Fresh Bones

"Fresh Bones" is the fifteenth episode of the second season of the science fiction television series The X-Files. It premiered on the Fox network on February 3, 1995. It was written by Howard Gordon, directed by Rob Bowman, and featured guest appearances by Kevin Conway, Daniel Benzali, and Matt Hill. The episode is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, unconnected to the series' wider mythology. "Fresh Bones" earned a Nielsen household rating of 11.3, being watched by 10.8 million households in its initial broadcast. The episode received mixed to positive reviews from critics. The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files. In the episode, Mulder and Scully discover a voodoo symbol drawn on a tree after a soldier, Private Jack McAlpin, crashes his car into it following two separate hallucinatory incidents. This leads the two to a processing center for Haitian refugees where suspicion falls on one of the Haitians identified by the colonel in charge. Howard Gordon was inspired to write the episode after reading two articles involving suicides of servicemen in Haiti. The Haitian refugee camp was shot in a derelict building in a North Vancouver shipyard; originally, the producers wanted to set the episode in Haiti and actually film in the country. This endeavor, however, proved unsuccessful.