Walkabout written by Chip Johannessen and Tim Tankosic is a bit of a different story for Frank Black (Lance Henriksen). First airing on 28 March, 1997 the story sees Frank awaking covered in blood and no real memory of the past few days. As he and Peter (Terry O’Quinn) begin to investigate, they discover something dark, with the machinations of a company and it’s medical trials on human guinea pigs – one of whom was Frank.

As he retraces his steps, and his path, he comes into contact with a doctor, Danny Miller (Zeljko Ivanek, last seen in The X-Files episode, Roland) and a dangerous man, Hans Ingram (Gregory Itzin) who believes that people have become too dependent on medication, and is planning on using the drug Frank was exposed to, to show them how wrong they are.

It’s an interesting story, a different one like I said, and while it’s interesting to see Frank backtracking his steps to find a bit of a conspiracy, it’s not quite as engaging as some of the other cases Frank has found himself involved in.

Frank obviously knew he was getting into trouble when he began using an alias he had used before (pre-series) that served as an overture to his breakdown, which sends both Peter and Frank’s wife, Catherine (Megan Gallagher) into a tailspin of worry.

It’s interesting as it seems Frank initially was having conversations with Danny about his gift, the visions and things he sees, and that would have been driven by a need to protect his daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady) who has shown signs of inheriting that same gift…

Lamentation written by series creator Chris Carter gives us a dark, supernaturally tinged (though Frank doesn’t see it) demonic story that first aired on 18 April, 1997.

When a doctor, Ephraim Fabricant (Alex Diakun – a familiar face and voice to X-files fans – he shows up on all of Darin Morgan’s scripts) who was murdering his patients, and caught by Frank, escapes from his hospital room after a kidney donation for his sister, it sets into play a chain of events that portend disastrous results for Frank’s family, and a death that strikes a little too close to home.

As Frank tries to track down Ephraim, he slowly becomes aware of a bigger game at work. Fabricant warns him that It knows who he is. This unnerving statement is made the more forbidding when strange phone calls and a horrifying night for Catherine, Jordan and Bletch (Bill Smitrovich) in the Black’s big yellow house has a lasting impact on everyone.

All of it has a strange connection to Ephraim’s wife, Lucy Butler (Sarah-Jane Redmond), and we are left with a troubling worry about what will happen in the future for the Black family.

As a fun aside, while at Quantico to brief the investigative team about Fabricant, we get a brief glimpse of what appears to be Mulder and Scully coming down a flight of stairs.

Next week, I’ll follow Frank further into the darkness…