John Doe [9x07]

Overall Rating: 6/10
Fright Factor: 5/10
Acting: 7/10
Mytharc Relevance: 3/10
Re-watchability: Medium - this episode has a very different mood from the typical X-Files show.
Connections: Mexico City (R, 2000), Memento

Summary: Agent Doggett (Robert Patrick) is stranded in a small Mexican town suffering from amnesia, thrown into jail, and bailed out by a mysterious man named Domingo on the condition he work for his bail money. The job: helping smuggle illegal aliens. Doggett has no passport, no ID - he doesn't know how he got there, or even who he is. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the FBI's search for the missing agent goes nowhere until Doggett himself starts to put together the clues from half-glimpsed memories from his past life; he sees flashes of himself in a sunny bedroom, and a young boy who might be his son asking him to come outside and play.

Doggett sees that he has a Marine tattoo on his left arm, and a strange crescent-shaped scab on each side of his forehead. He calls the Marine Corps public affairs office to file a missing person's report using his own physical description. Eventually the word of a missing Marine gets to FBI headquarters, and Agent Reyes recognizes the false name Doggett gave - Detective "Ladatel" - as the name of Mexican telephone calling card. Putting two and two together, she suspects it was Doggett himself who made the call from Mexico. She asks Kersh to send a search team south of the border, but he refuses, saying it's out of the FBI's jurisdiction.

Doggett is a desaparecido - a "disappeared one" whose memory has been erased by a evil-looking ganglord, the "Caballero", and he has to rebuild his identity from clues in his environment and the remaining shreds of his recollections.

Report: When I first saw this episode on its inital airdate (January 13, 2002) I didn't much care for it; the atmosphere was very un-"X-Files" and I found the dialogue rather slow-paced and draggy. On second watching it's noticeably improved, perhaps because I've been taking a Spanish class, and some of the Mexican dialogue now makes sense! There is a painful emotional locus in this show when Agent Reyes (Annabeth Gish) rescues Doggett, but must reveal that his son Luke (the boy he has been seeing in his flashbacks) is dead. The revelation strikes a chord in Doggett, triggering a memory flood of the boy's kidnapping, murder, and the discovery of his body.

The camerawork is noteworthy for its use of contrasting extreme lighting conditions, as in the outdoor Mexico scenes where the sunlight is so intense the entire scene is washed out - almost "dry bone" in quality. The makeup on the characters in Mexico is dirty, greasy and sweaty - you almost feel like you need a shower after watching this ep! On the other end of the scale, the indoor scenes in the cantina and jail are the typically dark, somber low-key shots where only highlights are clear. The overall effect is gritty, primitive and authentic, but very different from the typical clarity and transparent quality of a traditional X-Files show.

It's also an atypical X-Files show because the structure is more a police procedural missing-persons plot than an exploration of the supernatural; the only time we suspect something other than human evil is afoot is when we see the "Caballero's" eyes flash red, and we realize he is not what he seems. The memory wipe he performs on the desaparecidos is done by pressing his hands against the skull of his victim, hence the two crescent-shaped scars on Doggett's forehead.

Is "Caballero" an alien? A demon? We never really find out.