23 September 2007

Season 7: Fight Club (7X20)

Written by: Chris Carter
Directed by: Paul Shapiro

When two FBI agents from the Kansas office get in to a fight with one another while investigating an incident where two men making religious calls got in to a fight with one another after visiting two houses and finding identical looking women living in them, Mulder brings the case to Scully's attention. One of the women is identified as Betty Templeton. Back in Kansas, Lulu Pfeiffer, who looks exactly like Betty applies for a job at a Koko's Copy shop, the manager remarks on the fact that she has had 17 jobs in 17 states in the past 3 years.

Across town in another Koko's Copy shop, Betty also applies for a job and the manager there notes that she has had 17 jobs in 17 states in the past 3 years. A newspaper clipping leads Mulder and Scully to Burt Zupanic, an amateur wrestler, he claims not to know Betty, but gives them an address. Scully checks the address and finds out about Lulu, she relates to Mulder how Lulu and Betty have followed each other from state to state and where ever they go, destruction has followed in their wake, from fights to fires even full scale riots.

Evidence suggests that the women are dopplegangers and keeping them apart should be their top priority. Unfortunately both Lulu and Betty have fallen for Burt Zupanic and have decided they want to stay in Kansas. When Scully discovers that Betty and Lulu's likeness stems from their shared father, via donations to a sperm bank. It leads to the discovery of Burt's doppleganger, but when they meet chaos ensues.

Notes:
The doppelgangers for Mulder and Scully are Steve Kiziak and Arlene Pileggi, who are also the stand-ins for the actors. Steve Kiziak appeared as himself in ''Hungry'' and Arlene Pileggi (wife of Mitch Pileggi) has appeared in several episodes as Skinner's assistant.

Scully tells Mulder "That's why they put the 'I' in FBI." Mulder said the same thing to her in the series Pilot episode.

Quotes:
Mulder: You have any ideas, Scully, any thoughts?
Scully: What I'm thinking, Mulder, is how familiar this seems. Playing Watson to your Sherlock. You dangling clues out in front of me one by one. It's a game, and... and, as usual, you're holding something back from me. You're not telling me something about this case.
Mulder: Hmm...
Scully: Okay, so these agents were investigating something. Something... much like what they themselves were almost killed by. Uh, something they came into contact with. Uh... Third party? Two third parties. Twins? Relatives? A doppelganger? A corporeal likeness that appears unbidden from the spirit world, the sight of which presages one's own death or... a double, conjured into the world by a technique called bilocation... which in psychological terms represents the person's secret desires and impulses, committing acts that the, uh, real person cannot commit himself... or herself? Mulder, the slide, please. Yes!
Mulder: Don't go thinking I'm going to start doing the autopsies.

Scully: Maybe you should take another look at that photograph, Mr Zupanic. Five-foot three, red hair. Maybe I can jog your memory. (She holds up a newspaper photo of Bert Zupanic with either LuLu Pfeiffer or Betty Templeton) Are you still pleading ignorance, Mr Zupanic? Is that not you in last year's Fourth of July parade?
Bert Zupanic: Yeah.
Scully: And who's that sitting next to you?
Bert Zupanic: Her?
Scully: Try Betty Templeton. We can't find her, Mr Zupanic. She seems to have left town in a hurry.
Bert Zupanic: She did?
Scully: Mm-hmm.
Bert Zupanic: Didn't she used to live on Moreton Bay in a pink house?
Scully: Alderwood, blue house.
Bert Zupanic: On Alderwood?
Scully: Mr Zupanic, do you have any reason to be lying to us?
Bert Zupanic: No, sir. I mean, ma'am.
Scully: Thank you, Mr Zupanic. I've no doubt we'll be in touch with you.

Scully: Bert Zupanic is a boxer?
Argyle Saperstein: A wrestler — semipro.
Scully: So what? We wait around Kansas City for a couple of days until we can talk with this woman?
Mulder: Well, there's lots to do here, and the barbecue's second to none right, Mr Saperstein? Plus Mr Saperstein's going to show me some in-your-face, smack-down moves so I can quit getting my ass kicked so often, right? Oh, and there's an art exhibit that traces the influence of Soviet art on the American pop culture, right? Unless, of course you've already found Betty Templeton.
Scully: Well, finding Betty Templeton won't solve this case, Mulder. Not unless we find LuLu Pfeiffer.
Mulder: Who's LuLu Pfeiffer?
Scully: Our doppelganger who lived, until yesterday, in a pink house on Moreton Bay Street, but she's not a manifestation, Mulder, she's real and so is the path of destruction that she's left in her wake. Though there seems to be no connection of any kind between these two women, Betty Templeton and LuLu Pfeiffer have travelled city to city across seventeen US States, one alternately trailing the other for the past twelve years and wherever they have been, mayhem has followed.
Argyle Saperstein: Damn.
Scully: It's not just car accidents and fistfights, Mulder. It's house fires and explosions and even riots.
Argyle Saperstein: The lady knows her stuff.
Mulder: Sholom alecheim.
Argyle Saperstein: Yeah. Your mama.

Scully: 50 million anonymous donations have been made to sperm banks across the US. Most have produced healthy offspring for single mothers or fertility-challenged couples while some of them have not. Bert Zupanic and his non-fraternal biological sibling both small-time bank robbers, part-time pro wrestlers, both with too many idiosyncratic behaviourism to list, stood a 27-million-to-one chance of ever meeting, but they did.
Argyle Saperstein: Damn, those are some odds.
Scully: Betty Templeton and LuLu Pfeiffer products of different mothers but the same father... an angry drifter now doing time for counterfeiting — chanced to meet 12 years ago, but couldn't seem to avoid each other's compulsively identical mannerisms, mannerisms attributable to their perpetually angry father.
Argyle Saperstein: Mm. What does it all mean?
Scully: I've been thinking hard about that, Mr Saperstein. I would like to say it has something to do with balance in the universe, the attraction of opposites and the repulsion of equivalents, or that over time, nature produces only so many originals, that when two original copies meet that the result is often unpredictable. If four should meet, the result is... well, suffice to say it's better just to avoid these encounters altogether and at all costs. I think Agent Mulder would agree with me.
Mulder: Mm-hmm. Mmmm.

Clip from ''Fight Club''

Episode Number: 159
Season Number: 7
First Aired: Sunday, May 7, 2000
Production Code: 7X20

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