Any time I do anything inspired by Choose Your Own Adventure books, I owe a debt to the books themselves and to Jason Shiga, master of interactive comics.
Also in this episode, Mulder breaks the waterbed he got in the body-swap story arc. RIP waterbed.
I think there was only one of the original run of CYOA books where the good ending was unreachable. Such a revelation when I discovered that. Like I’d discovered a wonderful secret!
I didn’t remember the title, but I just looked it up and I remember the cover SO MUCH.
It was “Inside UFO 54-40”, which is a perfect reference for this comic! Nice! And thanks for the reminding me about it.
Look at the name of the ice-cream place, then check out the good ending of Inside UFO 54-40 again.
There are people who complain about that ending and those people are WRONG, it was the best thing ever (or the second-best after Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?) and completely fairly clued throughout.
Oh no, I wish she got ice cream. But no. This is a great visualisation of a great episode!
I absolutely love the “good ending” that can’t be accessed.
I am convinced the actual books did that.
I remember there was a Zork Choose Your Own Adventure book that had a secret, inaccessible ending in which one of the Zork deities scolded you for reading the book out of order and turned you into a newt or something.
This was on Shaenon’s top five list, in the ‘Jeff and Shaenon’s Top Five “X-Files” Not Written by Darin Morgan’ Skin Horse post from 2010. At that time, Shaenon said:
‘The show’s homage to (or ripoff of, depending on how kind you are) Groundhog Day, “Monday” forces Mulder, Scully, and everyone inside a downtown bank to repeat the same disastrous bank robbery over and over again…and only the robber’s accomplice/girlfriend is fully aware of the time loop. A cool idea, nicely executed, with lots of gloomy cinematography and shots of Mulder looking downcast–that’s what a solid “X-Files” episode is all about. Plus it ties up the all-important loose end of the waterbed Mulder acquired in the two-part body-swap storyline “Dreamland.”’
At this point, Monster of the Week has covered all five of Jeff’s top five episodes, and 4 out of 5 of Shaenon’s picks. The remaining episode is ‘The Unnatural’, which is coming up later this season.
Benguiat typeface and an inaccessible ending? Shaenon knows her Choose Your Own Adventure books!