Late in The X-Files‘ fifth season—just a few weeks before the first X-Files feature film hit theaters—viewers were plunged into the terrifying madness of “Folie à Deux.” A weary Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) trudges to Chicago to check out the latest “monster of the week,” but his head snaps back into the game when he realizes the monster in question just might be targeting him next.
Before it flips its approach to put Mulder in its crosshairs, “Folie à Deux”—directed by X-Files regular Kim Manners, and written by future Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan—introduces us to Gary Lambert (Caprica‘s Brian Markinson), a rather ordinary guy working a soul-sucking telemarking job for a vinyl siding company. The calls cycle constantly as Gary reads from a precise script and endures nagging instructions to “dial and smile,” all the better to hook new customers.
It’s dull and stressful but not exactly toxic—until Gary senses an alarming presence lurking in the office: a giant insect-like creature, masquerading as his boss and turning his co-workers into remote-controlled zombies. It scares him enough to audio-tape a warning about a monster stalking VinylRight employees, which is why the FBI’s resident spooky kids Mulder and Scully (Gillian Anderson) get handed the case.
But there’s tension in the FBI office too. Mulder and his own boss, FBI Assistant Director Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), are enduring a surly patch in their relationship—not for the first or last time. Mulder’s annoyed the Bureau sees him as “monster boy” (to be fair, there’s a solid reason for that), and tells Scully he can handle this “jerk-off assignment” by himself. But once he flounces off to Chicago, he realizes there’s more to this case than he realized, and he does actually need her help.
Meanwhile, Gary’s reaching his breaking point as he observes his co-workers systematically transforming into dead-eyed automatons. It’s all the paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, down to Gary being the only person who realizes what’s going on.
Even the audience can’t tell if what Gary sees is real or the result of a very troubled mind… until Gary takes the entire office hostage, including a visiting Mulder. In the chaos Mulder realizes he can also see that Gary’s boss is, in fact, actually a giant insect hellbent on assembling an army of human drones.
There’s a certain amount of metaphor at play here, as Gary—who ends up being shot to death in the standoff after killing an “infected” co-worker—rails against a creature who “wants to take away who we are and control us.” It could be a supernatural menace; it could be capitalism. Actual human telemarketers have been largely replaced by robo-calls these days, but in 1998 when the episode aired, everyone still had a land line and generally picked up when the phone rang. In a room crammed with cubicles full of people all reading the same pitch over and over, you can see how “dead-eyed automatons” isn’t too far of a leap.
But this is The X-Files, so something eerie always has to creep in. Even Mulder is skeptical about Gary’s claims at first, but any doubts evaporate once he catches a glimpse of the monster himself. “I saw it too,” he confesses to Scully. She wonders if it’s perhaps a folie à deux, meaning that Mulder was so affected by the experience of being held hostage that he’s now sharing Gary’s delusions.
But Mulder’s inclined to point to a larger conspiracy. Maybe Gary’s boss, the otherwise unmemorable Greg Pincus (John Apicella), is actually a manifestation of evil capable of using camouflaging mind tricks to conceal its presence?
Turns out there’s some history to back up this admittedly wild-sounding notion. Gary’s audio warning to VinylRight evoked the phrase “hiding in the light,” something that’s popped up in similar X-Files from the past. With some digging, Mulder realizes Pincus has a geographical connection to many of the past incidents.
True to form, Scully doesn’t immediately agree with Mulder; what’s more, she’s not keen on the idea of legitimizing Gary’s crazy-guy talk, especially since he murdered a guy on the way out. But Mulder is unusually sincere here. He even begs Scully to believe him, since she’s his “one in five billion”—the rare person who actually understands where he’s coming from. But it takes an irregular autopsy for Scully to realize that Mulder is right, and something extremely weird is indeed happening.
Along with this, an increasingly furious Skinner wonders if this will be the case that finally sees Mulder booted from the FBI into a padded room—and Mulder does end up strapped down to a hospital bed at one point, frantically shrieking at the nurse to set him free so he can protect himself from the zombie-creating critter.
By season five, X-Files fans had come to appreciate Mulder’s extremely open-minded way of looking at the unexplained. But it’s not that far-fetched to imagine that after years of not being believed, and years of witnessing some of the most bizarre discoveries in the history of the FBI, his own mental health would suffer. Maybe even start to crack?
It takes Scully’s intervention to admit that while she can’t explain exactly what happened, there’s enough concrete evidence surrounding the case to confirm that Mulder hasn’t gone full cuckoo. Skinner admits “I’m at a bit of a loss here,” but despite his frustration with Mulder—which spirals into a physical fight at one point in the episode—he’s fair enough to accept Scully’s judgment as rational and reasonable.
At the end of the story, with a still-perplexed Scully suggesting maybe she and Mulder are the ones experiencing the folie à deux, we see a new call center, packed with anxious employees trying to “dial and smile” without losing their minds. Except, of course, there’s a classic X-Files button to push, as one very unlucky man suddenly catches sight of what looks like a giant, freaky insect scuttling around the office.
The X-Files is streaming on Hulu.
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