“Plus One” is episode three of season eleven of The X-Files.
The episode opens in a bat with a band playing. A young man drinking from a bottle makes his way to the stage, climbs on it and crowd surfs. As he is doing this, he spots someone identical to him at the other end. The double disappears behind a door that closes and the man leaves the bar and gets in his car and drives off into the night.
A police car pulls out and looks like it’s going to pull him over, but it passes. Then the man sees the double is now in his passenger seat. The double grabs the steering wheel, stamps on the accelerator and crashes the car into a tree. The driver is thrown through the windscreen. The double is no longer there.
The man did not die – rather surprisingly – but is currently in jail, as he was drunk when he crashed. He’s not the only one who reported seeing a double – he’s just the only one who survived. Each individual, all of whom live, or lived, in the same Henrico County in Virginia, died at their own hand shortly after seeing their double. This is a lot of strange deaths in a small area. So Mulder and Scully head to Henrico County Jail, where the young man, Arkie Seavers, is currently residing. Arkie says that he saw his double on four different occasions.
Arkie – who has had a few DUIs in the past and a bit of drug use (which does not make him a reliable witness) – says he can prove what happened. So Mulder and Scully head out to the crash site. It’s not so much that Mulder believes Arkie; he simply thinks he’s too stupid to make the story up.
According to the doctor who treated some of the victims, they all suddenly became mentally ill. None of them were upstanding citizens but none had any previous psychiatric problems. At the facility, Mulder notices a woman, one who, according to the doctor, suffers from a split personality. The woman plays a lot of hangman, apparently by herself, although she says she plays with someone who no-one else can see. The game of hangman she is currently playing has Arkie’s name on it. Then she loses the game. At the county jail, Arkie is handcuffed and placed in a cell, where his double appears.
Mulder and Scully get a motel room for the night and Scully is trying to get some sleep when Mulder comes in and says that Arkie has been found dead in his cell. Apparently a suicide by strangling. The woman from the facility, Judy, said she was playing hangman telepathically with her brother. Who was the person who discovered Arkie dead in his cell. The brother, Chucky, is a little weird. He also didn’t think much of Arkie. Chucky is also playing hangman. He also has an invisible person in his room. Little Judy’s other personality is not a nice one and doesn’t seem to like Scully. Scully thinks that Judy has a psychic influence over the victims. Mulder thinks it’s ghosts. Scully does not agree.
As long as the twins – who don’t actually like each other – keep playing hangman, it seems that people will keep dying. The question is how, and how to stop what is happening. It also seems highly likely that either Milder or Scully will start seeing their own double.
In some ways, an Evil Twin episode, but of a different type.