Over to Sky One today, starting with an episode of The Simpsons – Pygmoelian. Matt Groening appears in the couch gag.

Homer takes the family to Duff Days.

Moe wins a bartending competition, so he gets to appear in the Duff Calendar.

He gets cosmetic surgery.

He follows his dream to become an actor on a daytime soap.

After this, an episode of Futurama – How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back. Hermes has a job crisis. He goes to a spa planet that’s actually a forced labour camp.

His officious replacement has an affair with Fry.

Hermes is reinvigorated after he streamlines the labour camp, and returns to help them find Bender’s disk with a song and dance number.

After this, we move later in the evening for an episode of The X Files – X-Cops. It starts with a disclaimer that’s not in the show’s regular style.

That’s because it’s an episode of COPS. Not a show I ever watched, but I’m aware of what it is, and I love meta-textual TV, playing with the raw format of a show.

The cold open is entirely an episode of the show, where a cop investigates a report of a prowler, finds deep scratches on a front door, then after checking the back yard, runs away in panic to his patrol car, which is then attacked by something large enough to turn it over.

Following the regular X-Files titles (I guess they weren’t brave enough to ditch all the X-Files branding) the police on the scene spot two armed people – It’s Mulder and Scully, investigating the same case, which Mulder thinks is a Werewolf.

But the police sketch artist, working on the homeowner’s description, has a different idea.

There’s a strong ‘Unbreakable – They’re alive, dammit’ vibe about these eyewitnesses when the sketch artist is killed by the unknown attacker.

As well as playing with the format in a fun way, the actual story is interesting. Now the deputy who first saw the attacker tells Mulder that what he saw was ‘The Wasp Man’, a creature from his childhood that his brother used to frighten him with.

They even get an autopsy. I love the nervous look to camera from the assistant. Who then worries about not wearing a mask (!) and thinks she might get Hanta Virus. Then she dies of symptoms that look like Hanta Virus. Whatever the supernatural monster is that’s stalking people, it’s attacking people who are in mortal fear.

This is a fun episode, and I’m not surprised to see it’s written by Vince Gilligan.

After this, recording switches, and there’s another Futurama – A Clone of My Own. Farnsworth has made a clone of himself to take over from him.

Then, back to The X Files with an episode called First Person Shooter. It’s all a bit Laser Quest.

It’s a sophisticated VR-based game. But there’s someone lurking in the game that’s able to kill people for real.

The Lone Gunmen are involved with the project. And, you’ll notice, it’s got a writing credit from William Gibson.

They don’t seem to do much logging in their game, so they can’t work out how someone is shot when there’s no real guns anywhere. But they’ve got some logging so they can see the woman who shot the player in-game. “Can you texture wrap her?” asks Mulder, making it sound like something pervy. Although given her design as a pretty typical game dominatrix, it sort of is.

Phoebe (Constance Zimmer) looks a bit shifty as they discover this character.

A suspect fitting the woman’s description is picked up. There’s a really gross scene where she’s in an interview room, and all the policemen (they are all men) are crowded outside, leering. Even Mulder joins in. This is fairly sickening, even though I’m sure it’s meant to be funny.

The woman, Jade Blue Afterglow, was approached by a medical imaging firm to have her body scanned, which explains why the character in the game looks like her.

Mulder and the Lone Gunmen go into the game. By the way, this is the most boring game ever, as all the player seems to do is stand behind a barrier and shoot oncoming enemies. It might as well be Space Invaders.

The game stops, but Mulder has disappeared. The three Lone Gunmen are there, but no Mulder. Somehow, although the programme makes no effort to explain it, Mulder is trapped in the game. Scully accuses the skeevy computer bloke of putting the Jade Blue Afterglow character in there, but it’s actually Phoebe, who was working on her own game, with that avatar (because she’s so ugly in real life) but somehow her game became part of the laser quest. That’s not how any of this works, by the way, but it’s The X Files so let’s roll with it.

Oh God, now Mulder’s in a western town.

Phoebe’s avatar is there, a lot. Nothing says Sexy Cowboy like enormous furry trousers.

So Scully has to suit up and play.

While the Lone Gunmen have to persuade Phoebe to tell them what the shutdown command is, otherwise the game will destroy Mulder and Scully. And they actually have to persuade her to tell them because, I don’t know, they probably didn’t have a decent source control system. They had to debate whether to let people die or shut down a server. But then, earlier they sent a gamer into the game to kill the avatar and just watched as he was hacked to pieces, so their moral compasses are spinning a bit.

This was a very silly episode, not helped by the rampant sexism, and by having Scully take the position that gaming is inherently dangerous. Of course, in this very particular instance she was right, but that’s not what that position usually means.

After this, there’s the start of an episode of American Sex, during which the tape ends.

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