The X-Files season 11 episode 3 recap and review: Plus One

Mulder and Scully meet evil psychic twins on this week’s latest episode of The X-Files. Also, Scully makes some really questionable decisions about bread.

This week’s episode of The X-Files, “Plus One,” opens on someone who is decidedly neither Scully nor Mulder. Instead, we meet Arkie Seavers, a rangy blond guy walking through the crowd at a rock show. He takes a few pulls from a bottle and then jumps on the stage to crowd surf, just like everyone’s favorite guy at a concert.

Arkie’s elation fades, however, when he spots his dour-faced double standing at the back of the space. When he walks towards his glowering twin, said twin shifts to another location. Arkie gets in a truck and drives away. He narrowly escapes being pulled over when he turns to see none other than creepy Arkie sitting beside him.

“What the hell do you want?” Arkie pleads, but the twin grabs the steering wheel and aims the truck straight into a tree. Arkie crashes through the windshield (seriously, everyone, wear your seatbelts). His doppelgänger is nowhere to be seen.

When we return from commercial, Mulder and Scully are sitting in his office, going over the details of Seaver’s case. Arkie — who somehow survived — claims that an evil twin caused the crash. “Well, you did say he was drunk,” counters Scully. It doesn’t help that Arkie admits that he’s been charged with at least six DUIs.

Scully can’t quite push away Mulder’s notions, however. After all, other people have reported their own evil twins shortly before dying. If nothing else, it warrants a visit to a local psychiatric unit. There, Dr. Russell tells Mulder and Scully that she did have to deal with a strange rash of psychotic doppelgänger cases.

Mulder pauses at a door and asks to talk to the patient inside. Dr. Russell is reluctant. She says that this patient, Judy, has wild mood swings and can get aggressive. But Mulder really wants to see Judy’s drawings, apparently.

Judy

Once inside, Judy (Karin Konoval) is aghast at the state of her “coiffure.” But she still agrees to speak with the agents, having taken a liking to Mulder. “You can call me Little Judy. That’s what my fans call me,” she tells them. “I’m a very famous actress.”

Hey, Judy, what’s the deal with all these hangman games strewn about your quarters? She says that she plays the game telepathically with her brother. One completed game has the name “Arkie” beneath it.

“I don’t know an Arkie Seavers. She might,” says Judy, pointing to an empty chair. Scully and Mulder leave, but Judy later draws a frown on the faceless hangman bearing Arkie’s name.
That’s bad news for Arkie, as he will soon learn. He’s left alone in his cell — except that his phantom twin appears. No one hears his screams.

Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully try to get a place at a nearby motel. Only one room is available, wink-wink. Scully gets the bed, while Mulder is stuck on the suite’s pull out sofa.

The cushy spot doesn’t seem to do Scully any good, as she tosses and frets. When she finally turns, she finds Mulder looming above her. He’s got a reason, though. “They just found Arkie Seavers dead in his jail cell,” he says.

At the jail, Arkie’s lawyer, Dean Cavalier, is livid. “Someone is gonna pay. Arkie did not want to die,” he says before storming off.

Chucky Poundstone

Later, Mulder visits Chucky Poundstone (also played by Karin Konoval). He’s a trustee who found Arkie. He also lives in a squalid, run-down house. Chucky himself is ostentatiously gross, asking if Scully (“that tasty little redhead”) is available for whatever Chucky considers wooing.

Mulder bravely makes his way into the house, which is even worse on the inside. He sees that Chucky, too, has a series of finished hangman games lying around. Mulder deduces that Judy and Chucky are twins, though little love is lost between them.

Chucky gets progressively irritated. “Is this guy a numbnuts or what?” he exclaims. No, he’s not talking to Mulder. “I’m talking to him,” he says, pointing to an empty chair.

Scully goes back to speak with Judy, who is in what the nurses call her “demon Judy” persona. Those nurses refuse to go into Judy’s room, and for good reason. Once Scully enters, she barely manages to miss being hit by — well, I suppose you could pretend it’s chocolate pudding if you prefer.

This Judy is menacing. She admits that Chucky, “the devil’s dimwitted disciple,” is her brother. But Chucky’s not her target right now. “Maybe I can make you go away, too,” she growls at Scully. “You’re all dried up. Not even half a woman.”

Scully plays it cool, but later it’s clear that Judy’s taunts have gotten to her. Even a good old-fashioned argument about ghosts with her fellow agent can’t cheer her up. “Mulder,” she asks, “do you think of me as old?” Well, only in dog years, says the ever-suave Mulder. But, no, “you still got some scoot in your boot.” Nice save, dude.

THE X-FILES: Gillian Anderson in the “Plus One” episode of THE X-FILES airing Wednesday, Jan. 3 (8:00-9:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. ©2017 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Shane Harvey/FOX

The problem with bread

When Scully returns to the psychiatric ward, Judy has no memory of her devilish alter ego. Well, so she pretends, though Scully suspects that it may all be an act.

Judy whispers that people can protect themselves by taking pills that she then pulls up from her cleavage. The nurses tell her that Judy has just rolled bread into so-called pills. “But we both take them … in case they have secret power.” They tell Scully to hold on to them, just to be sure. It’s a nice note of sudden weirdness. What do the nurses know that we don’t?

Meanwhile, Arkie’s lawyer is trying to smarm all over a diner waitress when he sees — you guessed it — himself standing outside. He freaks out and finds Mulder and Scully, who can only suggest that he take a day or two off.

That would be all well and good, if only the lawyer wasn’t kind of a jerk with an extensive sword collection (seriously, his license plate reads “SWRDGUY”). He goes home and frantically tries to rid himself of all sharp things and strangulation hazards. It’s no use. His doppelgänger appears, wielding a katana. Alas, poor sword guy, we hardly knew you.

Mulder tells Scully that the lawyer has died by looming over her bed. Scully tries to work out how the lawyer could have killed himself with a sword, but her heart isn’t really in it. Even worse, she sees her own glowering twin standing a crowd of onlookers. Looks like Judy has followed through on her promise.

Mulder and Scully forever

After all of this, Scully truly can’t sleep. She finds Mulder and they cuddle, musing on their impending old age and diminishing chances for reproduction. Mulder claims that they’ll be together even when they’re elderly: “I’ll come push your wheelchair with my wheelchair.”

It sounds awful, I know, but the exchange strangely works. For all the silliness of the ten previous seasons, we at least know that Mulder and Scully have a deep, complex relationship. It’s nice to hear them be honest with each other, even if Mulder can’t help but crack lame jokes.

Inevitably, the pair gets quite a bit cozier (strictly implied, this being network television). Mulder gets up to drink from a faucet and sees his own phantom twin. He understandably freaks out.
Mulder and Scully head off to check in with Chucky and Judy respectively, hoping to resolve the situation.

Before she drives off, Scully pauses, bread “pills” in hand. She surreptitiously eats one. Yikes. This must be bad.

While Scully talks at the double that inevitably appears in the backseat, Mulder confronts himself in Chucky’s mansion of filth. Simultaneously, Chucky and Judy are playing a particularly intense game of psychic hangman. It gets even more impassioned when they realize that one is targeting the other’s love/lust interest. Chucky changes his game’s answer to “Judy.” At the same time, Judy angrily scribbles in “Chucky.”

Suddenly, Scully and Mulder’s doppelgängers disappear. They quickly find the twins dead. Both look like they’ve been strangled — or have they been hanged? Mulder looks up from Chucky’s body to see two older hangman games, “mom” and “dad” written beneath the figures.

“It’s not out of the realm of extreme possibility”

Later, at the hotel room, Mulder and Scully awkwardly act like they’re totally just friends who happened to sleep together. “Call me if you need anything,” Mulder says.

Scully plays it cool: “I can’t imagine that I will.” So, he makes an exit, leaving Scully to reconsider. “But then again, it’s not out of the realm of extreme possibility,” she mutters as she opens the door between them. Mulder is standing there, waiting. We cut to black.

Now, I could probably sit here and nitpick it like the first two episodes, but “Plus One” was satisfying in a way that neither “My Struggle III” or “This” could manage. It presented a creepy story with just the right notes of goofy weirdness and character development, both for the main duo and one-off personas. And it did it all without the clunky, plodding nature inherent in any mytharc episode after, say, season 7.

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The X-Files works best when it’s unencumbered. Sure, “Plus One” has all of the Mulder and Scully romance backing it up, but it feels so much lighter (and way more consensual) than another episode with the Cigarette Smoking Man.

Honestly, we don’t need a strange situation explained to death. From the audience’s perspective, it’s enough that Judy and Chucky are evil, psychic twins. We don’t really need to know how they manage their killer games of hangman or their dramatic backstory.

Sometimes, it’s better to see it from Scully and Mulder’s perspective: as interlopers. You don’t always need to see how the sausage gets made.