The story isn't just remembered a certain way, the characters are actively letting their annoyance with the situation and the other agent change their portrayals.Īnd it's not the only source of humor. In both cases, liberties are taken that can only stem from the telling itself.
Jealous of Wilson's character, he decides to make him a buck-toothed hillbilly, the only inaccuracy he admits to. In Mulder's version, he paints himself as an insecure know-it-all (funny, because he doesn't realize those are faults) bullied by an aggressively unbelieving Scully. To get their stories straight-ish, a nervous Mulder asks Scully to tell her side of it, which involves a hilariously manic Mulder, a handsome Sheriff she's into in the form of Luke Wilson (we'll find out why she's acting so out of character in the last act), a comically tedious pair of autopsies, and tremolo exposition on a vibrating bed. Oops! Only in The X-Files would a wrongful death at the hands of an FBI agent be the trigger for comedy. So Mulder finds himself in hot water when he stakes a kid, convinced he's vampire, only for the costume store fangs to pop out of his mouth. The thing about vampires is that there have been so many versions, it's always a game of figuring out what parts of the iconic vampire myth are true in any given universe. Or is that just me? The existence of vampires being dubious in the X-Files universe adds an extra joke to the plot, as the pizza delivery vamp is proven a hoax, then not, consistently playing with our expectations. Despite the compromise that must exist between the two tellings, it says something about the way the two characters have always been portrayed that we believe Scully more than we do Mulder. It's quite amusing to see the same case file twice, with Mulder and Scully mocking the other and making themselves the story's "hero", with a good dose of objective storytelling in the last act to help viewers decide what actually happened. REVIEW: Vince Gilligan pens his best X-Files comedy yet, but then I'm a sucker for stories subjectively shown as they are told. ACTUAL DOCUMENTED ACCOUNT: Mulder and Scully compare notes on a vampire case.