Rube Goldberg's fascinating Mouse Trap machines provide the groundwork for this episode, all about cause and effect and how the cosmos engineers seemingly random events to conspire at just the right time. It's a cute standalone hour and another X-File that shines a light on a kind of ordinary sadsack character, this time Willie Garson's lovably cursed apartment super who happens to have the greatest luck in the world.Jeffrey Bell's script could easily stumble right around the time that certain events just occur regardless of how irrational or coincidental they are, but there's a sense of almost fairytale sweetness to the whole thing, where you end up entirely believing in a story where bullets bounce around a room and revert back into the shooter's chest. Similarly, Henry himself is so jaded that his story avoids pretension. He's not discovering this luck for the first time, instead having become used to it over the years. Meaning picking up a lottery ticket is a means to an end, since he knows the money will inevitably reach him.
The story quickly ascends into wacky noir hijinks full of laundry service warehouses, kidnapped women in peril and metal hooks flying into the faces of crooked mobsters and while it's all sort of nutty, I guess that was the tone they were reaching for. Also of note is a young Shia LaBeouf as the ailing child Henry is angling to save, years before he became a raving asshole.
Like his script for The Rain King last season, Bell manages to create a unique little universe within The X-Files where everything is pretty goofy and charming, and even the thuggish gangsters are straight out of a cartoon. But it somehow works, creating something lightweight but ultimately warm. B
Credits
Guest stars Willie Garson (Henry Weems); Alyson Reed (Maggie Lupone); Ramy Zada (Joe Cutrona); Tony Longo (Dominic)
Writer Jeffrey Bell Director Thomas J. Wright
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