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NikkolasKing posted:Mulder's arc in S5 has been interesting. My criticisms of how it was done aside, his losing faith in the alien idea and becoming a jaded cynic about the government was an unexpected development in his character. Mulder's a pretty huge and unreasonable jerk about religious stuff. In the one where Scully's in a coma and Mulder is trying to save her by threatening the smoking man and running all over, she tells him at the end that she decided to fight back to consciousness because there was a doctor who said encouraging things to her every day during her coma dreams and that when she asked about the doctor, the staff said that she had died years ago. And Mulder rolls his eyes are her and then she yells at him about how he's always the first one to believe in ghosts that murder people but he's a total hypocrite about ghosts that would do something good for somebody. It's always really stuck with me that her attitude is completely justified, and also that he's incredible insensitive to blow her off mere hours after she almost died and argue with her about the impossibility of a ghost who helps people like he's a reddit atheist.
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May 11, 2020 20:06
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Maelstache posted:If you're talking about One Breath, the final scene is Scully asking about Nurse Owens, then we get the spooky Twilight Zone twist that she was I swear there’s one where they’re on a bench together and Mulder laughs at her for thinking there could be good ghosts and it’s because of something that happens in her part of the story. Maybe it was the ghost of a priest or something? I’m pretty sure it was in the earlier part of the series. Do they ever talk about the events of that episode later?
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Jun 7, 2020 03:30
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a ghoooost
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I might join this rewatch too. I always drop off right around the first movie.
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Jul 8, 2020 01:40
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There are too many kinds of loving aliens on and around Earth in season one. The conspiracy aliens cannot be cool with a mars face alien ghost and amish date rape aliens running all over the place. To say nothing of the volcano parasite aliens. But at least the brain worms from Ice were just prehistoric Earth life.
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Jul 9, 2020 05:13
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The early episodes really throw a lot at the wall as far as what kind of lives Mulder and Scully have led, and boy do a lot of those things not matter at all. Mulder especially seems to have a lot of exciting past experiences that go absolutely nowhere as the show settles into a consistent characterization of him and his life story. Does him attending Cambridge or wherever come up even once after that?
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Jul 9, 2020 14:22
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Milo and POTUS posted:Is the old lady in the bus station the person who gives scully the bugged pen? I don’t know what episode you’re on, but there weren’t that many tv actors in Vancouver in 1993, so sometimes you’ll see the same people over again.
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Jul 11, 2020 17:59
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I knew the show was dead when in the post-movie season, smoking man says without irony that he's going to pin a series of deaths on an insane native american going on a rampage with a hatchet because America hates "the red man." I don't know if that was some kind of attempt at name-checking a contemporary first-nations rights issue in the US or Canada at the time or something, but it was so stupid that I just checked out at that point. The show never looked right outside of Vancouver anyway.
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Jul 16, 2020 19:39
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The monster of the week ones in the first half of season two are my absolute favorite stretch of episodes. Everything just feels so desperate and weird with the x-files shut down and the premise doesn’t really have firm boundaries or formulas set yet.
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Jul 18, 2020 00:07
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I think the idea of seeing Mulder do a case on his own is interesting. The execution is not very good, but since the show always balances him with Scully, I always wondered what he’d be like solo as an unhinged jerk.
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Jul 21, 2020 03:44
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One thing that I’m glad gets shaken out by season three is the improbable number of aliens just loving around on Earth. Aside from your mytharc conspiracy aliens, you got the face on Mars dead alien ghost, the amish sex pervert aliens, and the aliens that turned the elephant invisible, plus a few more I might be forgetting. I feel like if I were the conspiracy, I’d maybe hit up those amish sex aliens and see if they want to team up against the black oil aliens.
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Jul 28, 2020 07:12
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Timby posted:Season 11 is so terrible in every respect that I got physically angry at it. I thought it was kind of funny the Scully’s kid who she missed so desperately became a piece-of-poo poo pick-up artist and she didn’t even care when he died.
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Aug 2, 2020 05:29
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Getting entombed in an ICBM silo to either dehydrate to death or be burned alive in the case of nuclear war. Also ending up really ashamed to be working for a white supremacist militia after they busted into his ICBM silo to steal the nuke and also rescued him.
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Aug 4, 2020 14:44
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Wolfsheim posted:this thread got me curious enough to watch the xfiles again and I know Scully's skepticism in the face of multiple incontrovertible alien/ghost encounters has always been kind of a joke but it's literally the second ever episode where she has to rescue Mulder from a secret military base at gunpoint, the sinister government agent says to them "we're hiding things from you for your protection!" and then in the very next scene says Mulder is crazy for thinking it's a conspiracy She usually just thinks it’s a conspiracy that doesn’t involve aliens but just regular secret weapons and human experimentation, which is kind of a fine line, I’ll admit. She just always wants incontrovertible proof of whatever it is in that particular situation. I swear she says stuff like “just because there was a ghost that other time, there’s no reason to assume it’s a ghost this time!” which is a really reasonable position to take.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:44
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DorianGravy posted:Yeah, it's a little funny sometimes. I'm sure Scully realizes that there are strange things and dark conspiracies going on, but she's unwilling to believe in aliens and monsters without clear proof. And clear proof is something that she rarely (never?) gets. Watching as an adult, it’s really clear to me that she’s constantly put in the boring adult role, telling Mulder that they have to be responsible and do their homework and that he can’t just go crawl through goo, when obviously the whole point of the show is them crawling through goo. It’s kind of like the show is an exquisite hell designed to frustrate her, as she’s a scientist MD Ph.D. or whatever who should be perfectly qualified to solve all this poo poo every week but she’s always being proven wrong by the wild guesses of this dumb rear end in a top hat that don’t even follow from the facts of the case. Like she just happens to have the one job in all of government service where the laws of physics don’t apply.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:57
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Payndz posted:I missed season 11, but I realised I'm going to have to get it just to complete my Darin Morgan episodes collection. His episode is extremely good. He's like some mad genius who can only create exquisite art within the context of a weekly sci-fi procedural. From Clyde Bruckman on, his writing transcends the qualifier "best episodes of the x-files" and moves into the category of "an extremely good narrative."
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Aug 20, 2020 17:46
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joepinetree posted:Lol, yeah. Appealing and teasing shippers became Chris Carter's go to move in later seasons when he ran out of ideas. Also their son turned out to be a dirtbag pick-up artist who uses his world-imperiling psychic powers to date two women at the same time and steal gas. Also he dies saving Mulder and Scully and the last line of the series is that he wasn’t really their son anyway because cigarette-smoking man messed with him somehow as a baby, so they don’t have to be sad. Sometimes I wonder about the other psychic child who was supposed to save the world in like season 5-6, who used his powers to cheat at chess.
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Aug 22, 2020 17:14
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Uh oh. https://twitter.com/THR/status/1299429111501328384?s=20
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Aug 28, 2020 22:27
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsAykauFEg8
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Aug 28, 2020 22:29
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Chairman Capone posted:I remember when they were filming the second movie, they released a lot of fake "leaks" and blurry "set photos" to throw bloggers off the scent, and all the fakes made it seem like the movie was going to be about a werewolf or wendigo or something like that, and I still wish it actually had been that instead. He was definitely an old hippie who fried his brain in the 70s, and there's definitely a pipeline from the kind of hatred of the government that old hippies have to the kind of hatred of the government that reactionaries have, sometimes activated by pressing on the latent racism of most white boomers.
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Sep 8, 2020 18:25
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Skinner was the best. The fact that they tried to deliberately engineer Krycek as a perfect nemesis for Mulder but couldn't resist the magnetic pull of Skinner's completely organic and natural hatred of him, even though Skinner is just a supporting character and Mulder is the main character of the show, testifies to the power of Skinner's character. You can see Krycek flying into the show set up to be a lifetime nemesis for Mulder as like a dark reflection of him who immediately betrays him and creates a personal desire for revenge in causing Scully to get abducted and in killing Scully's sister, but one savage beating involving Skinner just makes it the most natural thing in the world that Mulder's hulking, scary work dad would just want to walk over and choke the guy to death every time he sees him after that. It's completely organic character and plot development that really strengthens the show.
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Sep 21, 2020 22:35
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I remember that Kumail Nanjiani once described him as the kind of dad that all your friends are a little afraid of who makes you call him sir and would make you smoke a whole pack of cigarettes or dig holes in the back yard as punishment, and that really fits. He also described Deep Throat as like a permissive liberal dad who would never yell at you and just trusts that you'll come to the right decision on your own, which I still have to think about.
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Sep 21, 2020 22:38
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BogDew posted:It's brilliant in that people were questioning why shadowy governments were rigging football games and sort of missed the joke that implies CSM is leading TLG on by writing elaborate fiction that feeds into their conspiracy yearnings. I think it works with him just being a petty bureaucrat who wasted his life pointlessly rising in an organization at the cost of his true self. The part with him finally selling the story and finding out that the editors changed it all couldn’t have been in his manuscript, right?
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Oct 20, 2020 02:55
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Unmature posted:Should I watch Kolchak: The Night Stalker? Hard yes. Darren McGavin is a national treasure.
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Oct 22, 2020 04:22
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Plus that blockhead guy and the Enigma were minor gen x cultural figures at the time.
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Nov 10, 2020 01:20
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alexandriao posted:I just finished season 9 (which... hm) and I've been introducing it to a lot of friends, surprising how many have got hooked just from the first episode It’s better than the end of the original show. The Chris Carter episodes are extremely bad, some are average, and the Darin Morgan ones are the greatest of the series.
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Feb 5, 2021 03:29
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I kind of liked the "new" Mulder and Scully characters they introduced, although I'm still not entirely sure if they were meant to be serious possible leads of a new series or if they were just a joke.
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Feb 8, 2021 16:50
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DanteDevils posted:I just finished seasons 1-5 and the first movie. Just started season 6. This show loving owns and I can’t believe I missed it in hindsight. I saw a few episodes randomly back in when it aired, but I never followed the overall story. I’m going to avoid this thread to be safe from spoilers until I finish it. Just wanted to say I highly recommend the show and I can’t wait to see how it ends. Everyone makes their own decision about where it ends for them personally, probably, but you're going through the best episodes right now. Glad to hear you're enjoying it. I should do a rewatch some time.
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Feb 24, 2021 21:57
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It’s a symptom of Chris Carter not being able to move forward. That was like the third time the smoking man dies on screen and yet he still comes back.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:01
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zer0spunk posted:yeah, that was roughhh. The actors hated it so much they said publicly that they’d never do another season.
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Sep 5, 2022 05:11
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The first-season conspiracy stuff is great. There’s not a clear division between the alien poo poo and other cases, in that Deep Throat helps them with both, and it’s just a bunch of wild ideas thrown together with very hazy borders. It would be perfect if the show just lasted three low-budget seasons and remained a cult classic, although the height of the show’s popularity and budget was pretty good too, for different reasons. Darin Morgan is the most fascinating figure to rise out of The X-Files. Just an extremely lazy genius with zero drive to do any art other than what his brother asks for. He could have been a great artist, but instead we just have six of the best X-Files episodes, three of which are some of the best television ever written, plus the two best episodes of Millennium and some episodes of Wizards of Waverley Place or wherever his brother worked after X-Files. I wish Space Above and Beyond had lasted, so we could have seen some Darin scripts for it.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:31
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Even the regular episodes have some jokey dialogue and quips between the regulars. Frank Black is just dead inside and 100% professional at work. X-Files really benefits from how much of a weird maniac Fox Mulder is.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:40
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The later 90s definitely had this nonspecific sense of doom, like everything that felt so solid was precarious and a out to be swept away. X-Files feels like this too, and like Metal Gear Solid II. Millennium was like nonstop dread built out of that feeling.
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Jun 20, 2023 02:11
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Open Source Idiom posted:There are a bunch of good episodes in the back half of the third season -- basically from around The Sound of Snow onwards -- but IMO the dumbest thing about Millennium is the opening credits. They're so bad. The only show brave enough to say “who cares?” right there at the start of every episode. I discovered Nick Cave and The Dirty Three right around the time Millennium started, and I remember thinking it was like The Dirty Three did the Van Halen Right Now music video.
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Jun 20, 2023 04:22
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Payndz posted:It's 'funny' in retrospect how a lot of 90s media had an "end of the millennium equals end of times" vibe, considering that, all things told, in the West at least things were about as good as they'd ever been. Then we entered the 21st century and welp, downhill from there. I think for a lot of people there was a sense that something was very wrong with the world but they couldn’t put a name to it because of the limits to their frame of reference. They were all being told that the end of history had arrived and neoliberal orthodoxy had made the best of all possible worlds. But of course things were going wrong and neoliberalism was eating out the foundations—they were right that they were teetering on the precipice of a terrible collapse. There’s actually some ok scholarship that attributes the ufo abduction culture of the period to this same anxiety, that it is a manifestation of the anxiety people felt about living in an era where everything seemed carefully managed but felt utterly beyond an individual’s control or understanding, and not necessarily benign.
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Jun 20, 2023 16:57
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Khanstant posted:The frustrating part about MotW episodes compared to the dumb alien crap, was it never seemed to stick or carry forward. They'd discover proof of some supernatural monster or phenomenae, like, way better proof than stuff they cling on to, but it barely gets acknowledged by end of EP and then never comes up again. I swear there’s at least one time where Scully says something like, “just because it was a ghost that one time doesn’t mean that it’s going to turn out to be a ghost in this instance,” which is an extremely reasonable position to take.
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Jul 5, 2023 03:49
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zer0spunk posted:I love how forumla that gets too, when you get characters that only exist to be the what if versions of the leads...Monica Reyes is scully but not skeptical..wow, what clever subversion..etc etc Also she believes in supernatural poo poo, which I guess Scully also kind of does. Wasn’t there a recurring element in those episodes where some kind of demonic force was a recurring threat? Maybe it went after Cary Elwes’ character and killed Dogget’s son?
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Jul 5, 2023 17:03
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The thing about hippies and the old counterculture is that a lot of those guys were pretty racist and selfish. There’s a big overlap between far left and far right spiritualism in their focus on the purity of the body and the purity of the race.
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Jul 7, 2023 00:42
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It blows my mind that Agent Einstein from that episode is adult Van on Yellowjackets. She looks extremely different, but it’s probably just different makeup.
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Jul 7, 2023 02:21
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I discovered The Dirty Three around the same time Millennium started, and I will say I like the music, which is very similar to The Dirty Three stuff, even if the on-screen text is silly.
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Jul 7, 2023 15:42
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Bigfoot mythology is definitely trending toward him being either an alien or a defender against incursions from other parallel universes.
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Jul 7, 2023 17:09
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