"The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" is the fourth episode of the eleventh season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files.
A pre-credits black and white sequence appears to show the climactic scene of an episode of The Twilight Zone, in which a man in a late-night cafe' reveals his fears that Martians are invading Earth while disguised as human beings.
Dana Scully later matches his disbelief when Reggie (now going by the last name "Something") gives her a container of a cherry-flavored Jell-O rip off brand called Goop-O A-B-C, which she remembers from her childhood.
Now in the private sector, They applies his knowledge in cases ranging from corporate products liability to Holocaust denial.
Reggie then admits that he had been in Grenada prior to the US invasion of that island, and observed the alien survivor of a crashed spaceship being taken from the hospital by the American military.
In a montage of scenes apparently filmed in the same office, it is revealed that career has included: Manually sorting mail for the Postal Service, working IRS forms longhand, sleeping through a stint as a fraud detection officer at the SEC, constructing new identities for criminals at the United States Federal Witness Protection Program, waterboarding a prisoner for the CIA, and remotely piloting weaponized drones for the Pentagon (celebrating a hit by saying "Boom goes the dynamite", only to anxiously exclaim "Wait, is that a wedding cake?
While on a stretcher, Reggie recounts their last X-Files case together: an encounter with a Trump-like alien of the same race as that that had been found years earlier in Grenada.
The alien, representing the "Intergalactic Union of Sentient Beings from All Known Universes and Beyond" tells the trio that his organization no longer wants to have anything to do with Earth, which he says, "isn't sending us your best people".
Mulder, distraught with the idea of there being no more answers to seek, breaks down into a childish tantrum as Reggie and Scully embrace.
The episode guest stars Brian Huskey as Reggie, whose casting was revealed in September 2017 via Gillian Anderson's Twitter account.
[2] Regarding what clips to use, writer and director Darin Morgan commented: I thought I was going to be using different episodes or scenes, but then when I went back and looked at those things, there was no place to put Reggie.
[2][4] In the scene's final shot, the camera dollies out to reveal multiple American flags, as joke for fans.