There is more than one of everything.
This could have been so much better.
The alternate universe premise is wonderful, and could have been played into a great story like it was on Fringe, but here there was basically no difference between the universes. I was hoping for a slightly different Doggett or an explanation as to why Lukesh had this special ability when no one else did. Did his alternate self not exist?
Instead, we're left with our world, which has a living Doggett and Reyes, somehow magically transported back in space and time, and an alternate world where both of them are dead. Yeah, Fringe did that a lot better, too.
There was another problem with this episode, too, and that's that I couldn't believe, even for a little while, that Doggett was really dying or even at risk in any way. Scully's not ready to come back to work, and without Mulder, it'd just be Reyes, who I think is OK, but way too new to the show to really be able to carry episodes by herself. So Doggett has to survive. (Until the finale, that is, at which point I expect much death. They could kill just about everyone at that point.)
So the entire dramatically slow scene in which Reyes turns off Doggett's life support was meaningless to me. Well, not just because I still don't really care about Doggett, I mean. If they were trying for emotional weight, they failed there. If it had been Mulder and Scully (or Mulder and alternate Scully or something) it might have hit a little harder, though still not that hard, since we'd essentially know they were both safe.
As for the villain, I definitely picked up a Norman Bates vibe, and reading about the episode afterwards, I saw that I was not the only one who noticed it and that the connection to Psycho was intentional. Again, though, Alfred Hitchcock did a better job.
The other big problem with the alternate universe scenario is the idea that the alternate Doggett 'forced out' this universe's Doggett. So was this Doggett 'over there' or just didn't exist? He didn't seem to remember anything when he magically reappeared at the end of the episode. I think a much better way to have done that would be to still have him just in limbo, but make him the one to show up and save Reyes from Lukesh at the end, just as his alternate self stuck in this universe dies. (Of course, this must also mean he just vanished from the other universe, right? They won't know he's dead.)
It was actually kind of confusing in general as to who was in what universe at what time and who experienced what events. Which Skinner was there? Which Brad? Which Scully? Why introduce an alternate universe in a one-off episode if you're not going to take full advantage of it and show us the alternate versions of the characters? Is there a blond Scully over there? A Cancer Man who quit smoking and is Director of the FBI? I'm OK with the super soldiers plot, too, but if season nine turned out to be all about alternate universes instead, I'd be OK with that, too. As long as they did it right.
Another issue was that there was no real mystery. I guess maybe if you haven't seen Fringe, there's a lot more here that's not entirely known, but as soon as the parallel universe idea was even brought up, I more or less figured out exactly what was going on, which made a lot of the other scenes, meant to slowly unravel the mystery, just pointless and kind of boring.
I don't mind the slow episodes when they further some advancement of plots or characters I care about, but this one was all about Doggett and Reyes, and while they're both kind of OK as characters, they don't excite me, and they're just taking time away from Scully and her story. Since this is the final season, I think they shouldn't be wasting quite so much time on these character stories for characters who will be in at most 23 episodes together.
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