S.R. 819

The episode opens with Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) unwell and horribly discolored in hospital. His veins are a sickly purple hue and are pulsating ominously. Suddenly, he goes into cardiac arrest and the doctors pronounce him dead.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Skinner loses a boxing match after experiencing a dizzy spell. He is discharged from the hospital but Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) witness a bruise on his ribs growing. After trawling through security footage from the entrance to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Scully recognizes a physicist by the name of Dr. Kenneth Orgel, who advises the Senate subcommittee on ethics and new technology, who stopped Skinner in the hall that same morning. Mulder and Skinner travel to the physicist's house but find he is being held hostage. Mulder apprehends one of the kidnappers, who does not speak English. They release him since he has papers showing diplomatic immunity. Mulder does a background check on him anyway.

The background check leads Mulder to Senator Richard Matheson (Raymond J. Barry), which results in a dead end. Scully discovers Skinner's blood sample and, after checking, she finds that Skinner's blood contains some sort of multiplying carbon nanotechnology. Meanwhile, Skinner ends up in hospital following a gunfight in the FBI parking garage. Mulder and Scully reunite at the hospital, where Mulder tells Scully that Skinner was investigating a health funding bill called S.R. 819. Later, the physicist dies of the same carbon blood condition from which Skinner is sick.

Skinner remembers having seen, on numerous occasions, a bearded man who showed up suspiciously and who is actually running the scheme. He saves Skinner and sacrifices one of his own men. The case is closed and Skinner is, once again, aggravated with the agents, ordering them to report exclusively to Assistant Director Alvin Kersh (James Pickens Jr.). The bearded man was actually Alex Krycek (Nicholas Lea), a rogue FBI agent who formerly worked for the Syndicate, who continues to control the potentially debilitating nanotechnology in Skinner's system.

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