The X-Files Season 11: 10 Things We Learned From Plus One
4. Balancing Serious Drama With Comedic Elements Is A Tricky Task
If there's a drawback to Plus One, it's tone. No, not if. There is a drawback, and that was it.
Plus One starts off quite dark, with an alarming cold open that we'll discuss shortly. It quickly turns bloody... and then, when we're introduced to the antagonists of the episode, Judith and Chucky, it gets a bit... silly. Silly, where things should have been spooky. Call it "Season 7 Disease." Season 7 of The X-Files was perhaps the low point of the series, and that includes the seasons that were light on Mulder. The show, listening to critics who claimed it could be funnier than most comedies, started producing more and more light-hearted episodes.
The end result was a sunny mess, with episodes like Fight Club (which also tackled doppelgangers), that probably never should have been produced.
Plus One is far from that, but Little Judy (Judith, in the persona of a young child) and Chucky, her telepathically linked brother, come off more odd and quirky than dark and sinister. And that's a shame. It's still a killer performance by Karin Konoval (you may not even realize she's playing Chucky at first), and it's more about how the scenes are written and shot. The X-Files was always at its best when it was dark. In Plus One, a little too much is brought out of the shadows.
In short, it prevents a good episode from being great.