A Russian sailor walks along the lower decks of a ship and finds an overflowing toilet. He reports it to the ship's engineer who assigns a sailor named Dmitri to fix the problem. The engineer leads Dmitri to the lower decks where a blockage must be removed prior to flushing the sewage tanks. Dmitri removes an access panel and looks inside for the blockage when something reaches up and pulls him into the sewage tank. The engineer orders the tanks to be flushed out to sea.
Mulder is assigned to investigate what looks like dead end murder case in New Jersey. A decomposed corpse is revealed at the sewers. Enraged, Mulder returns to the FBI headquarters to get rid of the case he feels is only an "exercise" he is being put in by Skinner. He is ordered to continue the investigation. While Scully offers Mulder to do an autopsy of the corpse and proceeds with the task, a sanitation worker is attacked down in the sewage by an unknown creature. Simultaneously with the autopsy results being the finding of a mysterious flukeworm parasite inhabiting the corpse, Mulder learns that the sanitation worker has a strange formed bite. The connection between the two incidents leads to the capture of the monster that manages to kill a driver during its transportation to a mental institution. The bites of the monster were found out to be the search for hosts for the newborn larvae. The creature was tracked down by Mulder for the second time and killed during the attempt to escape to the sea. edit Background Information
* Darin Morgan, who played the Flukeman, is the brother of co-executive producer Glen Morgan. He is also a writer who is credited with the episodes Humbug and Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.
* It took up to six hours to put on the Flukeman suit and Morgan had to wear it once for 20 hours consecutively. For this reason, he had to relieve himself while wearing the suit.
Trivia While Scully is looking at the tabloid you can see one article that says "Nirvana's star's ashes are in this teddy bear," and below that it says "Now his widow and her new man even cuddle it in bed."