The X-Files Season 6, Episode 14: Monday

It's Groundhog Day! Only less silly. And less well paced.

But it is Monday. A lot.

So this is one of the episodes I was slightly spoiled for. I knew there was an episode where a 'bank kept exploding'. Obviously that wasn't quite the case - in the Buffy episode, 'Life Serial', that's how Warren describes it, but he leaves out the part where the bank wasn't simply exploding, but being blown up by a suicide bomber in a robbery gone horribly wrong.

One thing this episode fails at is suspense. Even if you didn't know there were three more seasons, would you really expect both Mulder and Scully to be killed off in the cold open of a random mid-season episode?

Yeah, I didn't, either.

So it opens in kind of a weird spot, but that's OK, because we are at least treated to Mulder's adventures with his waterbed, and Scully asking him where and when he got it - though really, has she ever seen his bedroom anyway? Why would she think he did or didn't have a waterbed? Either way, she made some great faces in this episode, both at Mulder's answer to why he was late, and at her FBI superiors in what looks like it was the most boring meeting in the history of meetings.

There were some definite pacing issues in this episode, though. The only montage they showed to indicate that several iterations of Monday were occurring was the newspaper delivery, which seemed kind of weak. It would have been funnier to show various versions of Mulder tripping over his shoes or stepping onto the soaked carpet. (Also, how much water is in a waterbed anyway?)

Or show a bunch of scenes with Scully asking variations on, "When did you get a waterbed?" Or something more fast-paced. The fact that they wasted all that time showing basically three full iterations of Monday made this a bit less compelling. By the time the audience was able to work it out, the episode was nearly over.

I like that Mulder was somehow able to figure out what was going on - of course he could, because he actually believed that something weird was happening - and retain some of his memories on the next iteration. Though it's kind of sad that the woman was basically right about it. She was living in hell, and the only escape was for her to die.

When the newspaper arrived at Mulder's door on Tuesday morning, I initially thought, "Oh, I guess it didn't work. So what's supposed to happen?" But then he woke up on the couch and his watch said it was Tuesday, which was a relief. Of course, I'm not sure what he can tell Scully and Skinner about Monday's events, since as far as they know, that day only happened once.

At least there wasn't an major character development between Mulder and Scully on the earlier Mondays, because then it would have been as annoying as 'Dreamland' in that they wouldn't remember any of it.

But what Mulder remembers is their conversation about fate versus free will, and that's probably the only important thing the episode brought up. It's obviously explored in great detail with the parallel universe in Fringe, though I felt it was more analogous to the way the Observers calculated event probabilities. As long as everything went as they had predicted and no new variables were introduced, everything went fine. It was only when something changed that their plans were disrupted.

So I think there's a very strong case to be made for, if not free will, then enough variation that even a semi-deterministic universe will give us the impression that we have free will. That is, if at any given moment in time, subdivided as small as possible - however long it would take the smallest subatomic particle to move a perceptible distance at the speed of light - all particles are in a particular location, and at the next moment, they are all in another location, that state of the universe is all that determines who we are and what we do. But since there are somewhere on the order of 10⁸⁹ such particles, that makes for an awful lot of combinations. Enough that it's impossible to predict the state of the universe at a given moment. So for all intents and purposes, we have free will. Because we think we have free will.

Also, direct deposit clearly saves lives.