Teliko

"Teliko "is the third episode of the fourth season of the X – files. The episode is of the "monster of the week" type and is not related to the main "mythology of the series".

The episode's title means "the end"in Greek. In African mythology, Teliko is an air spirit that is believed to be albino.

On an international flight from Burkina Faso to the United States, a black man goes to the toilet, where he is attacked by a man with an albino appearance. Another black man comes out of the booth and goes to his seat. After a while, the flight attendant discovers the corpse of a man with depigmented skin in the toilet.

Three months later, assistant FBI Director Skinner, in the presence of Dr. Bruin, an employee of the us Centers for disease control and prevention (CDC), informs Dana Scully about the recent kidnappings of four African-American men in Philadelphia. One of the abductees, Owen Sanders, was found with signs of depigmentation, and a CDC official suspects the man died of some kind of illness. At the morgue, Scully discovers seeds of an unknown plant on Sanders ' body, which she sends to the FBI lab for analysis. Mulder flies to new York, where he meets with UN employee Marita Covarrubias, who informs him about the incident on the plane three months earlier.

At night, at a bus stop, an African immigrant named Samuel Aboa kidnaps a young African-American man named Alfred Kittel, immobilizing him with a poisoned arrow. At home, Aboa takes a sharp-tipped tube from his throat and inserts it into Kittel's nose. In the morning, Mulder finds the same seeds that were on Sanders ' body at the bus stop. On a tip from Covarrubias, agents begin to compare the lists of people who arrived on the plane where the man was killed with the lists of immigrants who applied for a residence permit in the United States. Marcus Duff, an employee of a social service, AAA help with the paperwork, gives agents the address of a client. The agents try to talk to Aboa, but he escapes and mysteriously hides in a narrow ventilation shaft in the wall of the house. The agents discover him and take him to the hospital, where it turns out that Aboa is completely healthy.

Mulder meets with Deabreu, a diplomat from Burkina Faso, which is ordered to conceal information about the dead passenger aircraft. Debra tells him the legend of his people about the Teliko Bambara – night "spirit of air". Scully, after examining Aboa's x-rays, discovers that he is missing the pituitary gland. Mulder concludes that Aboa removes the pituitary gland from its victims to make up for the lack of melanin in its body, causing the victims ' skin to discolor. Aboa escapes from the hospital, hiding in a food cart, and meets Marcus Duff in the Parking lot. After tricking Duff, Aboa immobilizes him and takes him to a construction site, where he inserts a tube into his nose. A police officer accidentally finds Duff's body with a pipe in his nose, scaring Aboa, who is hiding in a drainpipe. In search of Aboa, whom Mulder believes to be the mythical Teliko, agents arrive at the construction site at night, as an FBI lab employee, agent Pendrell, found traces of asbestos on Sanders ' body. Scully finds the discolored corpses of African-Americans in the ventilation of a building under construction, and Aboa paralyzes Mulder with a poisoned arrow. Scully finds Mulder and severely wounds Aboa with a gun as he tries to attack her.

In the report, Scully writes that Aboa's condition is severe, and its physical features have yet to be discovered by science.

The antagonist of the episode is a mutant who arrived in the United States from Africa. He attacks African-Americans in order to extract the pituitary gland from their bodies and use it to restore the pigmentation of their own skin. The mutant immobilizes a person with the help of a thorn of an African poisonous plant, and then extracts the pituitary gland through the nose using a special tool – a long thin stick with hooks at the end. In this case, the victim is completely deprived of pigmentation of the skin, hair and iris, and the mutant restores the dark skin color.

Characters in the series connect the mutant with the legend of the tribes of West Africa about Teliko-a spirit that takes away people's skin color. According to legend, it attacks at night, and during the day it hides in drainpipes or other narrow and hidden places. Similar behavior, also inherent in the mutant, was already shown in the third episode of the first season of the series. There, the maniac, who has the ability to change the shape of the body and stretch it out strongly, hid in narrow niches or made his way through cracks to attack people and feed on their liver.

The episode also mentions an entire albino tribe in Africa, which is probably a reference to the traditions of Tanzania. The large number of albinos in this country is due to the fact that they are rejected by society and forced to marry their own kind. However, the attitude towards albinos in African countries is determined not only by fear. For example, in some places there is a belief that the flesh of an albino is medicinal, and a real hunt is arranged for them.

According to the plot of the series, the mutant is captured (which, generally speaking, is not typical for the "monsters of the week", which usually die at the end of the episode and leave no material evidence). The results of his medical examination indicate that a genetic mutation was detected, and not the effect of the"African spirit". Thus, in our classification, this phenomenon refers to unknown beings.

From a medical point of view, the idea behind the episode's plot doesn't hold water. In the middle lobe of the pituitary gland, the melanocyte-stimulating hormone that regulates the exchange of melanin is actually produced. When the melanin pigment disappears in certain areas of the skin, vitiligo disease occurs, the causes of which, presumably, may be neuroendocrine and autoimmune factors of melanogenesis. But it is not clear how eating (or otherwise) someone else's pituitary gland can resist the development of the disease. The instantaneous loss of pigmentation in the victim and its equally rapid recovery in the maniac also raise questions.