Here’s the idea of this episode in plain English: our memories are slippery. Sometimes huge groups of people remember the same wrong thing, and that weird glitch becomes a story about conspiracy, alternate timelines, and who gets to decide what’s “real.”
The Weird Memory at the Center
Mulder swears there was a Twilight Zone episode called “The Lost Martian.” He can picture it. He can quote it. Only… it never existed. That’s the hook.
This points to the Mandela Effect—when lots of people share the same false memory. Classic examples people argue about:
- “Berenstain” vs “Berenstein” Bears
- The Monopoly man having a monocle (he doesn’t)
- A Fruit of the Loom cornucopia (never part of the logo)
- “Luke, I am your father” (the line is actually “No, I am your father.”)
- Nelson Mandela dying in prison (he didn’t)
The show uses that feeling—Wait, I know I remember this—to ask: did we just misremember, or did someone (or something) change the record?
Enter Reggie (Who Everyone “Forgot”)
A man named Reggie shows up and insists he used to work with Mulder and Scully. He remembers cases, moments, inside jokes. They… don’t. Reggie says it’s not an accident: the government has been altering memories. Whether he’s right or not is almost beside the point; the episode wants you to feel that dizzy uncertainty when your memories don’t match the “official” version.
Alternate Universes vs. Alternate Accounts
The script nods at alt-history stories like The Man in the High Castle and Watchmen—worlds that are only a few steps sideways from ours. The point isn’t that we’ve slipped dimensions; it’s that competing stories can feel as real as facts when they’re told confidently and repeated enough.
Secrets Make Everything Squishier
The episode winks at how secrecy fuels suspicion. Think about classified-evidence rules and national-security cases: sometimes a judge can see material that defense lawyers can’t unless they hold clearances. Toss in worries about foreign influence, social platforms like TikTok, and you get fertile ground for “someone’s hiding the real story”. Even if the system has reasons, the opacity alone breeds conspiracy.
Dr. Seuss: The Memory We Prefer vs. the Record We Have
There’s a bit about Dr. Seuss. We remember the beloved children’s author, but he also drew sharp, sometimes ugly political cartoons in WWII. Both are true. Our brains like neat narratives, so we sand off the rough parts. That’s not a grand conspiracy—it’s human selective memory—but it feels like a rewrite.
The “Deep State” and the Post-Truth Vibe
The show jokes about a “deep state” (not one shadowy wizard so much as the messy, entrenched machinery of government and institutions). Then it leans into a postmodern note: big, all-explaining “grand narratives” (pick your ism) gave way to fractured mini-stories. With no single referee of truth, competing versions thrive.
Social Media: Idea-Morphing Machines
Now add Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok—algorithms that reward the most clickable version of a story. Rumors evolve, screenshots circulate, and “I heard” becomes “we all know.” Ideas morph: “stay positive” becomes “ignore the negative,” which becomes “the negative never happened.” The platform doesn’t care which one’s true; it cares which one spreads.
So… What’s Real?
That brings us back to Mulder, Scully, and Reggie. Maybe there was a Twilight Zone episode. Maybe there wasn’t. Maybe Reggie was a colleague. Maybe he wasn’t. The facts matter—but the episode is really about how memories make meaning, and how easy it is to nudge that meaning with repetition, secrecy, and nostalgia.
The Quiet Ending
The story lands on a soft, human question: What do you choose to remember? Scully reaches for a small, personal memory—think of that childhood dessert “Goop-O A-B-C”—because it’s hers. Not a global narrative. Not a government file. Just a feeling she wants to keep intact.
And that’s the heart of it: in a noisy world of shifting stories, maybe the small, honest memories we hold onto—how something felt—are the last things that can’t be edited by anyone else.