Friday, January 20, 2017

X-Files Episode Guide: Three of a Kind

20. Three of a Kind
Written by Vince Gilligan & John Shiban
Directed by Bryan Spicer

While admittedly many of the episodes of The X-Files cried out for sequels, one would be hard-pressed to argue that last season's Unusual Suspects did. Considering that the primary reason for it was to give a hiatus to Duchovny and Anderson to work on Fight The Future, and the main story was fundamentally self-contained, really there wasn't much need for it, save for the popularity of the Lone Gunmen. And really, if you were going to revisit the Gunmen's private world, the story of Suzanne Modeski wasn't one that exactly cried out for closure, especially coming as it did after an episode that pushed Mulder and Scully to the sidelines.
That said,  Three of a Kind still has some good moments that at times almost make it worth the time and energy. Just as in Unusual Suspect, one of the best things about Three of a Kind is the performance of Bruce Harwood. The teaser and voiceover are one of the simpler ones the series would ever do - no purple prose, no complicated images, just a simple yearning for faith and a normal life that Byers knows he will never have. It is also telling that over a decade after losing Suzanne, Byers is still the one with the most hope of the three Gunmen - hope that he'll finally see Suzanne again, which is why it's so painful that when he finally finds her in the arms of another man, we can feel his pain, even if he's forced to denial over what has happened to the woman he loved.  It's a brilliant stretching of acting muscles that the Gunmen rarely get to do in any of their cameos.
There's also some good guest work from Signy Coleman as Suzanne. It's somewhat shocking to see this woman who basically inspired the Gunmen to begin their quest to expose the truth seemingly back under the sway of the shadow government. But this time Coleman gets a chance to stretch a little as we see some genuine emotion from her as she realizes that the man she trusted to get her away has been playing both ends to save his own life. For the first time, there is a genuine look of longing from her, and we realize the heartbreak Byers must go through as he learns that the woman he's spent ten years looking for never stopped looking for her, and that, at the end of the episode, he must let her go again, this time forever. Its a level of pathos that you wouldn't expect from a comedy.
Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of the episode is scattershot. Considering that Unusual Suspects was basically another conspiracy episode with comic elements, you would thing that Gilligan the co-author of this episode would've tried to keep it mostly serious. Sadly, he and Shiban mostly play the episode for laughs, and it does a lot of damage to the story. Gillian Anderson has a couple of good moments in the episode, particularly in the delightful scene where she just laughs and laughs around a much of men in black. It's telling that the only way that she can really loosen up is when she's under the influence of a drug. But the scene that precedes it, where she basically acts like a fool in front of a victim she was trying to autopsy is one of the most painfully unfunny ones in the series. The fact that Langley would even believe for a minute that Scully was just grossed out by a dead body shows he doesn't know her at all.
The other guest performances are something of a mixed bag as well. John Billingsley work as Timmy the Geek is one of the more unnerving portrayals as he goes against his typical need performances to play one of the more intriguing villains. He also has one of the better lines in the episode when he tells the Gunmen point blank what the best part of killing the three of them will be. But the work of Charles Rocket as Suzanne's fiancée/ betrayer is really rather terrible; given what we see of him, we never find out what the hell Suzanne ever saw in him. And frankly, Michael McKean's cameo as Morris Fletcher strikes me as just another case of the writers having a joke for the sake of a joke; it doesn't add anything to the episode at all, and it takes the attention of Anderson's best scene..
Ultimately, Three of A Kind is a rather bizarre entry in what has been a fairly good sixth season.  There are some good laughs in it, and it does have a few good shadow moments. But considering everything that's happening in the series, did we really need another Lone Gunmen episode? There is some genuine poignancy in the moments when Suzanne leaves John for the last time, but it's immediately screwed up when Frohike and Langley try to cheer him up. It guts the entertainment with a bad joke, which is the episode in a nutshell: the good moments are submarined by a writer who doesn't have enough confidence in his main character to give it what it needs

My score: 2.75 stars

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