Talitha Cumi, possibly the most mystical X-File to date, opens with Mulder and Scully's search for a remarkable man who can calm a frenzied gunman, heal several people dying of gunshot wounds, and then vanish in the wink of an eye. This stranger, who goes by the name of Jeremiah Smith falls into the hands of the Cigarette-Smoking Man; their conversation makes it clear that "Smith" is not human. Meanwhile, Mulder's mother secretly meets the Cancer Man in a scene heavy with hair-raising implications, then suffers a stroke. Mulder's anguish over this event is balanced by his shock when he learns that she has known the Smoking Man for a long time, and by Mulder's own discovery of an alien weapon hidden -- as she told him it would be -- in their own family vacation home. X demands that Mulder hand over the device. When Mulder refuses, X tries to take it from him by force in a parking-garage brawl. "Let me be clear," Mulder asks him. "We're talking about colonization, aren't we? The date is set." This sets us up for a confrontation at an industrial site between the X-Files team and Jeremiah Smith, now spouting the same vague Promises to Reveal All that we have learned to ignore.
The trouble with "Talitha Cumi" is the trouble with the series--it is beginning to eat its own tail. Vital story elements--the alien ice pick or the faces worn by Jeremiah Smith--could have no significance to a new viewer. There is too much here whose significance points backwards, to earlier episodes. I can forgive stunning leaps of logic (like Mulder linking the restaurant shooting to his mother's stroke--oh, come on!) for the sake of Scully and Mulder's little "Are you okay?" conversation--a classic Carter/Duchovny/Anderson scene that says much with little dialogue.
