This is usually a strength, and not just in a something-for-everyone sense.
At its best,The X-Filesis a reminder that we are elastic people.
(Im done with this analogy now.)
Credit: Shane Harvey/FOX
Last week, Mulder and Scully were comfortably cohabitating and ribbing each other about handcuffs.
This week, Scully makes a show about sharing a motel room.
We open on concertgoer Arkie Seavers crowd-surfing to a punk rock rendition of a David Duchovny song (!)
when he spots his menacing double in the crowd and speeds off in his truck.
OnThe X-Files, science has become a dark doppelganger of itself.
(Toward the end of the hour, Mulder will yell, Youre under arrest!
Put the pencil down!
OnThe X-Files, the paranormal has become an MFA class.)
Naturally, one of those stick men hangs from a gallows that bears Arkies name.
It all comes back around.
For the fun tropes?
Mulder and Scully get to a local motel to find that theres only one room at the inn.
The name of the establishment?
Before Rachel married Jacob, her father tricked him into marrying her sister Leah first.
Appearances can be deceiving, even, apparently, in bed.
)(Next: Panic!
Konoval is too talented to need cheap tricks.
(It all comes back around.)
Just know that it cant haunt you if you dont let it, Scully advises sagely.
Rather than listen, Dean goes home and dumps all of his guns and ammo in his driveway.
(In the wordsofBrooklyn Nine-Nines Jake Peralta: Cool cool cool, our country is broken.)
Neither man is entirely responsible for his death, but neither man is innocent either.
and it seems the answer is both.
The signs are all there.
And yet shes definitely Scully, and hes definitely Mulder; their dark doubles dont even speak.
We can only hang ourselves if we panic, she tells Mulder.
But Mulder and Scully can hang themselves in other ways.
Thats not what she means.
Thats not what she means either.
Theyre talking around their issues again.
But whats refreshing is that Scully recognizes their avoidance and refuses to let them keep talking in circles.
(On her own, she protects herself by avoiding her fears; with Mulder she confronts them.
)(Next: It rains sleeping bags)
The conversation gets more muddled.
Judy pushed Scullys buttons the last time she visited, taunting, Past your childbearing years.
Youre all dried up.
Not even half a woman.
Every womans worst fear, you see, like Rachel, is to be old and childless.
He asks Scully whats stopping her from trying for more children.
Besides the fact that the first time was a miracle?
And besides the fact that I dont have anyone to have one with even if I could?
Scully continues, like she didnt live with Mulder all those years.
This is pointillism again, and Ive gotten too close.
That sums them up.
But Mulder isnt as good at being logical about his paranoia as Scully is.
He spots his double in the bathroom mirror and panics, ignoring Scullys attempts to calm him down.
(Its 2018 and Scully is under a sheet asking Mulder to come back to bed.)
Mulder and Scully are saved because they do the opposite.
Mulder and Scully are closer to one person than two; theyre already each others good doubles.)
She probably wont, she says then opens the door to find Mulder waiting patiently just behind it.
In their lives, the improbable is a guarantee.
