The X-Files Season 5, Episode 19: Folie à Deux

Holy shit, this was one of the more disturbing episodes of the show, wasn't it?

So there was a slightly heavy-handed metaphor about call center drones, but I don't care, because this episode was pretty incredible.

For one thing, continuity porn: Mulder's fingers are still bandaged form his encounter with Jacob Haley's henchman in 'The Pine Bluff Variant'.

For another, though, and more importantly, Scully finally witnessed actual paranormal activity. She cannot deny that the nurse was a zombie or that she saw a giant bug trying to attack Mulder. Of course, she denies it to Skinner, but I like that despite doubting Mulder the entire time, she gets the proof she needs to believe him in the end.

But the way the episode played out was extremely tense, and it was one of those that made me glad I had something else to watch before I went to sleep. Otherwise, I'd have dreamed of zombies and giant insects. It's a coincidence that I'm watching this as the cicadas attempt to invade but fall just short of where I live, right? I mean, that's what the boss was, yes? A giant cicada?

I got the idea near the end of this episode, especially as the employee at the new telemarketing call center started to hear the buzzing, that the boss acted kind of like Jasmine on Angel. Everyone saw one face, but if you somehow found out it was not her true face, you could never unsee the real one. In that case, it required contact with her blood; here, apparently just once seeing the creature in the dark would do it.

A theory I saw voiced on the newsgroup - I wasn't necessarily looking for it, but I wanted to see if anyone else thought the creature was a giant cicada, and ended up there - was that people who were prone to paranoia might be inclined to notice that something wasn't normal about their boss. After all, these people all worked in mind-numbing call center jobs, so it wouldn't take much to make one think of their boss as an inhuman beast commanding his drones to work longer hours and smile on the phone.

Seriously, that part actually had kind of an Office Space vibe to it, and I had to laugh. The rest of the episode was really not that funny, just really good. The pervasive paranoia and our knowledge, even early on, that Lambert (the first time they said his time, I swear I heard it as Lumbergh) was right, made this especially intriguing. And naturally, no matter how rational he was or felt, there was really no way for him to adequately communicate what he saw to anyone without them thinking he had completely lost his mind.

The same was true for Mulder, with one exception - Scully trusted him. Well, eventually. She didn't necessarily believe him at first, but she knows him well enough to know that he could be on to something. She's getting better at trusting his judgement, even if she thinks he's kind of out there sometimes. But it was her willingness not to entirely dismiss him that led her to be able to save him.

I do also really like the episodes where Mulder is in trouble and has to be bailed out by Scully, because they so thoroughly subvert the damsel in distress tropes. Not that there aren't episodes where Scully is the one in trouble, but in recent memory, they've done a better job of not having her saved by Mulder, which is good. It gets kind of old when she's always the one in danger.

And it wasn't like Mulder was abducted or impersonated or anything here, but worse. He was strapped to the bed. He knew exactly what was going on and was completely helpless to stop it. Which actually sounds really really terrifying to me. Like, I don't like the idea of being helpless in the first place, but to be helpless and attacked by a giant insect? Nighmare fuel, I tell you!