Season 9, Episode 15: Jump the Shark

Synopsis

This episode serves as the wrap-up to the short-lived spinoff The Lone Gunmen where, among other things, our favorite geeky trio stopped 9/11 about six months before it actually happened, picked up the companionship of a good-hearted if somewhat dim-witted fourth member named Jimmy Bond as well as a mysterious woman alias Yves Adele Harlow, and a cliffhanger series finale involving a team-up with Morris Fletcher that uncovers a secret government organization known as Romeo-61.

We catch up with Fletcher in the Bahamas, where his boat is blown up as he tries to seduce a woman. He requests Doggett and Reyes to come see him, asking for protection because of what he knows. He says Harlow is a super-soldier, and the agents and Fletcher go to The Lone Gunmen with this tidbit. They deny it, and are still angry at Fletcher for helping them track down Harlow a year before and then abducting her. Harlow kills a New Jersey college professor, removes an organ from his body, and incinerates it. The agents find that he was involved in medical research involving sharks, bled phosphorescence, and had a cartilage shell grafted into his body; the shell has had something taken from it.

Fletcher lets the Gunmen know that Harlow's real name is Lois Runce, and Bond returns from a worldwide search for her. An associate geek (the twin of the one murdered in Las Vegas) tells the agents that the Gunmen have gone broke and given up publishing their paper in a similar effort to find her. The Gunmen finally track her down as she's about to assassinate another man, who flees when they interrupt her. They find that Fletcher has had a tracking device on him the entire time, and is running a scam to track down Runce for his employer, a billionaire arms dealer who is also Runce's father. She says that her father was sponsoring the creation of a deadly virus capable of killing thousands, to be delivered by the decay of a cartilage shell that will release it that night...Fletcher is a little unnerved to learn that he's sponsored terrorism.

The man Runce was trying to kill is captured, but doesn't have any sort of delivery system in him. The Gunmen team and Fletcher realize that he was a decoy, while the real second vessel is inside a friend of the professor's. The Gunmen, Bond, and Runce find him at a conference and pursue him into the basement. The Gunmen find the perp, but are too late to safely remove the shell. Instead, they activate a fire alarm to seal him and the virus in the basement hallway, though they have to expose themselves to the virus in order to do so. Skinner pulls a few strings to get the Gunmen buried at Arlington National Cemetery for their heroism.

Zuleikha Robinson, who plays Yves Adele Harlow/Lois Runce, now plays Ilana on Lost. Marcus Giamatti, who plays John Gillnitz, also played Peter Gray on Judging Amy.

Episode Body Count

Professor Douglas Houghton: shot with a poisoned pellet by Harlow/Runce.


Joey Ramone: another stretch, but eh. Fletcher refers to Ramone as a "dead teenybopper," showing that he at least knows enough about him to have heard that Ramone died in 2001.


Professor John Gillnitz: dies after exposure to the virus he's carrying inside his body in a cartilage shell.


The Lone Gunmen: or to recap my original reaction, WHAT? John Fitzgerald Byers, Melvin Frohike, and Richard "Ringo" Byers die in the basement of a convention center after sealing themselves in with Gillnitz to prevent the spread of the virus.

Humans: 6
Creatures: 0
Aliens: 0

Cumulative Body Count (197/202 episodes, 1/2 movies)

Humans: 2,210

Creatures: 131
Aliens: 64

Grand Total: 2,405