X-Files Episode Guide: Fight Club

Written by Chris Carter

Directed by Paul Shapiro

In rewatching The X-Files,  I was surprised to find which episodes seemed better with the passage of time, and which seemed notably worse.  It was very surprising that even some of the episodes that I had utterly loathed at the time, such as 'Field Where I Died' in Season 4, and 'Milagro' in Season 6 were actually a lot better than I had given them credit for being on first and even second viewing. There is no such \feeling for Fight Club, an episode whose title immediately makes you think of the movie catch phrase "The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club'. Unfortunately, I kind of feel I have to.

By now, its become very clear just how tired the writers and actors behind this series had become at this point in the show. They might argue, in hindsight, that making the seventh season had rejuvenated them somehow, but looking at the majority of the episodes, you wonder how on earth they could think that. While the seventh season has had some good moments in it, for the most part, you can just see the level of exhaustion in both the writing and acting. I don't know for certain whether Duchovny and Anderson had a falling out by this point (there were rumors), but by this point TV Guide and the majority of the media were now certain that this episode was probably going to be among the last ever made.  Even if that wasn't the case, the Syndicate was dead, Mulder's sister had been found (sort of), and the mythology seemed to have been wrapped up. There seemed to be very little left to say about the X-Files, and even there had been, there was no time left to say it. And that makes Fight Club just seem like some horrible symbol of everything that the X-Files was now.

Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate a case where two FBI agents apparently decided to beat the crap out of each other after seven years of working together. They find themselves investigating the involvement of two women, both played by Kathy Griffin, who seem to have spent there entire lives following each other around the country, and whenever they get together, the earth starts trembling, machinery starts breaking, and people start beating each other up. That's it. That's the entire story. Former X-Files have basically been built around a single setpiece, but very few have been built around the same setpiece being shown over and over again. Carter then tries to make something out of it resembling a comedy, but like so many of the comedies this season, there isn't a single laugh to be found in it. Even if there were, so many of the jokes would involve a kind of brutal, nasty humor that even the most atypical comedies aren't trafficked in by this series.

There may also be a larger statement in the way this episode plays out. Every major character in this episode (including Mulder and Scully) have a duplicate of some kind. And the climax of the episode resolves around the unlikelihood of the another lead character Bert Zupanic happening to have a duplicate of his own. Now, you can just find this truly implausible, or you can read it as a statement by Carter that a) these stories don't seem to make any sense anymore, and b) nothing in the series is unique. Especially not Mulder and Scully. And just to emphasize that, he cuts their scenes to even more minimal than usual, and he basically reverses their roles, and in the climax has them get involved in a huge brawl, where they probably beat the crap out of each other. (I've never really believed that they could do that, but maybe that's the point. Carter is now saying our heroes are so much of the firmament of the series that they do whatever he tells them to do.) By the end of the episode, Scully seems to be reporting to a wrestling promoter, for some reason, that investigating the paranormal too closely is something best avoided. At which point you wonder, how much of this is Carter saying that he's tired of writing for this series?

Duchovny and Anderson have seemed awfully pedestrian through parts of Season 7, but never has there been an episode that seemed to demonstrate how much they are just going through the motions. The entire guest cast is completely flat, with not a single personality to be visible among them. It says something about the writing that the highpoint of the episode is when Carter gets Mulder to say 'shit' through a bad cell connection, that's the level of charm the writers now seem to want to go through at this point in the series.

Fight Club is an episode that seems to be a cry for help from Chris Carter, begging the Fox executives to put this series out of its misery.  No matter how many people were still watching X-Files by this point (it was still between 11 and 12 million), this is not a series that seems to be begging for a Season 8. It's a brutal turd of an episode, with no redeeming value. If the series managed to get another spark of life after this, it was not because of an episode like this.

My score: 1 star.