The X-Files (TV Series)

Familiar (2018)

David Duchovny: Fox Mulder

Photos 

Quotes 

• Dana Scully : [she hands Officer Wentworth the book of witchcraft found at the scene]  Somehow, this didn't burn.

  Fox Mulder : What'd you tell him?

  Dana Scully : To consider that book as evidence.

  Fox Mulder : Huh. Evidence of what, exactly?

  Dana Scully : Of a town in the grip of madness. Of the most human faults and frailty.

  Fox Mulder : Or in the grip of a curse, unleashed by a modern-day witch.

  Dana Scully : Leave that to the tourist literature, Mulder.

• Dana Scully : What's not to like? I mean, you couldn't dream up a more perfect suspect. He's potentially John Wayne Gacy, with a monkey.

  Fox Mulder : That's it. It's too perfect. I don't, I don't like perfect like that. Makes me uncomfortable.

  Dana Scully : Well, sometimes the simplest of competing theories is actually the right one.

  Fox Mulder : [referring to the crowd gathered outside the suspect's home]  And I think most of these people would agree with you. That's what scares me.

  Dana Scully : Well, they've been living next to a convicted pedophile and they didn't know it.

  Fox Mulder : This guy has no chance.

  Dana Scully : Why are you defending him.

  Fox Mulder : I'm, I'm not defending him. But you said it yourself, it's this rush to judgement - mass hysteria, Salem, McCarthyism. What happened to the precious presumption of innocence, which is rooted in a very democratic ideal - that it's better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man.

  Dana Scully : I'm all for benefit of the doubt, Mulder, but he is a convicted felon and we have to start somewhere.

  Fox Mulder : And you and this mob are re-convicting him right here and now for the sins of his past, with a fervor that we see too often in this American experience of ours.

• [last lines] 

  Dana Scully : [sighs]  I just hope that it's over.

  Fox Mulder : I only hope that it is, too.

  Dana Scully : [after a long pause]  That woman went up in flames.

  Fox Mulder : [with a shrug and a wry smile]  Maybe it was the candles.

  Dana Scully : Maybe it was the gates of hell.

  [pauses and takes a deep breath] 

  Dana Scully : Let's get out of this town, Mulder.

  Fox Mulder : There is no getting out of this town, Scully. Not these days.

  [they drive away from the park, cut to a playground merry-go-round that spontaneously begins to turn slowly] 

• Dana Scully : No matter how many times we do this, Mulder, a child is always the hardest. - - It never gets easier.

  Fox Mulder : It's an innocent life cut short. It's hard not to take it personally.

  Dana Scully : Irregular lacerations and abrasions on the neck, throat and torso. Significant amount of the lower abdomen is completely torn out and missing.

  Fox Mulder : That would appear to agree with their findings

  Dana Scully : Well, evisceration fits animal predation, but the condition of the body makes it almost impossible to determine when it happened. Cervical fracturing fits with the picture that he was most probably shaken to death.

  Fox Mulder : By a man.

  Dana Scully : Well, that's something I didn't want to broach out there, Mulder.

  Fox Mulder : You think it's one of the parents.

  Dana Scully : You were in Violent Crime, Mulder, before you came to the X-Files. You know the profile.

  Fox Mulder : Eyewitnesses exculpate the mother.

  Dana Scully : But the father - he's a police officer.

  Fox Mulder : Being protected by fellow officers? What's that? What does that look like to you?

  Dana Scully : What is that, fine, white sand?

  Fox Mulder : Looks like salt to me. Mm. That in the report?

  Dana Scully : What would be the significance of that?

  Fox Mulder : I'm not sure. Tell you what else isn't in the report. There's an eyewitness to the scene who wasn't interviewed. And her father's the chief of police.

  Dana Scully : Mulder, she's five years old.

  Fox Mulder : That seem odd to you?

  Dana Scully : And her mother was right there with her.

  Fox Mulder : Seems very odd to me.

  Dana Scully : But you're wasting your time, Mulder.

• Dana Scully : Have you told anybody else about this?

  Officer Wentworth : I told Chief Strong, but he didn't want to hear it. He told me to let sleeping dogs lie. I-I don't think the chief's head's been right since he lost little Emily.

  Fox Mulder : No, you did the right thing.

  Officer Wentworth : The town won't see it that way.

  Dana Scully : Time has a way of shedding light on injustices especially in this part of the country. But we're not done here yet.

  Officer Wentworth : I sure would like to find that killer. See him get what's coming to him.

  Fox Mulder : We'll talk to Chief Strong.

• Dana Scully : What is it, Mulder?

  Fox Mulder : It's salt.

  Dana Scully : Oh, there's some here, too.

  Fox Mulder : You seeing this, Scully?

  Dana Scully : Mulder, it's a crime scene.

  Fox Mulder : No, you know what this is? - This is a magic circle.

  Dana Scully : Mulder

  Fox Mulder : In witchcraft, magic circles are used - to summon spirits and demons.

  Dana Scully : Mulder, stop.

  Fox Mulder : When casting spells or curses, the salt protects the caster from the demons unleashed.

  Dana Scully : Mulder, this is protecting no one and you can't do this.

  Fox Mulder : In the 16th and 17th century, witches were said to conjure spirits called familiars, which usually took the form of-of animals. But sometimes could take human shape in the guise...

  Officer Sean : Hey, what are you doing?

  Fox Mulder : ...of the victims' ardent desires or a beautiful woman luring a man to his death, or a TV character.

  Officer Sean : Hey, I asked you a question.

  Dana Scully : ...a TV character.

  Dana Scully : What do you mean a TV character?

  Officer Sean : Mind telling me what you're doing?

  Fox Mulder : Scully. This is a Puritan graveyard. This is ground where spirits and demons have been unleashed. I think there's someone who's not telling us everything they know.

• Fox Mulder : You closed the case because you didn't want it looked into further. You knew there was salt on that young boy's body, but you hid that fact, a fact you knew would reveal that someone was practicing witchcraft.

  Dana Scully : Mulder

  Chief Strong : No, it's It's okay. He's right.

  Officer Sean : You ought to take a beat, Chief, before you say anything else.

  Dana Scully : Did you kill those children?

  Chief Strong : I have let the devil into my soul and I have sinned against God, broken a sacred commandment, but I did not kill anyone, especially not Emily.

  Fox Mulder : Then what's your part in all this?

  Chief Strong : I am a lustful man. An adulterer. She wanted to end the relationship, but I wouldn't let her; I kept pushing and pushing. I was on the phone with her when Andrew went missing.And now my own daughter. God. What have I done? See, I'm being punished. I've opened the gates of hell. Oh, God.

  Officer Sean : Let's all give him some room.

  Dana Scully : How did you know, Mulder?

  Fox Mulder : I did not see that coming.

  Dana Scully : But you knew something.

  Fox Mulder : Yeah. In his library, there are all these books on the town's history folklore, witchcraft.

  Dana Scully : Well, that's circumstantial at best. I'm sure lots of libraries in this town have those books.

  Fox Mulder : Yes, but he would have known about magic salt circles and familiars and hellhounds.

  Dana Scully : So you think Chief Strong unleashed something?

  Fox Mulder : I think someone has put a curse on this town, Scully, and maybe unwittingly opened the gates of hell.

• Fox Mulder : In 1658, a Puritan midwife named Goodie Bishop was accused of witchcraft and lying with the devil. Legend has it that she spontaneously combusted in front of the assembled townsfolk, right over there.

  Dana Scully : Well, as we've discussed previously, people don't just spontaneously combust.

• Chief Strong : But, uh let me ask you, what's the FBI doing here?

  Fox Mulder : The FBI has jurisdiction over the killing of the immediate family of a law enforcement officer.

  Chief Strong : Wait - You think that this was a murder?

  Dana Scully : I don't rule it out.

  Officer Wentworth : What makes you say that?

  Dana Scully : I know this is a small town, and probably very close-knit, and I'm sure that you don't want to hear this. But if a man did this and it would typically be a man he would be emboldened by escaping detection - and would likely kill again.

  Officer Wentworth : The evidence - doesn't support that.

  Dana Scully : Well, the broken neck supports that. And the bite marks that you see might be postmortem animal predation.

  Chief Strong : You can't just walk in here making assumptions that we've already dismissed.

  Fox Mulder : These aren't just careless assumptions. Agent Scully's also a medical doctor, and damn good at her job.

  Dana Scully : You'd be looking at a male, age 19 to 42, with a criminal record. And probably lives near and frequents the park. Would know the boy's play schedule. And most disturbingly, these types of killers get aroused at the suffering of their victims.

  Fox Mulder : We were hoping we could see the body.

  Dana Scully : Thanks for backing me up out there.

  Fox Mulder : Yeah. You're my homie.

• Dana Scully : But Coywolves? - Really, Mulder?

  Fox Mulder : Sometimes mixed with wild dogs.

  Dana Scully : Bet a wolf hasn't been seen in Connecticut - for a hundred years.

  Fox Mulder : Just last year, to be accurate.

  Dana Scully : All that I took from the report is that a child was snatched, right from that playground. Does that sound like a wolf to you?

  Fox Mulder : No, I wasn't thinking wolf. I was thinking more like a hellhound.

  Dana Scully : What's a hellhound, now?

  Fox Mulder : It's a large black dog that guards the gates of the underworld. But that's neither here nor there. The point is that stranger things have happened around here, Scully. In 1658, a Puritan midwife named Goodie Bishop was accused of witchcraft and lying with the devil. Legend has it that she spontaneously combusted in front of the assembled townsfolk. - Right over there.

  Dana Scully : Well, as we've discussed before, people don't just spontaneously combust, and that woman was undoubtedly an innocent, a tragic victim of religious persecution and hysteria, and anybody would know that if they read - beyond the tourist literature.

  Fox Mulder : Because there were bogus witch hunts doesn't mean that there were no witches. And while I do sadly concede that there are probably no Coywolves in Eastwood, Connecticut, I do suspect there are still practitioners of the black arts.

  Dana Scully : Well, they can practice all they want, but it doesn't mean that witchcraft - has any basis in reality.

  Fox Mulder : Well and yet, a young boy is dead.

  Dana Scully : Mulder, the only devil around here probably parks right here in front of the playground, stirring something other than his cauldron.

  Fox Mulder : Huh

  Dana Scully : I just want to find the killer.

• Fox Mulder : There will be two injustices here. The death of an innocent man and the release of a guilty officer.

  Dana Scully : What makes you so sure, Mulder?

  Fox Mulder : It's small town justice. They have their scapegoat, their predator.

  Dana Scully : We've witnessed mass hysteria and mob violence at its worst, but I'm not so sure about an innocent man.

  Fox Mulder : This is a witch hunt. I think the person or persons responsible for the deaths of those children is in this courtroom today.

  Dana Scully : What happened to hounds of hell?

  Fox Mulder : Oh, I saw one.

  Dana Scully : Mm-hmm.

  Fox Mulder : I did.

  Dana Scully : Whatever you think may you have seen, Mulder, you still haven't explained how a wolf can take a young child from under it's mother's nose.

  Fox Mulder : Oh, no, it was - it was just guarding the entrance to the underworld in this case.

• Fox Mulder : In the 16th and 17th century, witches were said to conjure spirits called familiars, which usually took the form of animals. But sometimes could take human shape in the guise of the victims' ardent desires or a beautiful woman luring a man to his death.