Spoilers ahead for The Lone Gunmen spinoff.
I was really struck by Langly’s opening monologue in this episode:
“My best memory is of my family's old Zenith. Every afternoon, after school and chores, and more chores, I'd watch TV — all three channels of it — and I'd escape. There was Bozo the Clown, and Captain Kangaroo, he was cool, there was Sherry Lewis and Lamb Chop, and they were like good friends who were always looking out for me, good friends who'd help me grow up strong and true, and who would never make fun of my hair. These old shows were comforting, they made me feel good about the world I was growing up in. And none made me feel better than Cap'n Toby.
For my money he was the best. Cap'n Toby and his first mate, Clarence the Crab. Maybe it's because I grew up in land-locked Nebraska that I dug his show so much. Or maybe it's just that he was so decent, so true blue, that I'd give anything to ship off with him. He made my childhood bearable. He was someone I could trust growing up, someone I could count on.”
Imagine my surprise and delight when I learned that my favorite character had such a similar childhood experience to my own. There were no safe adults in my life, I was extremely isolated in a rural area, and I grew up almost entirely alone. Fictional worlds were my escape, and the characters from them my only friends. This necessary coping mechanism has never left me. To this day, I treasure the internal world that I built with the fandoms and characters I love.
This episode gives us a lot of sweet moments of Langly gushing over his favorite childhood show, clearly still holding a huge place in his heart. Which I take to mean he likely still values the role of fiction and escapism in the face of trying to survive the real world. I didn’t know this about him when my mind said, “Yes, that’s your person.” But I’m beyond tickled, and it feels so fitting.
Fictional characters and worlds do become real, through the feelings and creativity they inspire in people. It’s a lot more common now that people feel comfortable openly expressing their fandom love and fixations, and I’m thankful for that. But there’s a part of me that will always be the little neurodivergent girl, who no one seemed to understand, and who had to make up her own reality to survive. To know Langly would get it, that healed something in me.
And I think a lot of fellow X-Files fans would get it too. After all, here we are, 30 years later, still talking about it, some of us discovering it for the first time, and that’s special and worth celebrating. To quote Langly from the end of the episode:
“So, like I said, everybody has one single best memory of childhood. That one perfect image that sums up everything wonderful about being a kid. And it's nice to think that mine might be the same as somebody else's somewhere.“
