The Science Behind The X-Files:

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• In this very disturbing episode, a woman is abducted by a person who unknowingly leaves pictures of his darkest thoughts on undeveloped film. I won't even speculate on the possibility of "thought photography" (famed skeptic James Randi dismissed it as a fraud), but photography, in itself, is as much a science as it is an art. Cameras operate on several simple scientific principles, focusing light onto specially treated film which is then developed in a series of chemical baths. Polaroid film (or any kind of instant-developing film), like the kind used in this episode, contains development chemicals in the film itself which allow the you to see the results of your camerawork right away.
  
  James Randi Foundation link: http://www.randi.org/
  History of Polaroid link: http://www.polaroid.com/polinfo/timemach/past.html
  To find out more about how cameras work, go to Verlangieri's Virtual Art Gallery for a great description of the whole process at http://www.calpots.com/sp_exhibits/camera_exhibit/how_camera_works.html.
  To learn the lingo of photography, check out Kodak's photography glossary at http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/glossary/glossaryContents.shtml.
  For more information on photography, go to "Exposure" at http://www.88.com/exposure/index.htm.

• When the missing woman is eventually found, she has been brutally lobotomized. Much in the style of the earliest lobotomies, the abductor had pushed an icepick into corner of the victim's ocular socket, piercing the bone behind the eye, and rending apart the brain tissue in the frontal lobe. This grisly "treatment," named the "transorbital lobotomy," was developed in 1945 by an American neurologist named Walter Freeman. Freeman thought that he had developed a method with which almost anyone could treat a serious case of mental illness. In its heyday after the second World War, tens of thousands of mental asylum patients were given gruesome icepick lobotomies.
  
  Merriam-Webster "lobotomy" definition: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/netdict?lobotomy
  To read more about the gruesome history of the icepick lobotomy, visit http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n02/historia/lobotomy.htm. This page is part of a fascinating site on the history of psychosurgery by Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD.

• Part of the abductor's modus operandi involves knocking out his victims with a potent anesthetic. Lab work determines that the chemical cocktail is an old dentist's brew called "twylite sleep"; the late father of the prime suspect in this case was a dentist. All of these clues help Mulder finally track down Scully after she too is abducted by the psychotic lobotomist. (A sidenote: Mulder has a run-in with an anesthetic of a slightly different kind in DEMONS.)
  
  For the intriguing history of ether, the first anesthetic, read http://www.community.net/~eclipse/ether.html.
  To find out anything you'd possibly want to know about the field of dentistry, go to the Ask a Dentist page at http://www.parentsplace.com/cgi-bin/objects/dentist/index.html.