SALVAGE

In Muncie, Indiana, Nora Pearce and Curtis Delario argue about the death of her husband, Ray. Nora believes Ray died from Gulf War syndrome. After attempting to comfort her, Delario starts to drive home and crashes into a man in the middle of the road. His car is totaled, but the man is unharmed as the car breaks around his body. Curtis, grievously injured, looks up at the man and says, “Ray?” The man’s arm slams through the windshield as Curtis screams.

Agents Scully and Doggett investigate the crash. Scully suggests a man stopped the car but Doggett points out that it would have required a dense block of steel to stop the car. Nora Pearce appears and asks what happened to Curtis Delario. Soon afterwards, Scully finds Delario’s body left in a garbage can nearby; his face has gaping holes in it. Autopsying the remains, Scully concludes that the five holes in the man’s face were made by human fingers, as someone reached into Delario’s head and pulled him out of the wrecked vehicle. Doggett finds a fresh fingerprint with the blood of Ray. Then Doggett goes to see Nora Pearce and finds Harry Odell, who employed Ray Pearce at his salvage yard. Doggett asks about Ray, but Nora insists she saw Ray die; both do not believe that Ray could be involved in Curtis’s death.

Later, Ray Pearce eats at a halfway house as volunteer, Larina Jackson, bothers him. She tries to reach out to help him but he is completely uninterested in talking with her. Meanwhile, at the salvage yard, Odell is shredding documents when Ray appears. Harry feigns friendliness while he gets the shotgun out of his desk drawer. He blasts Ray through a sliding glass door. Ray’s detached arm begins to rebuild itself with metal. Harry is transfixed by this sight as Ray kills him. The next morning, Doggett checks out the new murder scene and finds an interesting shredded document. Doggett goes to Chamber Technologies and learns about "smart metals"—metals that rebuild their original forms but are still a metallurgist’s pipe dream at the moment. On the phone, Doggett mentions the "smart metals" and Scully tells Doggett about how Ray Pearce’s medical records show his whole cellular structure was changing due to exposure to an unknown substance. Meanwhile, Larina sees Ray’s obituary in the paper and is watching the television news story about the murder at the salvage yard. She decides to call Ray’s widow.

Scully discusses Ray Pearce with Doggett. Scully wonders: if Pearce has become a 'metal man' "how can he be stopped?" Pearce later arrives at Chamber Technologies. Dr. Pugovel, one of the scientists working there, lures him into a containment chamber and then Doggett, Scully, and SWAT team members surround it. He eventually tears his way out of the back of the chamber. Nora waits for Ray in the halfway house. Ray explains that he didn’t come home because he isn’t himself anymore. Ray turns angrily to her and says, "They've got to pay for this. They've all got to pay."

Doggett, searching in the salvage yard, finds a Chamber Technologies drum, inside of which is a metal corpse. When Scully and Doggett confront Pugovel about it, he admits it was Dr. Clifton, a doctor who mysteriously disappeared. He had requested that he be put in the barrel in order to not ruin the company or slow the research. Doggett and Scully realize that Ray was exposed to the barrel, and thus was transformed into a metal human. At the same time, Doggett notices Nora Pearce at the lab, looking through files for the person responsible. Later, the halfway house is raided by the FBI to find Pearce. Larina finds Ray and he puts one hand over her mouth to muffle, but he kills her by accident.

When Nora arrives home, Ray shows up demanding the name of the person responsible. She tells him that the man responsible is Owen Harris. Ray finds Harris, along with his family, and nearly kills him. However, he realizes that Harris was an accountant who accidentally sent the barrel to the salvage yard. Seeing that he was ultimately innocent, Ray spares him and goes off to die. Scully believes that this act represented the last of Ray’s humanity. At the very end of the episode, a car is dropped into a compactor at a salvage yard and crushed. As the camera fades out, Ray's eye is seen, still alive as the car is crushed

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