Tithonus

"Tithonus" is the tenth episode of the sixth season of the TV series "The X-Files". The episode belongs to the "monster of the week" type and is not related to the main "mythology" of the series.

A man chases a girl through the building. She gets into the elevator with other people. The elevator breaks, and at the moment of falling, the pursuer photographs the dying.

The photographer becomes a suspect in several murders. Agent Ritter begins to deal with this case, to which Scully connects. During the interrogation, it turns out that during the murder of the last victim, photographer Alfred Felig received eight stab wounds in the back, but remained alive.

Agent Mulder follows the progress of the case and decides to check the photographer's biography. He finds out that he changed his identity several times, but in fact was born in 1849. Scully demands an explanation from Felig, and he takes her to work with him. Together they drive around the city at night until they meet a prostitute, who, according to Felig, should die in the near future – and dies, despite Scully's best efforts.

Scali asks the photographer about who he is and where he got the ability to predict the death of people. Alfred tells her the story of how he got sick during the Yellow Fever epidemic, how he saw death and turned away from her, and she took the nurse who cared for him instead. Since then, he has not been able to die, although he has tried to kill himself many times.

The photographer sees that Scully is going to die soon. Agent Ritter breaks into his apartment, shoots Felig, and the bullet hits Scali. Ritter calls an ambulance, and the photographer takes Scully's death for himself and dies in her place. Scully stays alive.

A man named Alfred Felig, born in 1849, cannot die, since Death took another person instead of him. This happened because, being seriously ill, he refused to face death and wished that the nurse who took care of him would do it instead. After that, he recovered and became immortal: not only does he not age, neither jumping from bridges, nor knife or gunshot wounds, nor an overdose of pills kill him.

After a while, Felig, tired of life, began trying to meet Death, look it in the face and die. Over the years he has lived in search of death, he has learned to recognize people who are going to die in the near future (within an hour). In the episode, such people are shown in black and white, which makes them stand out against a colored background. Felig photographs them in the last moments of their lives, trying to capture Death itself in this way. In his opinion, he managed to get closer to this goal only once, when an obscure glare appeared in a photo with people who had just died.

At the end of the episode, Felig still dies, offering the wounded Scully to close her eyes and not look - apparently, Death takes him in return. It remains unclear whether Scully became immortal after that.