Seeing In the Dark
"Mind's Eye" Plot Summary:
A self-sufficient blind woman has a vision of a drug dealer being stabbed to death, from the point of view of the murderer. She rushes to the scene of the crime, where detectives discover her when they find the body. Mulder and Scully learn that the woman, Marty Glenn, has been in trouble with the law before. She resists answering questions about the murder, so while Scully goes with a detective to the scene to search for the murder weapon, Mulder asks Glenn to take a polygraph test. The only question which the blind woman appears to be lying about is, "Did you see the murder?"
Glenn has a vision of a woman being harrassed in a bar, again from the point of view of the assailant. She demands a phone to call her lawyer and instead calls the bar, warning the man to leave the woman alone. Mulder and Scully bring the bloody gloves which Scully found hidden in the bathroom where the drug dealer was found dead. The gloves fit Glenn, but Mulder doesn't believe that a woman who's been blind since birth could have carried out such a crime. Scully begins to wonder if perhaps Glenn isn't completely blind - she never claimed it as a disability - while Mulder thinks she may have some sort of sixth sense she's not telling them about.
A doctor at the jail performs a vision test and determines that Glenn is utterly nonreceptive to visual input. But in the middle of the test, she has another vision through the eyes of the criminal - this one of a drug deal in a bus depot - and her pupils dilate. Mulder tells the D.A. that there's evidence she can respond to visual stimuli, but the D.A. says that, in the absence of a murder weapon, he isn't going to try a blind girl. Scully arrives to announce that the gloves had blood from two people on them - the dead drug dealer and someone else, possibly Marty Glenn. Meanwhile, Glenn, released from prison, has a vision of the woman from the bar being murdered. She rushes to the scene, finds the woman already dead, and returns to the prison, declaring that she killed them both.
Mulder reads Glenn's confession and realizes that she doesn't even know the name of the second victim, Susan Forrester. He asks who she's covering for and demands help before the real murderer can kill again, but she refuses to cooperate. In the confession, she told the cops where to find the killer's drugs in a bus depot locker, and when the detective walks off with his suitcase, the killer follows. Scully reports that the blood on the gloves was not Marty Glenn's, so Mulder was right: she didn't kill the drug dealer.
Mulder tells Glenn that he read an old medical report and he now knows her mother was murdered by a single stab wound to the kidney, same as the drug dealer and Susan Forrester. Glenn says she never knew her mother, who was pregnant with her when she was stabbed; Glenn was delivered as doctors fought unsuccessfully to save her mother. Mulder hypothesizes that the interruption of oxygen to her brain during the murder caused Glenn's blindness, and that during the trauma, she gained the ability to see through the eyes of her mother's killer. He tells Glenn that she should stop blaming herself for the killer's actions and instead help them find him.
As she leaves the jail to transfer to a higher-security facility, Glenn sees herself through the killer's eyes: he's watching her. Mulder visits her in the new prison, but she's about to be released: Scully has learned that the blood on the glove belonged to Charles Wesley Gotts, a criminal who was paroled recently. The blood also indicates that he's Glenn's father. Mulder says she'll be charged with aiding and abetting murder if she doesn't help them track Gotts down. She sends them to the bar where Gotts threatened Forrester, but Mulder realizes once they get there that she has deliberately misled them: she sees only one way to escape from Gotts.
The detective accompanies Glenn to her apartment so she can move into protective custody, but she tells him that Gotts already knows where she is; he's down in the lobby looking for her. Glenn hits the detective over the head and takes his gun, waiting for Gotts. When he finds her, she says, "I hate the way you see me," and shoots him in the head. By the time Mulder and Scully arrive, the detective has recovered and arrested her. When Mulder visits her in prison, she says Gotts went to Atlantic City when he first got out of jail, so she got to see the ocean, and now that's all she sees.
Analysis:
This was an engrossing if inconsequential episode featuring a terrific performance by Lili Taylor, who had nice chemistry with David Duchovny particularly as their characters swapped O.J. Simpson glove jokes. Scully was a nonentity again, but there were a few great Mulder moments, like him telling the detective that no one has ever called him skeptical before and his chanting to Scully, "Even if the gloves fit, you can still acquit." The murderer was truly creepy, a man with absolutely no redeeming qualities that we could see through his own eyes or anyone else's. I just didn't understand why he didn't try harder to stab Glenn in the end.
The gimmick itself was strange - I've heard of blindness caused by prematurity in infants, but it's odd that no one realized Glenn had this odd ability to "see" things through someone's eyes, since she's been completely blind from birth and should have had no knowledge of colors or light as a child. I didn't buy that she recognized herself so quickly when she saw herself through Gotts's eyes, either, since she should have had no basis for the realization. And the ending was just plain sad, a girl who'd spent her entire life "seeing" jail being put there herself. I wasn't all that sure why they wouldn't let her off with a self-defense plea.
The X-Files Reviews
Get Critical