REVIEWED BY: Jennifer J. Chen ON: March 15, 1999
ORIGINAL AIR DATE: October 21, 1994
To this day, this episode remains one of my favorites. Scully only has a cameo appearance, and her hair is the only part of her that gets any screen time with Mulder, but what that hair leads to is a scene I can (and have) watched over and over. The focus of this episode, of course, is no longer Duane Barry, but Scully--and Mulder's response to her disappearance.
Plot wise, this is a hugely important episode to the mythology. 
Scully's abduction furthers the agents' quest to find the truth, and gives Scully a personal investment into the X-Files, instead of only having been assigned to them and to Mulder. I have often wondered where the series would have gone if Gillian Anderson had not gotten pregnant and required the writers to quickly come up with a way to cover her absence. It's possible that they would have staged her abduction eventually, but perhaps at a later time, and the mythology would still have been different.
I'm not going to go too much into the mythology, especially because it is such an early episode that any questions I had at the time have probably been answered. Suffice it to say that I was not all that surprised to find young Krycek working with the Syndicate--I was glad, of course, because it would easily free up the position of "Mulder's partner" and plus it made Nick Lea that much sexier. When he was just a snivelling kiss-up he just didn't have the same presence on screen as when he became a double-agent (I'm still not absolutely sure where his ultimate loyalties lie) with considerable power of his own.
Even this early in the series (it was only the second season, after all), we are shown how much Scully has come to mean to Mulder. I think he surprised even Krycek with his determination to get to Scully--not just anyone would risk life and limb and use a cable car known to be untested and dangerous, and not just anyone would be worth the risk. And then to climb onto the thing when it has stopped--that is one determined man. But the most riveting moment of the entire episode, a scene that shows us in a most obvious way how much Mulder loves Scully, is when he confronts Duane Barry. 
From the beginning of the scene Mulder's tension is obvious, but he does a good job of trying to remain calm, his voice quiet. From the way that Mulder looks at Barry, we know that he hates him for being in any small way responsible for hurting Scully, for taking her away from Mulder. Mulder, who absolutely believed Barry in Duane Barry and even sympathized with him, now despises him more than anyone else on the planet. He doesn't care about Barry's abduction experiences, he doesn't care that Barry could very well shed much light and provide some answers that Mulder has been searching for all his life. All he cares about is that Barry is the person responsible for Scully's disappearance, responsible for the pain inside him. It is a pain that cannot be healed until he knows that Scully is safe and by his side.
I think the scene deserves to be delved into in detail, so I'll begin when the medics leave Mulder with Barry in the room. As I said, Mulder is very deliberate and tries to be calm--he questions Barry about where he took Scully, and when Barry reveals why he did it--"That was the deal. Her instead of me," Mulder closes his eyes and is no doubt controlling his pain and anger. He cannot avoid what is pressing on his mind any longer, he has to know--in a very quiet voice, he asks, "Did you kill her?" I need to stop at this point and confide how impressed I was with David Duchovny's performance. Every word that he uttered was laced with Mulder's pain, anger, and anxiety for Scully's life. Even having watched it dozens of times, I am still struck with how every nuance of Mulder's voice absolutely carries all these emotions in it. Barry responds, very convincingly (Railsback is also great) that no, he did not kill Scully. Mulder just stares at him for a moment, and you know that if Barry had provoked him in the least 
way at that moment, Mulder would have killed him then and there. Mulder then gets off the topic of Scully herself (it was probably getting too difficult to maintain his composure, so he had to distance himself again) and asks Barry about his burn scars. For the first time, Mulder is not able to believe, willingly and without proof, that a spaceship was involved ("I saw a helicopter."). He wants to make Barry work--he wants to be convinced. In this way, Mulder has become Scully, seeking evidence to find a conclusion, instead of making the evidence fit his foregone conclusion. Perhaps it comforted him to do things Scully's way. Perhaps it would be the only thing left of her that he had.
Mulder is operating on Scully's beliefs--her skepticism about Barry's abduction and her belief that he was instead suffering from psychosis leads Mulder to act the way we see most closed-minded characters act. Barry sees the shadowy figures outside the room, but Mulder does not even look; he automatically assumes that Barry is getting over-excited and is obviously mentally disturbed. This causes the audience to question Barry's psyche as well--if Mulder doesn't believe him, then why should we? But luckily we are able to watch with an audience's detachment as the rest of the delicious scene unfurls itself.
In the process of trying to calm Barry down, Mulder discovers Barry's hospital wrist-tag...with blood and a few strands of hair from it. It can't be said for certain whose blood it is, but there's no mistaking the red-gold strands stuck to it. At this point, Mulder snaps, and basically goes crazy in a whirl of mental anguish. He rips off the wrist-tag and shoves it in front of Barry's face. He is barely under control when he demands, "Did you hurt her?" Barry senses that he is on very thin ice, that Mulder will kill him with the least provocation. He says no, but Mulder doesn't believe him--he has to know the truth, he wants to be given a reason to hurt Barry physically the way Mulder is hurting emotionally; someone needs to be punished for Scully, and Mulder wants it to be Barry. He shouts, "Did you hurt her?" Again, Barry denies, fear on his face. "What is this?" Mulder is ripped apart by Scully's red-gold strands of hair; it is evidence that something has happened to her. He imagines the worst, and the worst thing of all is that he believes himself to be the cause of it. 
He is the one to put Scully in danger, he is the one who left her vulnerable to this madman, he is the one who would not believe her but believed Duane Barry instead, and he could not save her. In this, the most important fight of his life, he is helpless, useless, the problem and not the solution. Barry does not know how to explain the hairs; he had taken Scully but Mulder would not believe that the spaceship had taken her away. He frantically shakes his head, but Mulder can't take the agony any longer; he loses the thin thread of control. He starts to choke Barry, his anguish and pain evident in his face; he has to punish Scully's tormentor, this is the only thing he can do for her, for himself.
But he cannot forget that Barry is his only link to what has happened to Scully and his common sense returns from its emotional tumult; Barry is still a witness, a mental patient, and Mulder can't help Scully if he's behind bars, so he finally lets go. Barry understands Mulder's actions (they are so heart-renderingly obvious!), and tries to empathize with him: "I hope they're not hurting her...too much with the tests. I'm sorry." Mulder can't take this further imagery from the ones that are already raging through his mind, and he leaves the room.
Mulder goes on to use whatever contacts he can in order to learn more about what has happened to Scully. Skinner asks him if Mulder believes that Scully is dead; Mulder's response of, "I don't know. How far do you think they'd go?" is honest but a little disappointing. As a Shipper, I'd like to have heard him say, "No. I would know." But I'm writing this four years down the line, so at the time, it was probably much more realistic to have him say what he said.
Mulder then goes on to bond with Margaret Scully, who seems to have implicit faith in her daughter's partner.
Please feel free to 
Even then, I think she was able to sense that if there was anyone out there in the world who cared about her daughter as much as she did, it was Fox Mulder. And if there was anyone in the world that could save Scully, it too, was Mulder. It is an incredibly poignant and symbolic gesture for Mrs. Scully to refuse Scully's necklace and insist that Mulder keep it so that he can give it back to her in more ways than one. Firstly, it speaks of Mrs. Scully's confidence that Scully is still alive; this confidence is no doubt very reassuring and motivational for a very depressed and exhausted Mulder. Secondly, if it is the last link to Scully, Mrs. Scully would not give it up to just anyone--she knows that Mulder needs it more than she. And lastly, if Scully is ever found, she could just as easily give it back to her daughter, but she entrusts Mulder with that intimacy--she is certain that both he and her daughter would want it that way. Mrs. Scully's words, "When you find her, you give it to her," still have the power to make tears spring to my eyes, it is such a powerful moment.
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1999 by Jennifer J. Chen