AIR DATE:  May 10, 1998
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by  Kim Manners

	Boy, talk about your hostile takeover.  In "Folie A Deux" we have
a monster who kills people then somehow has the ability to control them
until somehow someone is able to see it.  In the middle of all this we
have Scully and Mulder who are sent to investigate a tape sent to a radio
station about the monster, and along the way Mulder appears to finally go
over the edge.  I don't know whether it is the fact I find insects creepy,
but I found "Folie A Deux" scary and eerie though every bone in my body
tells me this shouldn't be the case since the episode seemed awfully
familiar. The episode seemed to take off from that old Twilight Zone
episode with William Shatner as a passenger in a plane who sees a monster
that no one else sees on the airplane wing trying to rip off one of the
engines.  The monster in "Folie A Deux" reminds me more of the movie
version of the story starring John Lithgow.  Just as Lithgow's character
keeps appearing to be crazy both Gary Lambert and Mulder kept looking
crazier and crazier in the episode. I kept waiting for the monster to
shake his finger at Mulder before it escapes.  Needless to say I found
this episode to be quite enjoyable and suspenseful.  Oh yeah, let's not
forget to add a little bit from the movie "They Live" for good measure
by the monster's ability to make people think they are seeing humans
instead of zombies.

	The only aspect of the episode I didn't like was how hostile
Scully was to Mulder one minute then the next minute quite understanding. 
Her outright dismissal of Mulder's belief that there might be something to
Gary Lambert's story seemed a bit out of character.  Not that she wouldn't
dismiss Mulder believing it, but the way she did it.  Instead of being
understanding and trying to get Mulder to stop and think about what he is
saying, she gets angry and unfriendly about it. Especially about doing the
autopsy. If she wanted to prove to Mulder that he was falling into
Lambert's train of thought you would think finding no evidence of foul
play would be a start instead of rejecting Mulder so easily.  By doing
this she made Mulder go off on his own which she should know by now will
only mean he will get himself into trouble which is exactly what happened. 
If this had played a little differently then the later scene where Scully
visits Mulder in the hospital where he convinces her to reexamine Mark
Backus's body would have been a bigger payoff of us seeing the trust and
belief between them.  Otherwise, we had to wait until the end scene where
Scully is willing to believe there are monsters out there when she sees
the zombie nurse and at the elevator after her meeting with Skinner and
she tells Mulder she shares in his madness. 

	Now some miscellaneous comments on "Folie A Deux":

- Was the Phone Supervisor at VinylRight stuck in the '70's with that suit
and tie along with his sideburns.  Also, I was wondering if that was
Skinner at the beginning of the episode when we see him wearing a bluish
shirt instead of his usual white shirt. 

- I loved having Scully point out to Mulder he was using I quite a bit
when he was complaining about being assigned this case by Skinner. 
Essentially telling him aren't we supposed to be a team here.  Sometimes
Mulder can be so self-centered that he would think it was Skinner's way to
get back at him instead of both of them.  No wonder Scully can get so
frustrated by him.  She has just as much at stake as Mulder in the X-Files
and they are no longer just his X-Files, but Scully's too.  Somehow I
don't think the Scully of old would have let him go by himself anyway, but
he needed someone down in his office to go looking through all of the
X-Files.

- I can't help thinking how Scully as she is looking through paper file
after paper file must be wondering when Mulder is going to want to put the
X-Files onto a computer database. 

- I do find it hard to believe that as Mulder is flying out to Chicago he
wouldn't have studied up on the case, i.e. the previous incident at a
VinylRight office that Skinner mentioned.  It just seemed liked sloppy
police work on his part even if he wasn't that interested in it. Instead
he takes Greg Pincus' word on what happened at the other office. 

- Why would Pincus have the tape that Lambert sent to the radio station
instead of the local F.B.I. field office or police station?  This is
evidence, yet the police allow a civilian to hold on to it to do whatever
he wants with it.  Kiss that tape out of any court proceedings that could
have taken place.  I know it was done to get Mulder to the office, but we
could have seen him at the local F.B.I. office hearing it and getting a
breakdown on the case from an agent. 

- The Agent-in-Charge wasn't too smart when it comes to hostage
situations.  After his men get shot at instead of letting the situation
calm down a bit as Scully suggested he decides to call Mulder's cellular
phone.  By doing this he exposed Mulder and got a hostage killed even if
it was a zombie. 

- It would have good if the zombie Lambert shot that everyone, but Mulder
saw it bleed. 

- What floor was the cafeteria on?  One time it seems to be on the third
floor since we see shots come through the roof when he shoots at the
F.B.I. men trying to drill a hole through the ceiling.  The second time it
appears to be on the first floor when they send in the armored car to bust
down the wall.  I won't even go into how it is weird that they wouldn't
put any windows in the cafeteria since it is obvious the room had an
outside wall when the armored vehicle busted through. 

- We get a date stamp of May 10 as to when the incident happened at
VinylRight.  When did "Pine Bluff Variant" take place since he only had a
small bandage around two of his left fingers from his terrorist lie
detector test.  At least they remembered that little tidbit and they made
damn sure we saw it too when they had Mulder hold his left hand to his
face. 

- I wonder if zombie bodies slowly decompose over time as Mark Backus's
body appeared to do. 

- I found Mulder's comment to Scully that after working with him for 5
years she should have found him tied up sooner in a hospital bed to be
quite funny and insightful on Mulder's part.  He knows what it looks like
to Scully, but he knows Scully believes in him enough to look at Backus's
body one last time.

- One of the big problems and surprisingly it came from the pen of Vince
Gilligan was how Mulder's nurse became one of the monster's zombies
because it makes no sense when it happens.  She's near the window and
suddenly she has become a zombie!  So when did he attack her?  Wouldn't
Mulder have seen her being attacked if it was at the window?  How did it
suddenly have the ability to attack without going through the window? 
When she enters the room there isn't blood on the back of her neck, but
when she leaves the room she suddenly has blood on her neck.  Only two
words for this: bad writing or directing.  It was as if they didn't care
how she became one just as long as she was one so she would be out of the
picture when the monster came into the room and Scully would see she is a
zombie. 

- I kept waiting to hear Mulder tell Scully "I told you" so at the end of
the episode. 

- One would figure Mulder wouldn't rest until he found and killed the
monster by the way he was acting throughout this episode.  Also, it
appears once a human sees the monster they become obsess with exposing and
killing it as if some kind of human instinct kicks in for self preservation. 
Both Lambert and Mulder became obsess with exposing the monster to the
point where they appeared to be crazy.

- We have to wonder what attracted the monster to telemarketing jobs since
it always worked at one.  Hmm, maybe there is something in the vinyl
siding. 

	"Folie A Deux" was another good X-Files episode that was both
suspenseful and creepy.  This time we get to see Mulder really go over the
edge to catch a monster that no one else sees.  The scene where Skinner is
yelling at Mulder that he is close to being kicked out of the F.B.I. if he
doesn't watch himself was quite a chilling scene when the monster started
making a move on Skinner and Mulder goes after it.  The monster knew just
what button to push to make Mulder go over the edge.  I can just imagine
Mulder yelling and screaming as he is being dragged out of the room.  In
all of this Scully shows her trust in Mulder's belief in an evil being
even if in the beginning of the episode she dismissed his claims.  "Folie
A Deux" was the first episode in a longtime to give me the creeps and one
of the better episodes this season. 

Claudia
E-Mail:  Claudia.Cauchon@unh.edu

5/11/98

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