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That first revival season is rough and proves that Chris Carter is, somehow, the worst X-Files writer. Curse of the Were-Monster is one of the best episodes ever, though. The second revival season is much better, except for the finale, which you should avoid at all costs and pretend Mulder and Scully are just out there doing their thing forever. Regarding conspiracy theories - unfortunately the world we live in right now means that conspiracy theories are (mostly) the domain of right-wing grifters scamming morons. I think the show did a good job in the 2nd revival season of addressing that fact and course correcting after presenting an Alex Jones-esque character as a voice of reason in the first revival season.
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Apr 20, 2020 14:59
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My absolute favorite episode is Jose Chung's "From Outer Space", but I realize that's not really a controversial opinion. It's still amazing to me just HOW good it is. It's funny, it's touching, it pokes fun at the entire premise of the X-files but manages to do it without being cynical or edgy. It's the first episode I saw in its entirety as a kid. My parents watched the show religiously, but I was way too young when it started. But I was 8 years old when this episode aired and was finally brave enough to watch the show. I was absolutely terrified by the opening confrontation between the giant alien and the "Greys". I watched the entire episode but the humor went completely over my head, so I just thought X-Files was the weirdest and most terrifying show of all time.
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Apr 21, 2020 13:17
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NikkolasKing posted:As for her partner, Reynard Muldrake... that ticking timebomb of insanity... his quest into the unknown has so warped his psyche, one shudders to think how he receives pleasures from life. I was SHOCKED that upon rewatching that episode you get to see Fox Mulder, 90s sex symbol and co-lead of the show, jerking off to the famous Bigfoot video. I don't know how in the world they got way with this, unless it was a combination of "It's fox, they're the edgy network" and maybe people didn't realize what he was actually doing? I apparently didn't notice it as a kid, at least.
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Apr 21, 2020 20:57
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mastershakeman posted:I stopped watching after lost art of forehead sweat where scully said she'd rather remember things the way she prefers rather than knowing what they're really like. with that in mind should I ever finish watching the last few episodes? i saw everything else up to that point In my humble opinion you could end there and end on a high note. But of the remaining episodes I think you have 2 great ones, one loving awful one, and the rest all range from "okay" to "pretty good". Skip the finale unless you want to get angry. I also love the Cigarette Smoking Man and "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" is another classic episode. Just the idea that the most powerful person in the show (and arguably in the world of the X-Files) is completely miserable and looking to become a writer is intriguing to me. He's as close to pure evil as the show gets, even in that episode itself, but you end up feeling a little bad for him by the end. He's a prisoner of his life as much as anybody else. Also my wife and I met William B Davies in real life and he's amazingly nice. He signed my X-Files DVD and talked to us about water skiing. He actually has (or at least had when we talked to him) a bunch of records for water skiing, which is a pretty awesome mental image.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:39
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:The last rewatch I did, which was the first in about a decade, I was surprised at how much it stuck out to me that Mulder is a complete rear end in a top hat to basically everybody around him, especially Scully. However, Mulder is always vindicated (and forgiven). I really like the episodes where Mulder is presented as a loser, because realistically even if you look like David Duchovny, a dude like Mulder is going to be a social outcast. He can't really function in normal society, he has no interests outside of paranormal things and pornography, and he'll randomly disappear for huge stretches of time with no explanation. As a teenager I loved Mulder because I saw a lot of myself in him. As an adult? Skinner is where it's at. Just trying to keep your poo poo together, your boss is always trying to gently caress you over, you get some small moments of victory every so often, and you have to deal with constant insanity in your professional life.
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Jul 10, 2020 13:26
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Milo and POTUS posted:Pusher is so unbelievably good This was a favorite one in my recent rewatch and I loved the reveal at the end that the Pusher could have had this brain tumor removed easily, but he'd rather die and have these powers for a while than go back to being a normal person.
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Aug 17, 2020 18:53
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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. I definitely think this should have been the season finale (especially since the show's dead again and it would have been the SERIES finale), the first time I watched it I was blown away and ready to call it the best episode of the X-Files ever. It's still a top 5 for sure, and it possibly has the best ending of any X-Files episode.
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Aug 20, 2020 20:29
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Milo and POTUS posted:Bill scully loving sucks Agreed. Complete idiot and a huge dick to Scully for daring to have a career. I remember when she's in the hospital for cancer and he's basically just waiting for her to die, even as a kid I hated this dude.
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Sep 4, 2020 16:09
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Payndz posted:Nearing the end of season 11, so a question about the end of season 10: since 'My Struggle II' (the only previous episode I haven't seen) was effectively retconned into a dream/vision by 'My Struggle III', is there anything about it that makes it worth watching? Completely ignore "My Struggle II", I'll also suggest that you avoid "My Struggle IV", despite the fact that it's the season (and most likely series) finale. It's just going to make you very, very angry when it ends.
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Sep 23, 2020 12:19
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Unmature posted:Watching the Stephen King written episode Chinga. What is up with Mulder being instantly like “no, haunted dolls are bullshit from movies”? It’s one of the most common tropes he should at least reference the Warrens even though they were full of poo poo I'm a huge King fan, and this episode is really disappointing. It's not terrible, but it feels like it's torn between being a King work and an X-files episode, so it never really satisfies either itch. But I do like the idea that Mulder has certain things even HE doesn't believe in.
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Oct 20, 2020 15:38
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OldSenileGuy posted:Your opinion is wrong, the carny community one is a classic. One of my absolute favorite moments in the entire show. I would love for Darin Morgan to write a book about his views of Mulder (and possibly David Duchovny) and how it affected his writing. Chris Carter mostly writes Mulder as this cool-as-hell super FBI agent that's haunted by his past. Morgan writes Mulder as a weird outcast who's only able to survive in the world because he's handsome.
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Nov 10, 2020 14:36
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Like a lot of multi-season story arcs, I think the alien conspiracy stuff complete collapsed when they realized the show was insanely popular and they needed to continue building on what they'd already written, and they felt like EVERYTHING had to tie together. Jose Chung's From Outer Space is probably the best episode of the show, but nobody's wondering how Lord Kinbote fits into the mytharc stuff.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:10
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I AM GRANDO posted: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 the Kolchak reboot had been worth watching and had stuck around, because that feels like exactly the sort of show Morgan would have gone crazy with. I know that Were-monster was originally a script for that show.
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Jun 1, 2023 17:29
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Payndz posted:The idea to use zombies for "Millennium" arose from a separate aborted project. Reportedly, Stephen King, who had co-penned the fifth-season episode "Chinga", wished to write an episode based on George A. Romero's cult zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968).Romero was also slated to direct the episode. According to "Millennium" co-writer and executive producer Frank Spotnitz, the staff of The X-Files met with both King and Romero, and the two showed an interest in producing the episode. While the episode was slated for the seventh season, it never came to fruition. I found this while reading up on Millenium. Holy poo poo, that would have been amazing. Chinga isn't great, and the Millenium episode of X-Files isn't great (except for the ending, which I love), but I'm already imagining Mulder trapped in a farmhouse making Molotov cocktails.
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Jun 20, 2023 14:59
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The tough part about doing any kind of government conspiracy theory stuff nowadays is just WHO believes these things and the kind of message you're trying to convey. Back in the 90s you could say "the government is hiding the truth about aliens from us!" and that was that. Nowadays a message like that gets combined with 30 other conspiracy theories and pretty soon you're hearing about how January 6th was a psy-op. I think that was the failing of trying to do any sort of overarching conspiracy theory stuff in those 2 revival seasons. It just felt weird. Joel McHale's character was basically Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones mixed together and we were supposed to root for the guy and think he had the inside scoop on things. That's not to say you didn't have cranks talking about conspiracy theories in the 90s. I listened to a lotta Art Bell and some of the callers were just as racist and crazy as anyone today. But I don't think a show can pull off "there's a vast government conspiracy theory" as a story beat any more, not without it feeling toothless and saying stuff like "oh, don't worry, the politicians you like aren't involved" or without it just feeling like some right-wing apocalypse fantasy. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" is my favorite revival episode, maybe my favorite episode period, because it realized this and wasn't afraid to poke fun at the central concept of the show.
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Jun 21, 2023 12:47
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Phy posted:Mulder going "YEE!" was one of the things that actually happened that night in Jose Chung's, and no one will convince me different That plus he ate all those slices of pie. Both totally in character for Mulder.
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Jul 6, 2023 13:07
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TIP posted:the revival seasons have a bunch of good episodes but the premieres and finales are written by chris carter and they're bad bad bad The series finale is the worst episode of the show imho and one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on TV. It felt like an X Files episode written by someone who did not know what the X Files was and, in fact, actively wanted to kill off the show as messily as possible.
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Sep 2, 2023 03:05
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joepinetree posted:Isn't tibetan numerologists of appalachia from the Xfiles episode of the simpsons? Yes, along with the unsolved mysteries of... Unsolved Mysteries. Milo and POTUS posted:Is that the one where mulder gets his rear end chewed out because he shows up to a plane crash and starts his whole spiel about tibetan numerologists of appalachia and the guy in charge is not having that nonsense I know you said it's not Jose Chung but this really feels like the part where the guy says Mulder and Scully really "bleeped up this case".
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Sep 5, 2023 19:15
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Are there any good write-ups or summaries of stuff the writers have said on what the plans and stuff were with the Mytharc? Like I know we hear a lot that they intended to end it with the movie, etc etc, but like what about the stuff before that? Because as noted, it's clear there's retcons and changes even before the film. Like was this a result of different writers, writers forgetting/not caring what they had previously written, or what? Like were they writing by the seat of their pants even prior to the film? Everything I've read (and even the DVD commentaries to a degree) seems to boil down to the show being much more successful than they ever planned and having to come up with more and more stuff to put into the mytharc to accommodate that. Big stuff like Gillain Anderson's pregnancy got worked into it, Scully having cancer at all was just something they came up with at the beginning of season 4, and originally Scully's mom was going to be the one with cancer. We'll probably never know exactly, but my gut instinct is the basic idea (humans made a deal with aliens, getting tech in exchange for eventually turning over Earth to the aliens) was always set in stone but that's about it.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:10
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Lid posted:
You'll have to get to the final season of the revival but there's an episode that runs off this idea, with conspiracy theories being presented as relics of the past since people can just create their own subjective realities nowadays. It is definitely odd to go back and watch the show. Like, there were always anti-vax conspiracy theories, but you could watch the X-Files and separate the reality of the show from real life. But now? If they introduced that you'd have half the people watching say it's "The elite rubbing it in our faces"
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Oct 24, 2023 17:53
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UnknownMercenary posted:Huge parts of the original mytharc get wrapped up in season 6 but the show has to justify its continued existence. I'm not the first person to say it, but the show 100% loses something when they move the filming from Vancouver to Los Angeles. It's just not as dreary and moody, you don't get those cool shots of somebody in a forest with a huge flood light illuminating the horizon. There are definitely good episodes in season 6 and beyond (Drive is one of my all-time favorites) but I always miss the look of the first 5 seasons.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:23
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Assuming it actually happens, I'll at least give it a shot. But I just don't have a lot of faith in it working in today's world. Any conspiracy talk is either going to come across as right-wing lunacy or they'll pivot too far the other way and be like "aliens are doing this but don't worry, the politicians you like aren't involved!". And as much as I love the monster of the week episodes, I dunno if you could really call a show "The X-Files" if that's all it is.
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Feb 29, 2024 16:02
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