Case 07, File 06: The Goldberg Variation

AKA: Luck Isn't A Super Power

Season Seven has an...odd relationship with the funny, quirky episodes The X-Files did every so often. I think everyone on the writing staff realized they'd gone kind of overboard with them in Season Six, but they'd been doing funny, quirky episode since Season Two, they were basically as much a part of the show's DNA as Alex Krycek. Their solution, it appears, was to throttle them down to only 2 or 3 episodes, and make those episodes vary wildly in quality.

Our episode opens with a schlubby dude, Henry Weems, at a poker game with...well, they're obviously mobsters, led by a guy named Cutrona. He wins, oddly enough, and is trying to cash out his 100,000 dollar winnings, but the monsters, being the kind understanding type, chuck him off the roof instead. But, oddly enough, he walks away unharmed. That's enough to get Mulder and Scully on the case, who are told by some FBI Agents who were watching the building (cause of the mobsters, you see) what happened.

Mulder thinks that the guy is invulnerable but Scully thinks he's just lucky, and when they track him down to his apartment, they decide to ask him. But they can't find him, at least until Mulder gets asked to fix a woman's plumbing, messes it up and also falls through the floor into an empty apartment to find Weems. Weems, who makes Rube Goldberg machines in his spare time, doesn't want to testify against Cutrona, and denies any supernatural powers being responsible for his survival.

But when a mobster shows up to silence Weems and dies through a series of extreme coincidence (Mulder rings the bell, making him miss his shot, and then Weems dives over the couch, knocking over an ironing board, which the mobster trips over, causing him to hit a chair, bounce off it and get his shoelace caught in the ceiling fan, causing him to have a heart attack, yes really) Mulder starts to realize that Weems's actual ability is supernatural luck. Meanwhile, Scully goes and meets a boy who lives in the building named Richie, who is close to Weems but his liver is failing.

When I saw Weems is a great physical presence, this is the shit I'm talking about.

So anyway, Scully is still skeptical of all this, and wonders why Weems wouldn't just go and win the lottery, and since Weems is listening, he decides to go do that. However, once he does and finds out he won't get the 100,000 he says he needs immediately, he chucks the ticket. One of the other customers grabs it and is immediately hit by a truck, leading Mulder to suspect that to keep the universe in balance, whenever Weems get crazy good luck, someone around him has to get crazy bad luck, which explains why Weems dropped off the grid years ago when he survived a plane crash. He also realizes Weems was listening to him and Scully talk in the apartment building.

So they head back to the apartment and find Weems hiding out in the walls, but when Mulder tracks him down, so does another mobster who shoots Weems...but the bullet ricochets off a pocket knife in his breast pocket, around the room and hits the mobster in the back. So at the hospital, Mulder discusses how Weems has unspeakably good luck, how he needs 100,000 dollars to help Richie (since he has a rare blood type), how he chose to play at that mob game cause he didn't mind if they got hurt in the backlash to his luck and how he still doesn't want to testify. But when another mobster stalks him on the street, Weems lets himself get hit by a truck to uh...I guess make people pay attention so he can't get cornered? I didn't follow that entirely.

Whatever, Weems decides to testify, Richie's liver starts failing and Cutrona decides to kidnap Richie's mom to get Weems. Weems goes to see Cutrona as Mulder uses the phone book to find Weems, believing that he and Scully are now part of Weems' luck. Cutrona decides he's gonna torture Weems to death, but don't ya know, a series of weird coincidences later and Cutrona and his henchman are dead and Cutrona has the right blood type to get Richie a liver transplant. And thus the episode ends with everyone happy. Except Cutrona I guess, he's dead.

"Hey Scully, I'm coming up from the ground and I can see-"
"Mulder, I've shot you before, and I will again."

I've never been totally sure how I feel about this episode. It's easily the best of the Funny Episodes of Season 7, and it's definitely a solid episode overall. But where the best of the funny episodes had an animating purpose, a reason to exist outside of just being a funny episode; a unique character to explore, a fun way of telling the story or even just a solid theme. Goldberg Variation on the other hand feels weirdly empty of any of that. It's a fun and funny good time but little more.

I think the issue at the center of that problem is the one whose name is literally up in lights in one of the final shots: Richie. To put it bluntly, I have no sense of Richie as a character, his relationship with Weems or why this was so important to make Weems come out of hiding. Yes, fine, he's a sick kid and that's very sad, but there are lots of sick kids out there, America's healthcare system is a nightmare, what made his friendship with this one special? He says something like 5 lines, only 1 of them to Weems, who is he? And it's not like his mother is picking up the slack, all I know about her is that she's comfortable asking strangers in her hallway to fix her plumbing, so she's an inhuman monster.

We don't have that problem with Weems; He's not an especially deep character, but I do have a strong sense of who he is, and I can even grok the reason why he's so reluctant to exploit his powers. He's also weirdly entertaining to have around, visually. In a world of Mulders and Scullys and mobsters, just having our super powered guy this week be a schlubby, badly dressed dude. I dunno, I like Weems a lot as a character, and I love the moments where he actually interacts with Cutrona, they're funny.

Unfortunately, as funny as Weems is as a character, I don't think the episode makes real use of what you would think would be this episode's strongest trait, which is juxtaposing the funny coincidences with the violence they cause. I figure the whole reason you'd make this premise an X-Files episode instead of a Disney movie from 1964 was to make it more violent and dark than it could be otherwise, and use that for some depth, or at least additional laughs. But aside from the very end, when Weems Rube-Goldberg escapes from Cutrona's plan to torture him to death, the lightheartedness of his powers and the darkness of the story never really get to coexist.

I forget what caption I was originally gonna give this image, this shot is just too funny.

This sounds like I'm being harder on the episode than I mean to, I do enjoy it a lot. It's not what I would probably do with this premise, and it's schmultzier than it needs to be sometimes, but it's consistently funny and inventive. The sequence where the guy shoots Weems and the bullet ricochets around the room to hit him is, in particular, perfectly comically timed, and while the sequence in the bodega with the lottery ticket is a clear plot cul de sac, it's a funny one. Most of the plot stop offs are funny and most of the Rube Goldberg deaths are clever. And yeah, I like Cutrona dying from a massive fuck-off hook to the face, I'm not made of stone.

It's been suggested to me that one of the reasons I never really responded to Seasons Eight and Nine is because, as a fan, I had an idea of what The X-Files was supposed to be, and I was thus failing to appreciate the show for what it was and instead judging it for not being what I want it to be. That's a habit I'm gonna try to break when I hear Seasons Eight and Nine, but as we can already see, it's hard to get past. I have an idea of what a funny episode of The X-Files should be like, and when that expectation isn't met, I find myself disappointed, even while I like the episode in question.

Case Notes:

• I'm not totally clear on how Weems got to mob poker game, but I refuse to complain about contrivances in this episode, the main character's power is literally "Contrivances."
• Weems needs to learn to be more clear when he communicates, I feel like if he'd said "I need this 100,000 dollars to help a sick kid," maybe the mob would be more inclined to let him go, or at least less likely to chuck him off a roof.
• Mulder rising out of the elevator in the pavement is cute.
• Scully's initial theory (that he's Domino) is closer to the truth than Mulder's (that he's Wolverine), which is a nice twist.
• Between getting sprayed in the face with water, falling through the floor and then getting grossed out when Weems puts his eye back in, Mulder gets humiliated a lot in the early part of this episode.
• I feel like if Weems doesn't want to testify that Cutrona tried to kill him, he should probably deny that it happened. Say you fell off the roof dude.
• The visual of the gangster hanging from the fan by his shoelace is a great one to go to the ad break on.
• I love Mulder explaining how the gangster died, how come no one has ever hired Duchovny to be a Sherlock Holmes type character
• Shouldn't the police be stopping civilians from getting near the crime scene? Especially children?
• Richie says he doesn't like basketball anymore because the Bulls suck now, and it literally jogged my memory to remember that Michael Jordan retired for the 2nd time in 1999. This concludes my knowledge of basketball.
• Weems is hiding in the wall and all of a sudden I thought of Eugene Victor Tooms.
• The lottery winning scene reminds me of the opening scene of My Name is Earl. I wonder if that's where they got it.
• Weems saying that being the luckiest man in the universe is a nightmare is a fun reversal, even if we see it coming.
• I kind of don't like the check in on Cutrona. Once we know that Weems is testifying, we don't need to get any more info on why Maggie gets kidnapped.
• Mulder talking about how everyone in Weems' life becomes a part of his luck is existentially terrifying, but the episode doesn't have time to dwell on it.
• Mulder's first guess in the phone book being an Islamic school got a chuckle from me, I'll admit it.
• This is such a lighthearted episode, I think to myself, even as a mobster threatens to torture Weems to death.
• The series of contrivances required to kill Cutrone is really solid, even if its clearly being setup from the moment the iron falls in the water.
• The lights changing to say RICHIE is just a little sappier than the plot can bear, but it's only a moment, amidst the brutal death of two men, so I can live with it.
• As always, these reviews are supported by my Patreon. I can't go out and randomly win the lottery, so check it out so I can afford to keep doing this.

Current Celebrity Watch:

I'm mostly just stalling before I get to the big one in Future Celebrity Watch, but Weems is played by Willie Garson, who appeared in previous episode The Walk. He got a Future Celebrity Watch there, so go read it to see what's in it.

Future Celebrity Watch:

Here it is, the one you've all been waiting for: Richie is played by a very very young Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf. He was still three years out from his breakout role in Even Stevens, and he doesn't really get enough screentime for him to make much of an impression here. It is very hard to recognize him though, he's VERY young.

Also, Richie's mom is played by Alyson Reed who uh...played Jane Darbus in all three High School Musical movies? I have no idea if that's a big role, but she was in all three, so there's that.