Spoilers

“The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat”

The fourth episode of season eleven of The X-Files brought another excellent, comedic show that loosed its venom on itself.

What I mean is that this is clearly a parody of the X-Files as a TV program, poking fun at a lot of the tropes of the series.

Our new informant was named Reggie and the episode featured the Mandela Effect (or as Reggie would put it, the Mengele Effect). According to Wikipedia, the Mandela Effect is when “specific false memories can sometimes be shared by a large group of people.”

Besides the parody of the show, the episode also had some pointed comments about both the use of disinformation and Donald Trump. One of the conspiratorial characters, Dr. They, told Mulder that the days of hiding the truth were gone because the truth can be told and nobody will believe it.

There was an alien that Mulder, Scully and Reggie (who claimed that he had been their partner on the X-Files for years- which included a theme song for the show including his picture) met at the end. This alien spoke lines directly from Trump, talking about building a beautiful wall (invisible), around the galaxy because earth was not sending its best people into space. The Trump effect was in full swing with this episode.

There were clips from previous episodes of The X-Files with Reggie superimposed in them to illustrate his point. Episodes included “Home,” “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” and “Small Potatoes” to name a few.

The whole parallel universe argument that Mulder was making was really funny, as was Mulder’s own frustration on how silly the parallel universe argument was. When Mulder threw his pencil across the room in a fit of frustration, it was just hilarious.

The X-Files could do silly as well as any show and this was a very good example of that.