Fight Club
Scully and Mulder
investigate the havoc caused by a pair of doppelgangers.
A couple of days after this aired, a friend of mine told me
how much they'd disliked it. Normally, if someone has a negative opinion of an X
Files episode, I defend it, or maybe try to justify its shortcomings. With Fight
Club (what a great, original title - or not), though, I couldn't. It was
almost irredeemable. My first post on the message board about it was "Well
that pretty much sucked. Not even in a cheesy-bad-funny way. It just
sucked." And I think that pretty much sums it up; those three sentences
are a pretty accurate summary of this review.
The first time I watched it, my attention wandered all over
the place. I just wasn't interested in the characters (I use the word "character"
in the loosest sense; Lulu, Betty and Burt were so two-dimensional as to be figures
in the script rather than characters) or the plot. The acting certainly didn't
help. Maybe if you're playing someone as badly written as Lulu or Betty, you
lose the will to act properly, but I wasn't at all impressed with Kathy
Griffin. She recited her lines with a token amount of intonation, but never
made me give a damn about either of her characters. Sometimes a good actress can
lift a bad script, or vice versa. Write a bad script and employ a bad
actress and the result is as bad as…well, as bad as Fight Club.
A lot of the episode was ridiculously cartoonish, starting
with the rather camp missionaries beating each other up, complete with bad
music (Mark Snow can do so much better than that). I did like the blood on the
spyhole though, that was a nice touch. Damfousse was also too over the top for
my liking, and the staccato chords punctuating his shouting didn't help. As for
the fight scenes, they just weren't interesting. A load of people I don't know
beating each other up. Wow, exciting. Mulder's lookalike trying to climb into
the moving car through the window was vaguely amusing, but apart from that…. The initial shots of those lookalikes were
too obviously staged to avoid showing us their faces (same goes for the very
end with the real Mulder and Scully, although to a lesser extent). And how did
both of them (amusingly credited as "Man who looks like Mulder" and
"Woman who looks like Scully") receive such serious injuries? They
each had all four limbs in plaster - how do you fight when all four limbs need
that kind of treatment? And another thing - how come the missionaries only
stopped at the two houses? Not very committed to spreading the word, I suppose.
I did like Mulder and Scully's first scene together.
Mulder's lines (and David Duchovny's delivery) made me smile, as did Scully's
guessing game. Her animated attempts to "get it," followed by her
"Mulder, the slide please" and her pleased "Yes!" were amusing,
and Mulder's facial expressions were just right. This was the best scene in the
episode, which says a lot (it's entertaining, but the initial introduction of
the case shouldn't really be the highlight).
One of the problems was the vagueness of the plot. Wherever
the two women went together, they caused mayhem. But no specific type of
mayhem, just anything that happens to be available, from riots and earthquakes
to fistfights and angry photocopiers. And for no apparent reason, unless you
count Scully's little speech at the end as an explanation. I mean for goodness'
sake, why didn't Betty and Lulu just go their separate ways long ago and avoid
all this trouble? Why not just drop all the petty "She's following
me!" "No! She's following me!" nonsense and save us from this
sad excuse for a TV show? The only reason we were given was for why neither of
them would leave Kansas - they were both in love with that sex-god Burt. I would
have found that a lot more credible if there had been any kind of reason for
either woman to care about him, but we were given none, and there wasn't even
any kind of spark between the actors. Did anyone actually care when both women
were in Burt's room? Completely lacking in originality, with the added bonus of
using characters who you just can't bring yourself to take an interest in.
I may be missing a trick of the counterfeiting trade here,
but how would photocopied money ever pass for the real thing?
So Lulu and Betty were half-sisters? Was Scully not
surprised by the slight genetic impossibility involved in two women having
identical children, even if they share the same father? I suppose it's
conceivably (if you'll pardon the expression) possible, but with phenomenal
odds against it, that Lulu and Betty's mothers could have been inseminated with
genetically identical sperm from Damfousse. It might even be possible (although
again highly unlikely), if the women were sisters, that they could each produce
an ovum containing the same genes. But the chances of both those ova being fertilized
by those particular sperm are astronomical. Add in the fact that the women's
mothers weren't related (as Scully said Betty and Lulu were unrelated) and
you've got not just a statistical improbability, but a biological
impossibility. (If anybody reading this can see faults in the science I've
used, please let me know. My knowledge of genetics is limited and any
corrections would be welcome J)
In a good episode, I would have taken Scully's line
"That's why they put the I in the FBI" as a deliberate reference to
Mulder's identical line in the pilot, but here I wasn't sure if maybe it was
just lazy, unoriginal writing.
Mulder falling down the storm drain didn't look very
convincing, but the image of him climbing out was amusing. I liked Scully's
pleased smile at the fight as Lulu and Betty seemed to calm down, followed by
her falling face as violence broke out. But were we supposed to laugh at Mulder
and Scully's injuries? Were we supposed to laugh at anybody's injuries? Were we
supposed to enjoy Fight Club?
Best Lines
Mulder: Mr Sapperstein's going to show me some in-your-face
smackdown moves so I can quit getting my ass kicked so often.
Scully: Mr Damfousse, I'm Special Agent Dana Scully with
the FBI.
Damfousse: What's so special about you?
Damfousse: A big ugly dog lifted its leg against my family
tree!
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