“Improbable” is episode thirteen of season nine of The X-Files.
In a casino, a man gets a poor hand, looks at the dealer and leaves the table. He sees a woman at the slots and stands next to her, staring. At the bar, a man dealing cards states a drink, which is what the other orders when he comes over. The second man tells the first, who asks if he knows him, that it isn’t the cards. You play the hand your dealt. You can think; the cards can’t. They just lie there and you have to make them work for you. The game can’t beat the man; the man beats himself. As the first man looks at the woman playing slots, the second says she comes in every Friday, loses her paycheque and cries all week. Nice girl. When the woman heads to the toilet, the second man tells the first to walk out of there. Surprise him for a change. The man instead follows the woman into the toilet. The person who took over the slot machine she was at wins the jackpot and another woman comes out saying someone has been murdered.
The opening phrase is ‘DIO TI AMA’ or ‘God Loves You’ in Italian.
Reyes is reading about the murder as she heads to the office. She has four files and is trying to decide something when Scully arrives. Reyes asks Scully to open her mind to something; can the universe be reduced to a single equation? Scully doesn’t believe it can, but yes, she knows how some do, assuming that Reyes means unified theory, the theory of everything, explaining in detail. Is that what Reyes means? Potentially.
Reyes has four murders, the last being the casino victim. Using numerology Reyes has reduced the victims to numbers. The last is 14, a karmic number. The other three also have karmic numbers, 10, 13 and 16. Scully is asking if Reyes has no other evidence, circumstantial or forensic, to correct the murder when she notices something on the latest photo, then checks the other three. All four have a pattern in the bruising, three small circles. Reyes thinks if numerology is directing the killer, then she’s not crazy. Or both Reyes and the killer are, according to Scully.
The killer is dressing; he has a devil-head ring with ‘666’ on it. He looks out of the window and sees the man from the casino bar on the street with a table doing a card game. The man looks up at the killer. The killer comes over and tells the man to quit following him or he might find himself dead. The man says that’s not the killer’s style. It doesn’t fit his pattern. Far be it for him to rat the killer out. He suggests the killer tries to find the king. When the killer fails, the man tells him there’s a secret to the game. Choose better. The killer tips the table over.
The killer heads across the street, briefly getting in the way of Reyes. She heads into the Hotel Knickerbocker and heads to see Vicki Burdick, a numerologist. Reyes explains why she’s there and Burdick explains that if numerology really did what people hoped, she’d have a better life. At best it’s an art. Reyes wants her to look at the cases, though, as there’s clearly a numerological connection between the victims.
Doggett calls; two more victims have been found. She should get back. Reyes returns, to applause for discovering a serial killer. Scully is taking point on forensics; Doggett will be lead on the case. Agent Fordyce wants to know Reyes’ insight. She starts spouting numerology when her phone rings. Burdick has found something. But the killer enters the office whilst she’s on the phone.
At Burdick’s office, Fordyce wants to know who else knew Reyes was coming there. No-one. Then how did the killer end up there on the same date? Reyes explains why she came there; she’s old the FBI doesn’t use numerologists. Killers have reasons. Reyes suggests some killers don’t understand their reasons and in turn these reasons can’t be understood. Fordyce considers that unacceptable. Doggett suggests an inside man. Fordyce doesn’t believe there is one. But he wants results and the killer catching.
This is one of the lighter ones – apart from the murders – though it does cross from light into outright weird. And there are lots of Neapolitan folk songs sung; Neapolitans have a lot of interest in numerology.