“Three of a Kind” is episode twenty of season six of The X-Files.
A car pulls up outside a house and Byers get out. He’s narrating that he keeps having a beautiful dream, one where JFK wasn’t assassinated, the country is better and hasn’t betrayed its people and he has a family, including children and a wife, the latter being Susanne Modeski from “Unusual Suspects”. It ends the same way every time; he loses it all.
Las Vegas, Nevada, Def-Con ’99 and Byers is playing poker with some defence contractors. He’s using a false name and trying to find out what they’re working on. Frohike is pretending to be a waiter and Langly is feeding information to Byers through an earwig. The pot is getting big and one person is quizzing Byers on information, sounding as if he’s testing him. Because he is. Byers loses the hand and the winner tells security to throw Byers and Frohike out.
They return to their room, where Langly is, with nothing. Byers wants to know who the guy who made them is; he hadn’t got a convention badge. There’s a knock on the door and there are two others outside, Jimmy and Timmy (the latter being John Billingsley, Enterprise‘s Dr Phlox), who are also looking for information and also failing to get it.
Jimmy insists that political assassination is the theme this year and a big new stealth assassination method is going to be unveiled. Meanwhile, do they want to hit the restaurant? All you can eat lobster and a floor show. Byers declines but Langly says yes. Frohike stays behind to speak to Byers; he says that Byers is still looking for Susanne, isn’t he? Yes; they met her at a convention. Frohike points out that was 10 years ago in Baltimore. They know what happened and she’s most likely dead. Frohike talks Byers in coming to the restaurant, but on the casino floor Byers sees Susanne and follows, but loses, her.
Scully is woken up in the middle of the night by Mulder phoning her and telling her she needs to come to Las Vegas; the Lone Gunmen are onto something big. It’s not actually Mulder, but Byers using technology to imitate him. Byers tells the others this involves the government and they need their own government agent. Mulder is too high profile. The others aren’t convinced Byers saw Susanne. Frohike tells him to get some ice and, whilst doing so, Byers sees the man who beat him at poker. He follows the man and sees him go into a room. Where he is kissed hello by Susanne.
The others identify the man from the room, Grant Elllis, driving a pool car from a DoD facility in New Mexico. The one where Susanne worked. Byers is convinced Susanne has been brainwashed; the gas she was working on. They’ll have refined it over the past decade. Frohike knows a way to find out.
Byers can’t get into a convention room, as the same guard who threw him out is there. Jimmy and two others arrive; Jimmy claims there’s a hole in the room’s security, but there’s nothing worth hearing until tomorrow. Byers wants to get in today and tells Jimmy to prove it. Jimmy heads in through an air vent, with a video camera. Susanne is there, but Jimmy sees Timmy in the room. He tries getting out of the vent but is dragged out by two goons and injected with something by Timmy. Timmy did have big plans for Jimmy.
Byers and Langly meet Scully and give excuses as to why Mulder isn’t there, why she hasn’t been able to contact him and that he’ll be hard to reach for the next few hours. Security passes with a woman talking about an incident involving a James Belmont. They follow; Jimmy has jumped in front of a bus and is very dead.
Frohike has got into Suzanne’s room to place a video camera in an air vent. However, when he goes to place the camera, he finds another one already there. Then Susanne returns, and shortly afterwards Byers knocks on the door.
Susanne doesn’t appear to have been brainwashed, but there is something going on. As evidence by the fact that Timmy isn’t like the rest of them, but some sort of government agent. Morris Fletcher, from “Dreamland”, makes a brief appearance.