This episode was interesting in a post-Me Too era world. The original victim is a notable contrast, they went out of their way to show she was brutally assaulted, and yet the character also is a shirker, a known liar, and more than willing to use lawsuits to get free money for ridiculous claims. She simultaneously claims to have been assaulted by an invisible entity but also an enfeebled old man, significantly weaker than her, physiologically incapable of the act, and strapped into his bed hundreds of feet away.
Scully, perhaps having lost a significant amount of her IQ due to the damage alien proteins wrought on her brain is willing to believe anything this woman says, finding increasingly ridiculous explanations to make her false claims make sense.
It's only after Mulder discovers the actual root cause of the problem that Scully becomes a skeptic again, disbelieving the correct answer until Mulder makes fun of her. Though, perhaps in a nod to the general push-pull nature of this episode I referenced with the initial victim, this explanation also is really confusing even if it is true. In the end everything stops, not for no reason, but for a reason that does not follow whatsoever, and makes absolutely no sense.
Happy Gilmore's grandmother makes a stand-out appearance as an Alzheimer's patient who can see ghosts.
P. S. Also in this episode Scully literally laughs at the idea that mushrooms can be used as medicine. While I could continue to ascribe this to her brain damage incurred onboard an alien spacecraft, I have a feeling it's actually on the ignorance of the writing staff, who like most people in the pre-internet 90s thought medications all came from laboratories where white powder was mixed with other white powder to create incredible new chemical compounds, without ever wondering where the powders come from in the first place or how anybody figured out to give the results to an old person. It's just a staggering thing to hear come out of a medical doctor's mouth even on a goofy TV show. Obviously the vast majority of all medications originated from natural sources, usually plants.
