Spoilers

“Monday”

Some of the best X-Files episodes are the ones where they take a familiar premise from a movie or TV show and give it the X-Files treatment. We have seen movie/TV premises such as The Thing, Speed, Firestarter, Freaky Friday and Twilight Zone among others. This time it is Groundhog Day (although actually, according to Vince Gilligan, more of a Twilight Zone episode, specifically “Shadow Play” from 1961).

Mulder and Scully wind up in a bank near the FBI offices at the same time that a man with a gun (and a bomb) is there to pull off a robbery. It seems that no matter what happens, the bomb goes off killing everyone inside the bank.

However, the bomber, named Bernard, had a girlfriend named Pam and Pam was the one reliving the day over and again and realizing what was happening. She tried everything she could think of to stop the eventual explosion, to no avail.

The show brings up Deja vu in the middle, with Mulder telling Scully that all the terrible things that had happened to him that morning felt like had happened to him before. All Scully could ask was “When did you get a water bed?” which is a hilarious toss back to the two part episode from season six, Dreamland, where Mulder switched bodies with Morris Fletcher who bought the waterbed.

The show’s director does an admirable job of shooting each scene, which could have been very repetitive, in different manners and with different variations, which showed that things could be changed and was not just totally fate.

This was a nice blend of humor, which a lot of these premise episodes leaned toward, and serious drama. It was a very engaging hour of TV and has been a highlight so far of season six.