Original Air Date: November 17, 1995
Episode Grade: B
A dark and slow-moving episode, “Oubliette” plays out more like Criminal Minds than The X-Files. David Duchovny received a lot of praise for his work in this episode, but I found him to be extra mumblesome. Also, Scully is weirdly bitchy in “Oubliette,” and her insistence that Mulder stop giving CPR to a child felt out of character. Still, there’s a lot of heart to this episode. Also, a lot of mumbling.
Recap:
A pretty teenage girl gets her school picture taken. Hey, it’s Jewel Staite, AKA Kaylee from Firefly. In 1995, she was twelve or thirteen years old; according to Wikipedia, they raised the character’s age from 12 to 15 to distance themselves from the Polly Klaas case.
The photographers assistant is super creepy and quite taken with Kaylee; we see him in his darkroom cutting out her picture and placing it next to his own, as if they were a loving couple.
The next thing we see is the creepy bastard abducting Kaylee, whispering “Nobody’s gonna spoil us” as he grabs her from her bed.
At a fast food join, a woman named Lucy gets a nosebleed and passes out, muttering “Nobody’s gonna spoil us.”
Cue the credits!
The scene of the abduction is crawling with cops and detectives. Mulder shows up, looking moody in his well-cut black trench coat. He finds Kaylee’s mother in her daughters’ room. She’s completely shell-shocked and rejects Mulder’s sympathy, saying that he can’t possibly know how she feels. Except for that time his little sister was abducted from her bed while he watched.
The lead detective says that there’s no evidence other than the blood from Kaylee’s nosebleed. Mulder wants to know if they’ve talked to the woman at the fast food restaurant, and the detective’s like, go ahead.
Mulder and Scully meet at the hospital where Lucy is being treated. He tells Scully about Lucy echoing the kidnapper’s words, and Scully says “That’s spooky.” Mulder’s like, that’s my name, don’t wear it out. Mulder says that Lucy was abducted when she was a little girl and held for five years; her captor was never caught.
Lucy is hostile and unhelpful. She can’t tell them anything, and she just wants a cigarette. Mulder says she’s free to go home. In the hospital bathroom, she has a vision of the kidnapper. He’s standing by the side of the road with a flat when a tow truck shows up. The helpful tow truck driver offers to help him if he’ll just pop the trunk. Of course he can’t do that, because there’s a little girl trapped in there. He lifts the tire iron to threaten the driver.
At the precinct, the lead detective says that Lucy has a record and a sketchy boyfriend. Scully shows up with actual evidence—Lucy had O-positive and B-positive blood on her uniform. Scully is running a DNA test to see if the B-positive blood is Kaylee’s, but Mulder doesn’t want Lucy to be treated like a suspect.
At Lucy’s apartment—possibly a halfway house?—she’s shivering and there are scratches all over her face. She says that it’s dark and she can’t see, even though the lights are on. We cut to Kaylee, who is being held in a dark basement with the same pattern of scratches on her face.
Mulder shows up at Lucy’s apartment building just as the EMTs are wrapping up with her. The friendly EMT tells her to get something to eat. Mulder asks if he can take Lucy to dinner. She slurps from a bowl of soup. She’s mumbling. Mulder is mumbling. It’s mumble city. Lucy insists that she can’t help and Mulder insists that she can.
Back in the basement dungeon, we see the creepy bastard taking photographs of Kaylee in the dark. The strobe flashes, whining with each shot, and it’s a tense yet simple scene.
Mulder and Scully watch a video of Lucy just after she had been found. She’s screaming because the light hurts her eyes. Scully has actual evidence—Amy never received her school photo, and the creepy assistant was fired. It turns out he spent the last fifteen years in a mental instution.
Kaylee hears him leave and starts looking around for a way out of the dungeon. She finds a boarded up window and pulls off the planks with her bare hands.
Mulder goes to show Lucy the photograph of the assistant. She recoils in horror and runs.
Kaylee isn’t fast enough. She hears the car returning and redoubles her efforts. The kidnapper sees her just as she crawls through the window. She runs into the woods, sobbing, as Lucy runs through the streets. The kidnapper is chasing her. She falls, and Lucy falls too.
Mulder catches up with Lucy. “What’s happening to me?” she cries.
Mulder and Lucy have another quiet, mumbling scene. “She needs your help,” he mumbles. “It feels like I’m going through this again,” he mumbles. Outside, Scully and the cops arrive. Mulder goes to intercept them, but Scully says that the evidence doesn’t mean that she did it.
By the time they arrive in her room, Lucy is gone.
Back at the dungeon, the creepy bastard is being extra creepy. He tells her that she shouldn’t have run. Kaylee begs for water, and he reluctantly gets her a glass. She says she wants her mom, and creepy bastard goes stony-faced and leaves her alone in the dark.
At the precinct, Scully thinks that Lucy is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and that’s why she’s working with the creepy bastard who abducted her. Scully thinks that Mulder is too close to this case because of his sister. Mulder says that not everything he does is tied to his sister’s abduction. Well, try telling that to the first two seasons of this show.
The tow truck driver shows up with the location where he encountered the creepy bastard. It’s right near where Lucy was found seventeen years ago. Mulder and Scully visit the small town nearby to try to find the creepy bastard’s address. In the next scene, Team FBI and the cops raid the isolated house where Kaylee is being held.
In the basement dungeon, Mulder finds someone sobbing in the basement. It’s not Kaylee but Lucy.
The lead detective demands to know where Kaylee is. He says she’ll be tried as an accomplice if anything happens to that little girl. She says she doesn’t know why she’s here, only that she’s been here before. Mulder leads her outside, and she says that the creepy bastard is taking pictures to work up the nerve to touch her.
Lucy insists again that she can’t help Kaylee. Mulder keeps pushing her, and Lucy starts shaking and coughing. She says that Kaylee is cold and wet. Scully tells Muler that they found the creepy bastard’s car north, but Mulder says that they’re in the river east of the house.
Of course he’s right. Mulder is always right and Scully is always wrong. We see the creepy bastard pushing Kaylee under the water as Lucy starts to drown on dry land. Mulder and Scully arrive. He shoots the creepy bastard in the back and fishes Kaylee out of the river.
She’s not breathing. Mulder and Scully do CPR on Kaylee…but it’s working on Lucy and not Kaylee. Scully tries to get him to stop, but he doesn’t want to give up. He stalks moodily away, and then Kaylee starts to cough and spit up water.
The detectives arrive, and Scully demands an EMT. Two cops roughly pull Kaylee to her feet, which seems…odd. Mulder runs back to the isolate house, where he finds exactly what he expected. Lucy is dead. He caresses her cold face and starts to cry as the camera zooms out.
The next morning, he sits in Lucy’s old room, looking at childhood photos of her. Scully joins him, and he asks how Kaylee is doing. Scully says that she’s unharmed, even though she had been dragged through the woods for over a mile. Meanwhile, the autopsy shows that Lucy drowned.
Scully says that Mulder rescued that little girl with Lucy’s help, but Mulder thinks that Lucy chose to give up her life because it was the only way she could escape. She never really left that dungeon, but now she’s finally free.
Nostalgia Vision 
You are wrong – all over the place! One of the very best x-files.