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There are elements to this episode that are uncomfortable, most importantly the issue of consent. Not the most pleasant topic, but the cast makes deft work of some rather Shakespearean instances of mistaken identity, wringing humor out of awkwardness and oddness. It’s about shifting shapes and shifting identities–and what it really means to be a loser. It’s not really about the babies, even though the episode starts with Mulder and Scully investigating a baby born with a tail to a mother who claimed the father was from another planet. Isn’t that awesome?”Īnything that begins with mistakes at a sperm bank is either going to be stellar or really crash and burn, and fortunately, “Small Potatoes” manages the former. It’s as if the writers are shrugging their shoulders to say, “yeah, there’s a lot of nutty stuff out there. But the ambiguity works in its favor, setting up some really fantastic jokes at its own expense. There’s a nice commentary on the show’s favorite phrase “the truth is out there,” because it paints the truth as entirely subjective, a risky move for a show that also wants us to believe.
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The characters all claim contradictory things, renege on those claims, prove themselves unreliable, and generally muddy what might be a mundane crime–or an actual alien abduction (or several). The setup is an author interviewing Scully for his next book, but rapidly devolves into a variety of conflicting he-said she-said tales. It was a bit of a risk to take in 1996, when the X-Files was only in its third season, but it paid off, showing some real versatility in the writing and acting. Like “Once More, With Feeling” from Buffy or “The Monster at the End of This Book” (and all subsequent meta-episodes) from Supernatural, this episode was a foray into some fourth-wall-bending (hey, I found the idea for the next Avatar series!) shenanigans that only work when characters are well-established and well-loved. The following, in order of air date, are the best examples of that boundary-pushing blended with humor. The X-Files became a cultural phenomenon because of its willingness to go for broke on ideas that, like the truth, were really out there.