Season 11, Episode 4: The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat

Synopsis

In a black-and-white scene, a paranoid man in a diner claims he's seen Martians outside, who have a ray that makes you forget. He sees himself as an alien in the mirror, then sees the diner owner remove his human disguise and cackle.

A man named Reggie visits Mulder in his parking garage and says he's stumbled on a "conspiracy to end all conspiracies." He says he's visited Mulder before, but that Mulder doesn't remember. Reggie tries to get Mulder's trust by saying the first Twilight Zone episode he saw was "The Lost Martian," but that the episode never existed.

Mulder can't find any reference to the episode (seen in the opening clip), despite his memory of seeing it and his assertion that it's a classic. Reggie finds Scully in the parking garage, gives her a box of cherry gelatin to "prove that [he's] real," and disappears as a couple of men approach. Scully says she has wonderful memories of the gelatin from her childhood, but hasn't been able to ever find it since then. Mulder wonders if their experiences have something to do with the "Mandela Effect," or a shared memory among large groups of people of something being different than it actually is.

Mulder and Scully meet with Reggie, who thinks some shadowy entity is monkeying with the past. Mulder wonders if the circumstances might be related to an interaction with a parallel universe. Scully suggests that it's just a simple matter of faulty memories.

Although Mulder and Scully are skeptical of Reggie's claim that a nebulous "they" is behind the weird circumstances, but he says there actually is a "Doctor They" out there. He claims this doctor worked to communicate with an alien who survived a UFO crash off Grenada, that the U.S. invaded to take the alien, and that he was actually an agent on the X-Files. We get a delightful montage of Reggie being inserted into a number of classic X-Files episodes, but of course Mulder and Scully don't remember him being involved.

Reggie again flees after men he claims to be the henchmen of Doctor They arrive, although they turn out to be nothing more than FBI agents who are dismissive of Mulder's work. As Mulder tries to unravel what's going on, Doctor They contacts him out of the blue and arranges a meeting. Doctor They says it hardly matters whether he's been interfering in the past, since people will believe what they want to believe.

Scully has looked into Reggie's past, and found that he's a former federal worker who did a stint in a mental institution. He is abruptly taken away in the sanitarium's ambulance, but before he goes Mulder asks what happened on their last case. As Reggie tells it, the agents made contact with an alien representative who gives a Trump-like speech, confirming that extraterrestrials are out there but that they think Earthlings are jerks. The representative says they'll be building an electromagnetic wall to keep humans away from outer space, but leaves a book with "all the answers" - effectively ending the X-Files.

Skinner suddenly shows up and wonders where they're taking Reggie, suggesting that maybe he did have a connection to the X-Files after all. Mulder finds that his lost Twilight Zone episode was from a knockoff show. Scully makes her gelatin, but decides against eating it, saying she wants to remember how it was instead.

Episode Body Count

Memory shop owner: Impaled by a lawn dart in his shop


Humans: 1
Creatures: 0
Aliens: 0

Cumulative Body Count (202/202 original episodes, 2/2 movies, 10/16 reboot episodes)

Humans: 2,479
Creatures: 132
Aliens: 66

Grand Total: 2,677