam War Memorial. A general is giving a speech to a crowd of veterans about how they were treated when they came home from Vietnam. AD Skinner is next to him. Not as a veteran, but as his job. Skinner asks for various positions to report him. Mulder and Scully are in the crowd. Mulder can feel that whoever they are looking for is there. Scully manages to ID the man, but he spots her as well. Scully and another agent are closing in, but he’s gone. Mulder spots him, but then loses him again. Skinner tells Mulder he’s right in front of him. Mulder sees the man approach, drawing a gun, and then vanish.
Twelve hours earlier at Fort Evanston, Maryland, a general gets out of a helicopter and into the back of a limo. He gets out a briefcase and the driver locks the doors and raises the partition. The general finds a card, the king of hearts, then sees a man sitting across from him. There’s a shot, which the driver hears and swerves to the side to the road in shock. In the back, the general is dead. And there’s no-one else there.
Skinner is briefing some agents about the shooting and that the driver, Burkholder, is being detained on suspicion of murder. Tests show he didn’t shoot the general and he’s believed to have an accomplice. The card was a death card used by soldiers to mark their kills. Burkholder has ties to a radical military group known as the Right Hand. Mulder and Scully enter as Skinner is saying there will be dozens of officers present at the rededication of the Vietnam memorial.
Mulder asks what if Burkholder is telling the truth. For now, Skinner says, they will pursue the leader of the Right Hand, Denny Markham. Agents will work in teams of two. After the others file out, including a general, the one who was giving the speech, who was sitting with Skinner, Scully asks Skinner if that was for the benefit of the general or has Skinner developed a real strategy. Essentially, he hasn’t. They’ve spoken to the private, who passed a polygraph test. Mulder believed him – but he says he also believed the Warren Commission. Scully asks if they have a warrant for Markham. They do. She wants her and Mulder to serve it.
They arrive at Markham’s compound and he tells them over the intercom that the gate is open. Not mentioning that guard dogs were lose, who chase them back out of the gate. Markham is told that he isn’t under suspicion but someone on his mailing list is. They have a warrant for his arrest. And, it turns out, lots of armed backup. Mulder shows Markham the playing card. Markham asks where it came from.
Mulder has a photograph Markham told him to pull from his filing cabinet. Nathaniel Teager, 26 confirmed solo enemy kills. Green Beret whose group, the Bloody Sabres, was shot down with no survivors. The photo was taken in December 1995, a few hours after Markham’s people liberated Teager from a POW camp. Even though the government had determined there were no more POWs in Vietnam. The government tried to kidnap Teager when they brought him home, but he vanished. Scully doesn’t believe this. Mulder says it’s the closest thing to an explanation they have. Scully suggests a coverup orchestrated by an elaborate conspiracy. Which sounds more like one of Mulder’s theories.
A woman is looking at a name on the memorial – Teager’s name is near it – when Teager himself comes over. He says he’s come over to act on the behalf of the man, Davenport, and gives her Davenport’s dog tags. When she looks up, he’s gone.
Mulder, Scully and Skinner are there; she identified Teager from the photo. According to Skinner, he can’t authorise a strategy based around Teager, because he’s dead. Army forensics have his remains, recovered from the crash site. Scully is speaking to the woman about Teager when the woman starts bleeding from her eye. Scully thinks it’s a burst capillary but Mulder wants an eye exam done. By all accounts, she saw a man vanish in plain sight. Mulder himself will check up on the remains.
Mulder is greeted at the Army Central Identification Laboratory. Teager’s remains have been located. There are three teeth. Which may or may not have been extracted after death. Mulder thinks this is rather inconclusive. The person who did the report at the time agreed, but someone signed off on it anyway. This man is General Steffan and Mulder contacts him, warning him about Teager. Two agents will meet him at the Pentagon. Teager follows the general and the agents in; the guard doesn’t see him but the monitor does.
Teager seems to be taking advantage of people’s blind spots. Which may just be talent and training, but it may be something more. There does seem to be evidence of a coverup, though not the one Scully was thinking of. The episode climaxes where it began.