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Eve’n Clonegirls Get The Blues

September 9, 2008 @ 8:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized, deepthroat, genetic mutation, insanity, slideshow, sunflower seeds

1×10 Eve

Episode summary:
Mulder and Scully investigate a pair of identical murders involving identical but apparently unrelated young girls. They uncover a eugenics plot and manage not to be killed by diet soda. Also, Deepthroat stops by to chat in the middle of the night because he has no life whatsoever.

Greenwich, CT!

It’s like a sandwich, but greener!

A matchy-matchy jogging couple sees a little girl standing in her driveway holding a stuffed bunny. Where is her dad, you may ask? Sitting on a swing in the backyard. DEAD.

With two holes in his neck!
Chupacabra!!!!!!11!
What?
Nothing.

Ayup, Joel’s neck done been bit.

Commence with the screaming little girl.

FBI HQ

Vocabulary word from Scully:

Hypovolemia.
Definition: Injecting small voles into your veins. God, people are so WEIRD.

Mulder’s favorite pickup line:

Hey Baby.
Are you at all familiar with the phenomenon of cattle mutilations?

“This is the best. Slide. Ever.”

SLIDESHOW! Apparently, lots of cows have been bled to death over the years, but this is the first time Mulder’s seen a human victim of…

Exsanguination!
Porphorytic hemophilia!
Fibromyalgia!

Social Services

Mulder and Scully head to Connecticut to look in on the girl from the driveway, Little Orphan Tina. Scully gets nothing re: suspicious folks around the house; Mulder asks some leading questions about Strange Phenomena and gets paydirt about “red lightning” and such, with a kicker:

The men from the clouds. They were after my dad.
Why were these men after your dad?
They wanted to exsanguinate him.
Bullshit! I call bullshit!

But then Scully gets a call — there’s been “another one”!

California

So another murder. Same cause of death, same circumstances, exact same TIME.

OMG SYNCHRONICITY
Fact: every breath you take, every move you make, Tina’ll be watching you.

Meanwhile, back in Greenwich, we get a scene of little Tina trying to bar the door of her foster care room against Unknown Intruder. She hides under the bed! The door gets kicked in! Someone grabs her! The bunny–

The bunny is left LAYING IN THE RAIN!

Somebody left the bunny out in the raaaaaain

Back in California, the next morning, Mulder and Scully pointlessly recap what we just saw happen in the previous scene. Thanks for the needless exposition, guys. We were right there.

HEY MULDER WHAT’S UP

And then they knock on the door of the 2nd murder house, to be greeted by Tina a girl named Cindy Reardon who looks exactly like Tina. Scully asks the big question: adopted? Hell no, says Mrs. Reardon. But it was in vitro fertilization! Hmm.

One girl was just abducted.
Kidnapped.
Nab-ducted!
Potayto, potahto.
Kid-tato.

Luther Stapes Center for Reproductive Medicine

A genial white-haired doctor explains to Dana Scully, MD, what in vitro fertilization is.

Well, that just saved her some Googling.

Scully asks some pointed questions of Doctor Grandpa, hitting on the name of a Dr. Sally Kendrick. Gramps gets visibly uncomfortable…and puts on a nice VHS tape featuring Sally. Turns out that the clinic discovered that she was tampering with genetics. Eugenics! They canned her, and she disappeared.

And now, Mulder wearing glasses:

Neeeeeeeeeerd.
Mulder, you’re rushing me out of the room.
No I’m not!
Do you have a girl coming over?
What’s a girl!
This is basically what’s wrong with Mulder.

Turns out he was trying to ditch her so he could meet up with Deepthroat, and chaw on some sunflower seeds.

I was just in the neighborhood and wondered if I had ever told you about the Litchfield experiments.

The what now?

A group of genetically controlled children who were raised and monitored on a compound in Litchfield. The boys were called Adam. And the girls were called Eve.

He points our agents to a mental asylum, so that they can pay a visit to:

Eve 6.
Is that where the band got their name?
Why yes, yes it is. As far as I know, there are no episodes feature any Yakoo or the number Eleventeen, though.

The agents follow a guard down a Hallway Of Crazy Moaning to the cell of our favorite band:

I would swallow some Tide / I’m a piper who’s pied

Wait, Eve is Sally Kendrick?! She sure looks like Sally, but then there’s some crazy clone stuff going on, so maybe not! Whoever she is, she expresses affection by biting eyeballs. Also, she’s aware that there’s a bunch of others like her out there. And they’ve got 56 chromosomes!

This is the best kind of pseudoscience.
This replication of chromosomes also produces additional genes. Heightened strength. Heightened intelligence.
Heightened psychosis.
Zing! Calling crazy people crazy = classy move, Fox.

Tinapalooza

The little girls are Sally Kendrick second-generation clones!

It all makes a crazy kind of sense that is the kind of sense that is actually pretty crazy.

Stakeout

Mulder and Scully camp outside young Cindy Reardon’s house, discussing the case while staring right at Cindy with binoculars — until someone snags the girl! The agents rush the house.

I’ll take the back!
You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road.
IYKWIM.
Butts.

Aaaaaanyway, someone body-checks Scully while Mulder explores the backyard.

IYKWIM.

And then another Eve (Sally?) bursts through a pane of glass carrying chibi-Eve. Mulder pulls a gun, and then Eve does too and sort of wins by default on that front. She even takes a potshot at Mulder, and then speeds off in a car which Mulder in high labrador fashion chases on foot, futilely.

Footilely.
Isn’t this what they were trying to prevent? I am unimpressed.

A motel north of San Francisco

Older Eve and Cindy/chibi-Eve head into a motel room, where Tina is…tied up in the bathroom. The two girls exchange CREEPY SMILES. While the agents pick up a lead on the case, Sally drops some exposition on the girls, who then sort of seem to freak Sally out by being so chilled out about magically knowing that they should kill their respective fathers.

In a couple of years, they’ll be selling timeshares.

Also, the girls totally poisoned Sally’s soda with Foxglove. Oops! Convulsing Sally grabs a kitchen knife, and then…cut to cops outside! The agents bust into the hotel room! Sally’s dead, and the window is busted out!

Guess what? Cop butt!

And the girls snowjob the agents with a like Jonestown mass-poisoning story or something and blame it all on Eve 8.

Their own mini-Jonestown.
That was a surprisingly apt reference, I guess.

Our heroes take custody of the Red Blazer Twins and start driving back to wherever. Then they take a bathroom break at the Hi-Way 49 Cafe, where, uh…

Breakfast served 49 hours a day!
That’s a lot of hours. This must be like Alaska or something.

Everybody goes into the bathrooms, but then one of the hellions sneaks back out and drops some foxglove into a couple of the sodas. Mulder takes a sip! Does he know what’s up? Is he faking them out? He converses about his soda.

Normal people don’t comment on how syrupy a soda is.
Yeah. It’s soda. I mean, I get it: we know that the agents know that the soda tastes sweet, but we don’t know whether they know that it’s because hell children are trying to kill them with what is now a really, REALLY predictable MO. But WHO WOULD SAY THAT.

But Mulder forgot his keys inside! He goes back for them…and notices a rim of green on the counter! Foxglove! So he didn’t know.

Okay, so belaboring the point, but the script has Mulder implausibly ordering four diet sodas — have we established that he prefers diet, or that he knows Scully too? NO WE HAVE NOT — specifically to allow for the girls to ask for regular instead of diet for themselves instead, in order for there to then be a distinction between diet and regular, so that Mulder can have a reason to taste the diet and think it was regular because the foxglove makes it syrupy? Because that’s…that’s a long way to go for that setup.

So he rushes back out but tries to play it cool while SHOUTING SCULLY’S NAME and also KNOCKING THE DRINK OUT OF HER HAND. Somehow, the evil genius clone twins manage to twig that the game is up and bolt, which leads us to a chase through a truck yard. Mulder grabs ‘em, but then they start screaming and a couple of truckers make him let the girls go.

Hijinks are all kinds of ensuing here.

They ask the waitress if she’s seen the twins; she says no but points out that a bunch of schoolkids just left on a bus.

It’s the middle of the night. WHAT ARE A BUNCH OF SCHOOLKIDS DOING AT A TRUCKSTOP.

Mulder and Scully tear off after the bus in the car, but the girls were hiding under a tarp in a nearby boat the whole time. But Mulder was actually waiting for them, and grabs ‘em again!

Check and mate, Eves!

They protest!

We didn’t do anything wrong.
We’re just little girls.
That’s the last thing you are.
Yeah, you really hit one out of the park with that one, Agent.

Wrapup

Mrs. Reardon burns Cindy’s picture. Cold.

Cut to the sanitarium, where older Eve talks to the girls, creepily, as is her wont, and then they get a visit from a doctor lady in a white coat. It’s Eve 8.

How did you know I’d come for you?
We just knew.
We just knew.
Also, it’s interesting that the guard didn’t recognize you, what with you looking EXACTLY LIKE THE PRISONER YOU’RE VISITING.
Shut up.

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26 Comments »

  1. The Proprietors Said,

    September 9, 2008 @ 8:36 pm

    [Josh] Thank you all for being so goddam patient between updates.

  2. Justin Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 1:52 am

    This episode was pretty crap, but in its defense, there’s a throwaway line earlier in the episode that explains that the guards don’t know what Eve looks like because she always insists on there being no lights in her room.

    So that explains why they allowed her clone in.

    Sort of.

  3. The Proprietors Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 6:43 am

    Sort of.

    Heh. I think I may henceforth refer to this kind of writing as Diet Soda.

  4. rtha Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 8:40 am

    This episode is high up on the list of Crap X-Files Episodes, but your write-up makes me happy that I stayed up late a few weekks ago to catch the rerun. And I always wonder what the casting call requirements for the little girls looked like - “Must be creepy!”?

  5. mrzarquon Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 9:07 am

    As someone who grew up in Greenwich, CT, I can state with quite definitiveness that nothing that interesting happened there.

    However, I cannot disprove that this explains the level of total psycho bitches who live there.

  6. Nate Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 9:25 am

    Reading this has been the high point of my week. Thank you.

  7. The Proprietors Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 10:59 am

    And I always wonder what the casting call requirements for the little girls looked like

    [Josh] I like to think that they girls came as a package deal with Lili Taylor but then she had to back out at the last minute.

  8. Esmeralda Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 5:15 pm

    I used to love this episode, even though it was full of holes.
    Once I climbed Mt. Tabor to find foxglove with a nerdy-anarchist freind of mine. We wanted to see if we could make digitalis from the leaves, which of course is absurd, but we thought it would be really cool to have.
    I think we ended up just getting bored and seeing if we could catch a high from eating one of the leaves.

    …….

    …

    ………..

    Do you ever look back on stuff you did when you were younger and feel utterly perplexed?

  9. Chel Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 8:19 pm

    I did think that they looked eerily like Lili Taylor. And how did I not know that Eve 6 took their name from this. They couldn’t even pick a good episode?

  10. The Proprietors Said,

    September 10, 2008 @ 8:29 pm

    [Josh] It’s hard to imagine Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” making it as a commercial pop-rock success, you have to admit.

  11. That's what she Said,

    September 11, 2008 @ 8:44 pm

    I thought this episode wasn’t bad. Sure its cheesy and full of plot holes but its entertaining…the same can’t be said for space.

  12. Maxwelton Said,

    September 12, 2008 @ 6:37 pm

    You know, if you had two 24 hour greasy spoons right next door to each other, and each closed for half an hour once per day to put more red-hots in the vending machine, you would, in effect, have a “Open 49 Hours a Day!” truck stop.

    Too far?

  13. The Proprietors Said,

    September 12, 2008 @ 7:17 pm

    [Josh] That’d, uh, that’d be 47 hours. A day.

  14. Maxwelton Said,

    September 13, 2008 @ 3:10 pm

    Well, sure, if you’re actually going to do the math correctly. I guess I need daylight savings time to save me, or a third restaurant and shifts…I guess the question is did they use a real location, or was “49 hours per day” some sort of joke the set guys thought up?

  15. Suze Said,

    September 13, 2008 @ 10:05 pm

    I think that an “Open 49 Hours A Day” truck stop is perfectly plausible . . . after all, time may not be a universal invariant in this zip code.

    …yeah, I know.

    Glad you’re back.

  16. Chel Said,

    September 15, 2008 @ 4:11 pm

    I’m sorry, but I think Esmerelda’s story officially wins this thread.

  17. Chel Said,

    September 15, 2008 @ 4:12 pm

    And JCFOS…I would like to see someone turn that into a Top 40 hit.

  18. Heather Said,

    September 16, 2008 @ 11:37 pm

    I have absolutely nothing to add to this thread other than unwavering devotion and many thanks for coming back.

    Oh wait…I’m a liar already. LOVED the Google comment. Seriously Scully? Google? I could slap someone.

  19. Calraigh Said,

    September 20, 2008 @ 6:18 pm

    I’m so happy you guys are back on t’interwebs. So much so that I feel the need to sing:

    ” You maaaaaake meee feeeelll-miiii-hiiiiighty realllllll !!!! ”

    Anyway. Yea, this ep sucked the big one but for some reason, creepy twins are always compulsively watchable. Also, Mulder in glasses-epic win. I’ve found it’s impossible to watch Californication these days because of the fact that maybe it should now be called ” Compulsification ” so X-Files is getting the full attention of teh DVD player.

    I’d just like to take this opportunity to say, ” Tinapalooza ‘ made me laugh for 2 and a half hours straight.

    Yea, well, it’s been a long day.. :)

  20. Shalora Said,

    September 21, 2008 @ 4:54 pm

    Dude, Esmeralda even TOLD me that y’all had done this ep a while back and I still didn’t read until today. I am made of fail.

    As seriously plot-holed eps go, I did rather like this one. But that’s not saying much. ;) Those little girls FREAK ME OUT, man. Kinda makes you wonder if they’re really good little actresses, or if their parents have a lock on the bedroom door and sleep with a knife under the pillow… ;)

    And I must agree with Calraigh - Tinapalooza is made of win!

    And yes, Chel, Esmeralda’s story totally wins the thread. And if you know her at all IRL, it’s /so/ like her to do crazy stuff like that. Awesome. :)

  21. Shalora Said,

    September 22, 2008 @ 11:10 pm

    Oh, and your definition of hypovolemia = ROTFL.

  22. sunburnfreezerburn Said,

    October 30, 2008 @ 11:41 am

    I hope there’s an update soon.. :(

  23. adam Said,

    October 30, 2008 @ 1:19 pm

    i demand one update a month, minimum.

  24. wendelah1 Said,

    November 8, 2008 @ 12:51 am

    I love your episode commentaries. When is the next update?

  25. Wednesday Said,

    December 24, 2008 @ 9:11 pm

    this is like the best episode EVER.

  26. Maddie Cakes Said,

    January 3, 2009 @ 12:22 am

    This was one of my favorite episodes. And your commentaries are hysterical. Please keep it up.

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