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The Walkers in Skin

The Walkers in Skin is the fourth canon arc of PITF, in which the task force goes to a haunted ranch in Utah to exhume a dead woman and finds two towns being replaced person by person.
Setting Washington, DC (episode 01); Sherman Ranch, Ballard and Roosevelt, Utah
Episodes 9 recorded (01–09), plus one unrecorded session ("08.5")
In-fiction dates Early November 1992, around Election Day (November 3)
Main threat The skinwalkers: pilot organisms in manufactured copies of people
Preceded by The Things in Appalachia (and the non-canon one-shot Philosopher's Fist)
Followed by The Roulet Estate

Overview

The arc opens with an epilogue to the Georgia case. With the Clinton surveillance scandal dominating the last days of the 1992 campaign, the Biz is sent onto David Letterman's show, President Bush tells Andrew Howard that the affair was enemy action, and Kurt Larson questions Jan Martense in a CIA black site. Then Alberta Wilmarth asks Andrew to dig up her mother, Shelly Wilmarth, who died in 1990 and has been seen alive. (Walkers 01)

In Utah the team lodges in a double-wide on Alberta's ranch, which she rents to the UFO-hunting billionaire Robert Bigelow. The first half of the arc is a slow accumulation of the strange: a coyote that walks upright, a car dragged sideways at dusk and later lifted into the sky and dropped flat in the next town, a night of hallucinations and levitation under a white ring, a cavern under the whole property, and a town government building a community center in the desert for no good reason. The comedy runs alongside, most of it supplied by Nancy the goose. (Walkers 02, Walkers 03, Walkers 04, Walkers 05)

The cold opens, which the characters never see, tell the audience the rest in advance: rows of bodies wrapped in plastic, a man feeding on Jell-O through gray tendrils, coyotes fed sugar by hand. In the second half the team catches up. Ballard's City Hall is abandoned and stocked with sugar, half the high school is missing, and the sheriff flees the state. (Walkers 06)

The turn comes in the school gym, where Andrew meets a copy of himself, fights it and loses. Andre runs the scene with the other three players out of the call, and at its end tells Rita that she is now playing the replica: a hurried, flawed clone that works for the enemy and passes itself off to the team as Andrew. (Walkers 07)

An autopsy by Donald McManley explains what the townspeople have become: engineered bodies steered by a pilot in the skull, living on blood and sugar. Roosevelt's police are massacred and impersonated, every car is stolen, and the road out is blockaded. In a session that was played but never recorded, the team reaches the National Guard by radio and retakes the Roosevelt police station. (Walkers 08, Walkers 08.5)

The finale is an assault on the community center with Guardsmen, horses and a homemade killdozer. The real Andrew, who died and came back as something else, returns to expose his double, and the team destroys a portal through which the skinwalkers were evacuating. (Walkers 09)

The two Andrews

Rita plays two different characters under Andrew Howard's name in this arc, and for three sessions the rest of the table is not told.

Episodes Who Rita plays What the other players know
Walkers 01 to the gym fight in Walkers 07 The real Andrew Howard. A dream of a naked double in Walkers 06 is the only warning. Everything; there is no secret yet.
End of the gym scene in Walkers 07, Walkers 08, Walkers 08.5, first half of Walkers 09 The replica, the same double Andrew fought in the gym. Nothing. Dante, Ezra and Zack were out of the call for the gym scene and for Andre's briefing of Rita, and had left before the closing scene of Walkers 08, in which the real Andrew revives in the morgue as the Monstrous.
Second half of Walkers 09 The real Andrew again, now the Monstrous. Andre takes over the replica. The real Andrew's arrival exposes the replica in front of everyone, and Andre announces, "Now that the game is up, Rita, let's swap back who we're controlling."

(Walkers 07, Walkers 08, Walkers 09)

Episodes

Episode Summary
Walkers 01 Letterman, the Oval Office and a black site close out the Georgia case; Alberta Wilmarth brings a new one.
Walkers 02 The team flies to Utah and meets Walt, Alberta, Bigelow and the goose at Sherman Ranch.
Walkers 03 An electrical event drags the car at dusk; the sheriff, the bartender, the grave and the substation.
Walkers 04 An upright coyote, a burned crow, two stoned teenagers, and a car that vanishes upward and returns flat.
Walkers 05 The night event puts Andrew in the refrigerator and takes the Biz's fillings; radar finds a cavern.
Walkers 06 A false confession, a fridge of sugar, a fleeing sheriff, a note, and a beam that launches sheet metal.
Walkers 07 A naked intruder, upright horses in the gym, and Andrew replaced by his double.
Walkers 08 Roosevelt cut off; the autopsy reveals pilots and vehicles; the real Andrew wakes in the morgue.
Walkers 08.5 Played but never recorded. Horses, the radio station, the National Guard, and the police station retaken.
Walkers 09 The killdozer assault, two Howards, and the portal under the community center.

Principal cast

Player characters

Allies and locals

Antagonists and suspects

Monsters and phenomena

Key locations

How it ended

With the substation destroyed, the power to the cavern fails and the portal falters. Huell's grenade finishes the machine, stranding fifty or sixty skinwalkers in the dark, and the cavern and the community center above it collapse into a sinkhole. Andrew shoots his replica, whose pilot crawls out of its mouth and escapes. Above ground, everyone has been knocked out by a white powder falling from the sky while black triangular craft circle and hazmat crews remove the bodies. Kurt reports by radio that a cover-up the team did not cause is under way, and the team drives for a hospital with McManley, Walt and the surviving Guardsmen. On the radio, Ross Perot has won the presidency. (Walkers 09)

Left unresolved

See also Unresolved mysteries.

Trivia

  • Dates. The episodes do not quite agree on the calendar. Walkers 01 sets the Letterman taping on November 1, 1992, and the flight to Utah on "the day before the election". In Walkers 03, the team's first evening in Utah, Andre says it is "late October" and Ezra looks up the sunset for October 30. In Walkers 05 Andre says "tomorrow is the election", and Walkers 07 crosses midnight into November 3, Election Day. (Walkers 01, Walkers 03, Walkers 05, Walkers 07)
  • Shelly Wilmarth's death. Alberta says her mother died two years ago and shows an obituary dated winter 1990. When Rita asks in Walkers 05, Andre answers "about, I think, like two months ago". (Walkers 01, Walkers 05)
  • The unrecorded session. "Walkers 08.5" was played between episodes 08 and 09 but never recorded; what happened in it is known from the recap and references in Walkers 09. See its page and Lost episodes.