"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.

Now 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.

Random Musings
-----------------------
-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."