“Fresh Bones” has a ghostly, half-formed quality, although that works quite well with its fixation with the threshold between life and death. It draws heavily on Wes Craven’s 1988 horror film The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was in turn inspired by the book of the same name by ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who described his experiences studying zombiefication in Haiti in the early 1980s. In this version, Mulder and Scully are tasked with investigating a Haitian refugee camp in the United States where zombiefication seems to be occurring alongside a pharmaceutical company that is experimenting with the possibility of “medical zombiefication” as the next big industry innovation.

There are lots of strong moment in “Fresh Bones.” The focus on zombieifcation casts a pallid torpor over the episode, sinking us into the humid thickness of Creole Gothic. Like “Die Hand Die Vertletz” this is also a highly imagistic episode, as esoteric designs proliferate out in a networked fashion from the Haitian population at the immigrant camp, appearing first on a tree at a crime scene and then on a conch in a children’s sandpit. The focus on networking continues with the suggestion that voodoo is a kind of pre-digital doxing – a form of remote communication, or remote bullying, that collapses the paranoid physical thresholds of the immigrant camp. Director Rob Bowman also evokes the dream-like liminalities of the American imagination quite evocatively here, as when Mulder and Scully chase a Haitian child (who turns out to be a ghost) through the hushed infrastructure of a shipping port, before he shapeshifts into a cat right at the water’s edge. Interestingly, the revivification narrative also brings back Deep Throat for the first time in several episodes.

That all builds to a powerful conclusion in which the American general heading the military camp turns out to be the main proponent of zombiefication, and is using voodoo technology he’d picked up while he himself was stationed in Haiti. In a terrific scene that recalls the substitute teacher who keeps disembodied eyes in her desk in “Die Hand Die Vertletz,” this general keeps bones and voodoo paraphernalia in his military desk to assist with his occult ceremonies. There’s also a great moment at the end when the general starts chanting in voices and performing voodoo rituals in a cemetery, thereby inverting the exotic gaze that has propelled much of the narrative. On the whole this felt more like a sketch than a fully-formed episode to me – a ghost of an episode – but that’s also what makes it unique. Once the plot details have dropped away, it stays in your mind like an imagistic figment of a forgotten dream.