Case 05, File 03: Unusual Suspects

AKA: The Frohike, Langly & Beyers Happy Funtime Hour

For such relatively minor parts of the series (they only show up 3 or 4 times a season), The Lone Gunmen cast a huge shadow. If you ask any fan who some of their favorite characters are, you're almost certain to hear the Lone Gunmen in there, and they were the characters tapped to hold up a spin-off during those heady days when they thought the series could support a spin-off (it couldn't). And yet, we know so little about them, outside of their relationship with Mulder. At least, till now.


Our episode starts off in media res, with a bunch of cops storming a warehouse only to find the Lone Gunmen cowering and Mulder naked and screaming. Oh and it's 1989, that might be relevant. Anyhoo, the Lone Gunmen get arrested and haven't quite formed the family unit yet, so they're fighting a lot. Byers gets pulled in for interrogation by Detective Munch (if you don't know who that is, google it) and he tells him how they got here. Which I guess makes it a flashback within a flashback, but don't worry about it.

Anyway, the story is that once Byers was working for the FCC as part of their outreach program at an electronics convention when he approaches a woman named Holly who looks lost and in need of help. She tells him how her ex kidnapped her daughter Susanne and she's trying to track him down. He follows some Apanet address she gave him and hits the government database, but the file they find on her daughter is encrypted. Oh and it also gets his FCC buddy arrested. Whoops.

So they recruit Frohike, who wants to go beat up the exboyfriend, only it turns out to be Mulder! And he admits to be looking for Holly and is a member of the FBI. After a brief confrontation, Holly disappears so Frohike recruits Langly to help them (look we had to get them all together somehow and the less said about the scene where Langly and his friends are placing bets on a D&D game, the better) and they break into the FBI database. Only it turns out the lady they were talking is Susanne and her file in the FBI Database says she blew up a lab and killed four people. And then she shows up at the hotel room where they are!

"Hi, I'm John Munch, can we wrap this up quickly, I have to be at HBO by 6."

Only it turns out she didn't do any of that. She worked on a chemical that would make people crazy, paranoid and crazy paranoid and she decided she didn't want to anymore, which is why the conspiracy is trying to find her. This is confirmed when they decode the file she led them to and discover that it says that they're tracking her with the help of her dentist, leading Susanne to make the totally rational choice to yank out her own tooth. But hey, there's a tracking device in it. It's not paranoia if someone is out to get you.

So they head downtown to check out the warehouse where the chemical is being kept and find that it's in asthma inhalers. But Mulder has tracked them down (somehow) and so has the Conspiracy (also somehow) and they get into a brief standoff. Mulder gets exposed to the gas and Susanne guns down the conspiracy guys and bolts. But X (remember him?) shows up and cleans up the mess before the police arrives.

That gets us to where we started, and after Mulder sobers up from the gas he confirms their story and the Lone Gunmen go to find Susanne as she tries to tell her story to the papers who don't believe her. She tells them to keep seeking the truth and is immediately kidnapped by the Conspiracy. So that went well. And thus the episode ends with Mulder getting told what happened by the Lone Gunmen,

I just love Mulder's giant 80s cellphone, that's it, that's the entire caption.

This is a pretty unique episode, the first one ever not from Mulder or Scully's perspective and one which would help define the series going forward. Putting so much weight on three, kind of shallow (at least at this point) characters may have seemed like a gamble at the time, but the episode became one of the series' most beloved and probably did more than anything to help create the spinoff. Which didn't work out, but hey, at least they tried.

I think the most interesting part of the episode is the depiction of how the Lone Gunmen got together. Yes there's some fanservicey stuff in there (the appearance of X comes to mind) but there is a genuine question of how three such different people ended up working together. Having Langly and Frohike already know (and dislike) each other is easy since they seem like the types to run in the same circles but getting Byers involved is tougher. He always seemed like a very different kind of person from the other two, so finding a way to get him involved was integral to making the origin story feel believable.

And we do get a strong sense of their characters in the episode. It's nothing groundbreaking, nor does it really add on to the sense of the character we got from the previous episodes (we don't learn that Frohike's "over-confident pervert" routine is covering some deep insecurities about his ex wife or something) but making sure we know who these characters are is key to making us care about them going forward. In that way, it makes sense to center the episode around Byers. We've always had the least conception of what he's like, since he's just been stiff and businesslike in the background. We need to know more about him, get what drives him to join with Langly and Frohike and why he's so passionate to devote his entire life to it.

It's a little flat that his motivation is based off wanting to impress a girl (Susanne, while well acted, is probably the weakest part of the episode as the writers can't find a way to make her an engaging character) but I feel like the episode's strengths go beyond that. Susanne at the end of the episode is so far beyond Byers' reach that he's never going to see her again (or, you know, next season) but he keeps going because he believes in her cause, not because he's trying to get laid. It's a solid way to end the episode, with our heroes soldiering on in the face of hopelessness.

"Look,  you guys are screwups and I just get shit done."

The major issue with the episode, aside from being unable to figure out how to use Susanne, is climax. I honestly don't know if opening with the in media res flash forward was the best choice for this plot. Yes, as a flashback episode, technically we already know that everything will work out, but by putting that certainty in the episode itself robs the story of a lot of tension. I guess when you've got Richard Belzer in your episode, you want to put him in as early as possible.

Honestly, while there's probably a lot of stuff that's interesting to examine about this episode, such as the role of the Lone Gunmen in the larger series or the way this season had to push Mulder and Scully off to the side due to the shooting of the movie, all of that is stuff I've talked about in the past or will talk about in the future, which leaves me precious little to talk about with this episode specifically. It's a very fun episode, but the failure of The Lone Gunmen casts a long shadow over it since it (and the Season 6 follow up episode) were basically soft pilots for the spinoff. But none of that is relevant to this episode, which is just fine.


Case Notes:

• The first time I saw this episode I missed the 1989 setting caption and I was very very confused for the first few minutes.
• On that note, putting "1989" at the front seems like the wrong move. I would have saved it for after the credits, leave what's going on more mysterious. But that's me and the episode works fine with the caption where it is.
• That said, I do really like the reveal that Mulder is the naked guy lying on the floor. The Lone Gunmen reveal is okay but the Mulder reveal is aces.
• I do love the pre-team up dynamic of The Lone Gunmen, with them all hating each other.
• Hey, it's Munch. If Belzer could still be playing Munch, he would.
• I could watch an entire episode of Beyers talking to people at the convention and getting "Up yours Narc" in return. I really could.
• Even when I first saw this episode, the fact that Frohike and Langly sold bootleg cable made perfect sense to me. I assume that's still how they finance their paper.
• The story Susanne tells Beyers is really well crafted to appeal to his sense of chivalry. She's manipulating him like a pro. The fact that she takes her name from the sugar on the table is kind of a dead giveaway though.
• I like Beyers convention partner, I wish we saw more of him.
• Pre-Lone Gunmen Beyers is, to put it simply, such a narc. It's a good way of putting him in context with the other two.
• I love the reveal that the "Psychotic ex" is Mulder. This episode is leaning hard on our knowledge of the rest of the series, but it works.
• I also love how quickly the episode manages to establish Frohike's personality as A, a pervert and B, way too full of himself. He says Mulder doesn't look so tough, but Mulder has like a full foot on him.
• Mulder is a huge dork in the flashback because Mulder is a huge dork.
• People do not bet on Dungeons and Dragons X-Files, I hate to break it to you.
• I do love the group's dynamic and how quickly they settle into bouncing off each other. I can see how this episode would convince you that they could carry a spinoff.
• I like the conversation in the hotel room, from how Susanne uses the hotel Bible as proof the government is evil to how Frohike uses Amtrak as proof the government is good. It's great stuff.
• Susanne finds out her dentist is working with the conspiracy and immediately yanks her tooth out. She is hardcore.
• The climax of this episode could use work. The scene where they're hacking into the computer is good, but the scene in the warehouse gets let down by the framing device giving us too much knowledge of what's coming.
• I do love the implication that the reason Mulder believes in aliens is because he got hit with the paranoia gas.
• The X cameo is probably the worst sort of fan pandering, but I love him so much that I don't even care. I miss Steven Williams.
• Again, X giving the Lone Gunmen their name is probably fan pandering but Steven Williams sells the shit out of it.
• I wanna say that Munch referencing Geraldo is an easy way to set the time period, but I love the way Belzer says Geraldo. "Don't lie to me like I'm Geraldo" is good stuff.
• "No matter how paranoid you are, you're not paranoid enough" is The X-Files' guiding philosophy.
• X used the Lone Gunmen to find Susanne. He is quite good at what he does.
• The final scene with Mulder and the Lone Gunmen is an easy scene, but a necessary one. Ending any other way would feel like a missed opportunity.
• As always, these reviews are supported by Patreon. If you want me to do some reviews of The Lone Gunmen, you'd best jump on it.

Current Celebrity Watch:

Signey Coleman, who plays Susanne, played major characters on both The Young and the Restless and Guiding Light, which I guess makes her, like, a soap opera megastar? That sounds sarcastic, but I'm serious.

And of course, our detective is played by John Belzer who is playing Detective John Munch, a main character on Homicide: Life on the Street. And on Law and Order: SVU. And he also played the character on The Wire and Arrested Development and- look Belzer likes playing Munch, and Munch appears in a lot of stuff.