Oh...comedy. Here we have a farcical version of Carrie/The Craft/'Gingerbread' from Buffy (several years before that episode was written...spoooooky!!), with two magical teenage girls doing some killing and Mulder and Scully acting like high school versions of themselves. We get a 'horny beast'/Baphomet joke. We get Chris Carter spoofing the Satanic ritual abuse panic. We get Scully testily infodumping all over the day players and guest stars. And we get a jarring tonal mismatch between Carter's usual absolute humourlessness and the Twin Peaks-y/Heathers-y vibe that this episode is going for. Oh -- and a very smart joke about how the hotel TV's (the episode's) stuck in an inappropriately comedic vein.
The tension between the Conspiracy arc(s), the evolving 'world of visionary experience' semi-episodic vibe, and the initial paranormal anthology structure already seems untenable, and we're only two and a half years into the show. Well, that was the time for such experiments. After pioneering shows like Hill Street Blues changed audience expectations about seriality, showing the enormous aesthetic potential of sustained accretive character development, series like Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, and The Simpsons pushed hard at the boundaries of episodic prime-time TV in the early 90s, and The X-Files is in a sense an adapation of the Outer Limits-style anthology show to those series' evolving serial model. But what Ken Hite calls the 'dire Bocho-ization' of primetime TV -- the move from procedurals with some continuous character material to relationship melodramas with weekly semi-serial pretenses, foregrounding what used to be the 'B story' at the expense of well-wrought episodic plots -- wasn't complete in the early 90s, and Chris Carter et al. clearly didn't quite know how far they could go with their character arcs.
The balance between 'mythology' and 'standalone' episodes in the first couple years is a little uneasy. Standalones present a lower bar for the writers; they need to be well formed, yes, and complete unto themselves, but that's a solved problem, and as compensation they can play fast and loose with characterization in a way the continuity of the 'mytharc' episodes won't allow. Standalones needn't imply character movement. Of course, by the time you get to Buffy in 1997, Hite's D.B.-ization was complete, and standalones were almost all pretenses for long-term character development. (Think of the way third-season Buffy episodes 'The Zeppo' and 'Band Candy,' which tonally resemble 'Syzygy,' ended up having enormous emotional consequences for Whedon's characters.) But there was no such show/viewer contract in 1994-95, meaning that standalones like 'Syzygy' can ring changes on the characters without implying anything about the following weeks' stories -- the mythology episodes are meant to resonate behind the standalones, but the one-offs aren't binding. 'Syzygy' seems to be meant as a riff on the Mulder/Scully relationship, not a contribution to it.
It's a 'Very Special Episode' episode.
But there's another source of tension. Mulder and Scully are (in e.g. Robin Laws's terms) iconic characters -- the Skeptic, the Believer -- caught up in a dramatic arc (inquiry into, let's say, 'The Truth': that big conspiratorial web encompassing the Cigarette-Smoking Man, alien abduction, Mulder's dad, genetic experiments, Roswell, &c.). And at some point, if the storyworld doesn't reset, the idea that Mulder and Scully remain basically unchanged in their relationship to The Truth will become totally ludicrous. It already strains credulity, 3-1/2 years into the show, that Scully is even a little skeptical about UFOs and such. The show's (static) premise and (dynamic) development are at odds in that regard.
In other words, The X-Files faced a kind of globally abstracted Sam/Diane (or David/Maddie) problem -- not in terms of Mulder/Scully's 'Unspoken Sexual Tension,' but rather in terms of their knowledge of The Truth. The iconic Mulder/Scully setup positions them as outsiders, with each completing the other's imaginative/emotional development so they can succeed at Mulder's holy quest. But once you allow them to evolve as people (which tends to happen when human beings interact!), it's impossible for them to return to zero after an adventure. So the world around them changes: in this case, gets bigger and more complicated, though not much more densely populated...
...and it gets sillier. This is where Darin Morgan comes in for criticism. 'Humbug' is a wonderful piece of writing. Like 'Clyde Bruckman's,' it's also well within parameters for the show. But it established the dangerous precedent of laughing at the characters, especially Mulder. Which leads us to this week's episode, the funniest thing Carter's written so far, and the most (pardon me for using this carelessly devalued word) problematic.
The sitcom requires iconic characters: if the characters are changing in response to what they've learned they'll stop getting into the situations which power the comedy. 'Serial comedy' can get into Simpsons-style referentiality and escalating complication a la Arrested Development, but comedy is all about satisfying return, and you can't return to someplace you've never been.
This is part of why it's easier to improvise comedy than drama, incidentally, and why shows like The Office and Friends, about evolving relationships, far outstay their welcomes. The Office, which I loved but (like several of my friends) got sick of right around Jim & Pam's wedding, went through the usual 'one awkward season, two or three brilliant seasons, sad decline' arc while following the government-mandated 'all US sitcoms turn into stories about building a surrogate family with people you despise' rule. (Three guesses what purpose that rule serves...) The characters' pathetic recidivism wouldn't have been so tiresome, might even have stayed funny, if the show hadn't spent so much energy on the Lessons they had Learned and the way their Hearts had Opened to One Another, &c., &c., &c. Compare to that great family sitcom The Sopranos, whose creator made several bold choices in later years at the expense of genre coherence and critical esteem...
Mulder and Scully are caught up in kind of mythic ramble through American history and folk culture(s), and such a project requires a sense of humour; but it also requires a good memory -- remembering and preserving the forgotten and damned (in Fort's sense) is one of Mulder and Scully's magical powers -- yet comedy wants (us) to forget. I don't want to take a break from the mythic responsibilities of the show just because we're having a laugh. But you kinda gotta.
I won't tell you whether this episode 'worked' or not because you're an adult and can figure it out for yourself. But I will tell you that by the end I was simultaneously (1) glad to see the show stretch its wings, (2) a little sad about its continuing inability to manage emotional continuity, (3) excited at the prospect of formal experimentation, (4) worried that the writing staff just wasn't up to it, (5) looking forward to Anderson and Duchovny getting a chance to show how funny they are, and (6) curious about what kind of schizoid writers' room could produce both 'Paper Clip' and 'Syzygy.'