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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