TEASER
In Hong Kong, two Asian men walk over to a big crate containing an animal with Chinese writing on it. They look inside and see its red eyes glowing, but nothing more. They quickly close the lid as the animal jumps and the crate shakes.
The crate quits moving and is eerily quite. The two men look inside, but it’s not there.
Later some men are looking for the animal, a dog – they are mad, it was supposed to have been watched. They open the crate and inside are the two Asian men, dead.
ACT ONE
Mulder is in his office when Scully comes in. He tells her about the two Asian men that were killed by multiple bite wounds while they were transporting, a dog.
SCULLY: A dog?…A dog, dog?
MULDER: Yo quiero Taco Bell.
Mulder tells her that the men were found in the crate locked from the outside. She wants to know what happened to the dog.
SCULLY: What happened to the dog?
MULDER: Dog gone…Dog gone…Dog gone.
SCULLY: Yeah, I got it.
Scully tells him that it doesn’t seem likely they died of only bite wounds. She says that bite wounds are rarely lethal, only if they lead to blood loss.
SCULLY: You’re not gonna tell me that a dog did this?
MULDER: Bad dog.
SCULLY: Yeah.
BELLFLOWER, CALIFORNIA
9:27 P.M.
A man is in his yard when he sees a shadow of a dog on his fence. His dog is barking at it, so he tells it to go back inside. The man looks over the fence; nothing is there.
The man goes into his house and goes over to his dog. He touches it and gets blood on his hands. He hears something and behind him is this dog/wolf. It attacks him.
SAN PEDRO, CALIFORNIA
7:42 A.M.
The next day, Mulder and Scully are at the crime scene where the two Asian men were attacked. They talk to a Jeffrey Cahn. He tells them that he didn’t really find anything conclusive, however, that it is unlikely that the dog is still on the ship. When Mulder asks how he came to that conclusion, he asks Mulder if he ever had a dog (Mulder replies that he has). He asks him if he’s ever had to clean up after it.
Cahn tells them about the man who supposedly caught the dog in the first place, Dr. Ian Detweiler. As a cryptozoologist, he studies animals that are thought to be extinct. Mulder adds to that.
MULDER: Animals that aren’t supposed to exist, like sasquatch, and the okopogo, and the abominable snowman.
SCULLY: Don’t mind him, he’ll go on forever.
Detweiler comes over to ask if they’ve found out anything yet. He thinks that it was a theft, and he wants his dog back, since it’s very valuable.
BELLFLOWER
9:32 A.M.
Mulder is walking around carefully, avoiding the dog crap, and looking around. Scully comes over.
MULDER: Watch your step.
Scully tells him that the victim was Jake Conroy, a customs agent. The bite marks matched the ones from the crate, except this time, the dog bit off the man’s hand. It seems he may have been the one that kidnapped the dog and it turned on him.
MULDER: Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
Scully tells him that it makes sense, since the doors were locked from the inside. Mulder asks then how the dog got out? He says that they are calling it a ‘dog,’ but that it exhibited none of its behaviors.
SCULLY: You mean covering up crime scenes?
MULDER: You get a biscuit, Scully.
Scully asks after his implication if he means it has human intelligence. She asks that even if it did, where would they look.
MULDER: With a human that thinks like an animal.
Mulder and Scully go to Karen Berquist’s house, where they mistake someone for her. Mulder thinks that Berquist will help them. Scully asks him how he knows so much about her, but not what she looks like. Mulder says that he’s never actually met her, but that she’s the one that told him about the case.
SCULLY: So you two are chummy?
MULDER: I read her book.
SCULLY proceeds to read off weird titles from werewolf stories from her bookshelf.
Scully is looking around when she sees an "I Want to Believe" poster hanging on the wall. She says that she must have made a connection to him. Finally Berquist comes in; she’s very strange.
The woman seems to like Mulder, and Mulder even introduces himself as Fox. Scully gets jealous and thinks the lady is nuts. She asks her about a ‘Dole,’ and Berquist says that if she means the Juan Chang Dole, it’s extinct. Berquist doesn’t tell them very much.
When she leaves Mulder tells Scully that they met online.
An officer is looking around when he finds the hand from Conroy in the garbage. He goes into a building when he hears a noise and turns to see a man in shadow as it quickly transforms into the canine. It attacks him.
ACT TWO
8:34 A.M.
At the crime scene, Mulder and Scully talk to Cahn. Suddenly Berquist is there.
SCULLY: I don’t think wolfwoman is here to speak to me. I’ll just, uh, take a look at the body.
Berquist doesn’t think that Detweiler could have caught the dog, it’s too smart.
Detweiler comes over and tells Mulder and Berquist, that there is nothing to prove it was his, no prints. He doesn’t want the dog killed.
Cahn is out investigating when Detweiler comes up to him and threatens him that he better not kill the dog.
At Berquist’s, Berquist looks at and enhances a photo on the computer, while Mulder and Scully talk to her. (NOTE: It looks like she’s using "Adobe Photoshop"!) She tells them that Detweiler said that there were no prints, but yet she found them easily. They look at the screen with the print. It has five toes on its paw instead of four.
Out in the car, Scully tells Mulder that she questions Berquist’s motives. She thinks she just did everything to get Mulder out there to meet her. Mulder disagrees.
6:21 P.M.
At the Riley Animal Clinic, Detweiler gets some tranquilizers.
Closing up, the veterinarian goes into the back to check on the dogs. All the dogs start barking. The man runs out locking it inside the kennel room.
Cahn gets to the clinic to help and tells the veterinarian that he has to kill the dog. He opens the door and sees movement. He fires.
The dog falls, but when they go over, it is a different, regular dog. (NOTE: Possibly an injoke to David’s old nickname, this dog’s name is Duke.)
Mulder and Scully come in as the vet fixes the dog.
Scully comes into the room, and the vet is dead on the floor. She calls Mulder in and they collect some samples. When they walk out the dog shape-shifts into the wolf and jumps off of the table.
Cahn is staking out the wolf when it attacks him.
Getting help in time, Cahn ends up in the hospital.
Mulder sees Detweiler there and figures out that since this mythical dog is supposed to be so cunning, that Detweiler never caught it in the first place, he somehow transforms into it. He used the tranquilizers to try to stop himself from killing, but it didn’t work, he’s been transformed into it.
Mulder, knowing Berquist lied goes to see her, and she confirms that it is Detweiler. She tells him that her mistake was wanting to protect the dog, but that the only way to stop him is to kill him. She tells him that it will go to the hospital to finish killing Cahn.
Mulder calls Scully (who is not amused to stop what she is doing) and they go to the hospital to wait.
Scully yells at Mulder for trusting Berquist. She is so jealous:)
They wait for a long time and Scully falls asleep.
Mulder rubs Scully’s face with a magazine to wake her up. He tells her that they can go home. He tells her that Berquist must have lied to him so she could catch up with Detweiler first.
Detweiler loads a tranquilizer gun and waits for Detweiler to come. Mulder calls her and tells her he’s coming over, and to lock the doors. She doesn’t.
The dog slips into the house. When Berquist sees it, she puts down the tranquilizer gun and lets the dog leap onto her. They go crashing through the window.
Mulder and Scully arrive to find Berquist and Detweiler dead.
Back at the office Mulder is upset, he thinks everything that happened was his fault. Scully tells him that it wasn’t. (This scene is kind of shippy.) Before she walks out, she tells him that [a package] came for him. She hands him a tube. She leaves.
Mulder looks at the tube, it’s from "Berquist Kennels." He opens the tube, and inside is a poster, which he hangs up on the wall. As Mulder steps back, the poster comes into view. The "I Want to Believe" poster is where it belongs once again.
(be sure to check out the images, quotes, reviews, etc. of older episodes, through the main pages.)
