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"What's so special about you??!!"
I will now tell you what I thought was special about "Fight Club." OK. Well. Let me think. I'm sure I can come up with a few things. Wait, I got it. The scene where that line comes from. It was hilarious. There is something about watching Scully try to politely and winningly plow forward while the angry man (played with style by Jack McGee) screams at her was laugh out loud good. Gillian Anderson did a wonderful job with that scene.
OK, I thought of another thing. Amazingly enough David and Gillian did not phone in their performances. Frankly, I would not have blamed them had they chose to, but nope they tried. God Bless them. They really did. The opening office scene was pretty amusing. Scully finally calls Mulder on his game playing technique of describing cases and shows him she does a pretty darn good Mulder impression after years of study. It was playfully done by the actors and fun to watch. Sort of like a game of X-Files charades. I enjoyed her triumphant reaction and Mulder's "don't go thinking I'm going to start doing the autopsies." I also liked seeing Mulder sucked down a storm drain, but maybe that's just me.
What else was special? Well. Oh. The props department did a nice job making slightly different things for the two women. Um. And, it was better than "Travelers." Warning: If you are faint of heart, bail now. I'm in a mood about this one.
That's what was special about "Fight Club." The rest was a rather mean-spirited, poorly acted mess where, in a rather astonishing turn of events, Chris Carter has now taken to ripping off himself to find a storyline. And doing it badly. This time it isn't two girls with the same birthday causing things to go wacky, it's - get this - identical non-twin sisters! And here is the knee slapper: you can tell them apart because Lulu REALLY likes blue (she has blue clothes, a blue house, and a blue car) while Betty has a thing for red. Except for the fact that the script can't even keep it all straight and even though we see Betty in a red house and Lulu in a blue one in the teaser they spend the rest of the time talking about Betty in her blue house. We don't even have freaking teaser continuity in this one.
And the script doesn't really get any better than that. Mulder and Scully I guess get this case because they are now investigating internal FBI disturbances between partners, but no one notices that before the agents pummeled each other they looked like Moose and Squirrel. We get to see a bar explode not once, but twice, because the first time was so riveting apparently we were all begging during the commercials to see it again shot almost exactly the same way so we could really relive it in all its glory. The big twist of the episode turns out to be that Burt too has a Burt 2 and was the child of the apparent sperm donor frenzy that went on about 40 years ago. Who knew it was so popular then. Thankfully Scully was just lucky enough to run into Burt 2 by coincidence. And amazingly the dad just also happened to be in the Kansas City area in jail also by coincidence. That's always fine writing when the plot is propelled by coincidence. Requires a lot of thought. And, as a viewer I just can't get enough of the tried and true one girl hidden and the other comes over - the suspense! Will she suspect? No one has ever thought of that exciting plot twist before. Oh, and for no reason a con artist who takes the money three times and whose name Mulder can not pronounce is his new bestest buddy. In a strange twist of events he is even their new supervisor since for no apparent reason they appear to be reporting the case to him in the end while he stinks up their office with a cigar. Why are they giving this man an official FBI slideshow? Who knows. Maybe he too is a friend of Skinner's that gets to tag along now because they are going to do a new WWF Mulder and Scully smackdown show and he wants to get a "flavor". But that was not even the worst part of the end. No, instead we are supposed to find it amusing that it is implied that Mulder and Scully beat each other up to the point that they have never looked worse on the series. Zombies have looked better. Look, Mulder's mouth is wired shut and they both have stitches and a black eye, isn't that clever? No, it is not. It was ugly and disturbing and played for laughs. This was definitely Chris Carter at his worst.
To top it off, both Lulu and Betty are played by the stunningly inept Kathy Griffin. She is so awful that she manages to make Victoria Jackson's "Rain King" turn look like Meryl Streep in comparison. Half the time you can see her almost mouthing along the other actor's lines before she speaks and the other half she is presenting canned responses like her patented surprised look that just scream phony. I did not believe one second of her performance. However, to make the episode even more special they managed to find an equally bad actor in Randall "Tex" Cobb to play Burt "the Titanic" Zupanic. Thankfully most of the episode consisted of scenes between the two of them with such brilliantly scripted lines as "why do I find myself so wildly attracted to you Burt Zupanic?" That's why we all watch the X-Files, am I right? Sheesh. As Angry Bob says "they could electrocute me quicker." So despite the fact that the actors have written three out of the last five episodes this is the best idea Carter could come up with? I had this horrible thought that the reason they were letting Scully do all that paranormal explanation riffing at the start and solve the case was that they were just preparing us for the show next year. It's time to end this thing with some class.
Inow if you'll excuse me, I'm going to use the internet to find confidential ancient sperm bank records and tie them to convicted felons. You can do that you know. Well, Scully can because that girl is damn smart and a computer whiz - a whiz I tell you.
-Retread alerts: Well, in addition to playing Skinner's secretary Arlene Pileggi has the now classic credit of being the "Woman Who Looks Like Scully" and has her voice dubbed over. Steve Kiziak who gets to sport David Duchovny's voice and clothes was last seen in "Hungry" as the private detective who becomes brain food.
-What exactly was the point of all that anyway? Oh I get it "everybody has a twin out there somewhere" - it's part of that deep theme of this episode. Was it supposed to be funny seeing people who look and sound like (if they were in a badly dubbed Godzilla movie) Mulder and Scully just beat the snot out of each other? The director was trying so hard not to show their faces until the big revelation that they just look stupid facing the wrong direction long after the person they had come to talk to walks between them and out the door.
-So, do those missionaries just pedal around until the voice of God tells them to stop somewhere? They sure did not seem to be going from house to house. And why did they start fighting when the women were blocks away from each other?
-Apparently they were going for cartoonish with this episode because the Mark Snow score certainly seemed like he was auditioning for a Saturday morning series after the X-Files gig ends. The fight sequence music was just too much.
-I got the impression that both women had just moved to Kansas City (hence the fact they had license plates from different states, talked about moving, etc.), but the Kansas driver's license shown has a date of 6-12-99 on it.
-Gee, I suppose we were supposed to fondly remember the pilot when Scully says "that's why they put the I in FBI," but the only first season episode this one reminded me of was that other Chris Carter gem "Space."
-After that Mulder decides to show us why they put the "B" in Breaking and Entering. Even though we don't see him in Zupanic's apartment why else would he quickly head to the door?
-That's a pretty fast elevator for an old building. Mulder hears Burt coming and darts away as the doors are closing on Scully yet seconds later the single elevator is back to pick up Burt.
-I'm still trying to figure out why some smoky bar in Kansas City was such a hot spot for lunch that everyone just showed up there. Could it be, I don't know? Coincidence?
-So stupid they did it twice: Besides the bar exploding we got to not hear Mulder say "shit" twice. Both times he was futzed out by a bad cell connection. But he was right. This time the shit really did hit the fans.
-Frank's Fashion Spot: It's sad when the Woman Who Looks Like Scully gets to wear better clothes than she does.
-The special effect's department was also hit and miss on this one, while the storm drain thing worked well, the end sequence with the Patty Duke identical cousins wannabes was just plain bad. It looked cheap and poorly constructed.
Autumn
"It's an FBI title, sir."