X-Files

[Thad]

Neat.

Reminds me a bit of the '90s X-Files comic, which was drawn by Charlie Adlard (now best-known as the artist on all but the first 6 issues of The Walking Dead).

[Mothra]

We've finished the original run of X-Files, with the second movie behind us. Like others have said, it's good that the movie focuses on the characters, but also the movie is way too long for the very dumb story they have, and there's like only one moment of an actual X-Files thing happening. Also I mean, I never wanted these two to get romantic so I kinda didn't love that either, but whatever.

The final episode of season 9 is so fucking wild, I cannot imagine what Friday went through watching this shit in real time. They drag the Smoking Man back out of the coffin yet again for the shittiest, laziest capstone to the "story" they've cobbled together, then he gets blowed up without incident.

Overall, that season is probably the worst the show ever got. Just tons of boring-ass episodes that do not leave the FBI building. Long gone are two agents off on some cryptid chase in the woods, now it's a million scenes of very similar characters talking to each other in dingy offices.

The best part of S9 is of course the fact that Big Dogg did not get killed off. Instead, the show just forgets he exists the instant Mulder comes back into the picture. Guess he was, truly, in the end, only there to fill the leading man void that Mulder left. Disappointing, but, our love of the character and the actor remains.

Anyways, we're obsessed with this deranged techno remix of the X-Files theme that Mark Snow busted out for X-Files 2:

[Thad]

Finally got around to finishing season 8, and you know what, if you have to hammer the Jesus metaphor that hard, at least having the Lone Gunmen show up as the Three Wise Men was a perfect call.

[Thad]

I kinda love how they just don't give a fuck anymore and the end of the episode is people like "Wait, why did the aliens decide not to kill the baby, and how did Mulder get Scully to the hospital?" and they're just like *shrug* "I dunno."

Also there are a number of No Prize reasons that would explain Scully saying "I named him William, after your father" buuuuut I'm gonna say the most plausible explanation is the writers just forgot that Scully's father was also named Martha William?

[Thad]

I haven't seen season 11 but I did hear about the gross twist that CSM, not Mulder, is William's father, and you know what, having watched season 8, just this once I'll say that reveal seems like something they probably planned from the beginning.

The reason I think that is that season 8 repeatedly and painstakingly establishes that William is the product of artificial insemination, even though "all things" pretty clearly implies that Mulder and Scully finally fucked, five episodes before she learned she was pregnant. There's absolutely no reason for the artificial insemination backstory except to leave an opening for some kind of interference -- maybe they didn't have season 11's specific twist in mind, but they must have planned for some kind of "the sample was tampered with" reveal at some point, or else why even bother with all the artificial insemination talk?

The only other explanation is that they just forgot Mulder and Scully hooked up, which...seems a little implausible. I find it easy enough to believe they forgot the name of Scully's father who appeared in one episode in the first season, but a lot harder to believe they forgot something as big as the leads finally sleeping together after seven seasons of buildup.

[Mothra]

Literally the result of every major plot thread in X-Files is, "why did they even bother?"

[Thad]

Season 9 premier: well, the precipitous drop in ratings isn't for lack of trying. Lucy Lawless, Cary Elwes, and all the nudity a TV-14 rating can handle.

Too bad about the script. The guest stars are wasted; Lawless doesn't get enough to do and they make the absolutely baffling decision of casting Elwes, an actor best-known for playing lovable rogues, as a charmless FBI middle-manager whose accent keeps slipping.

(I do like the idea that Doggett's a pariah now because he reported his boss for corruption and now all his former friends at the FBI are gunning for him because that's what cops do when one of them reports another of them for corruption. Though I never really liked the idea of Kersh as part of the conspiracy; I always preferred him as just a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat.)

I grant there are significant challenges to following up last season's finale and explaining why Scully's still there (but probably not for much longer) but Mulder is gone, but Carter isn't up to handling them. This is one of those scripts where characters point out, in dialogue, that none of what's happening makes any sense, and somehow Carter got this far without anyone managing to convince him that that's a thing that shouldn't be happening.

Every scene Scully's in she's waffling between whether she still wants to be part of the X-Files or not; I understand that they need to give her an off-ramp while still including her as much as Anderson will let them, but much like Mulder in season 7 she already had an off-ramp and they should have just taken it instead of trying to drag it out out of the mistaken notion that the show wouldn't circle the drain quite so fast if they kept including Mulder and Scully as much as they could.

And if they had to showcase Scully's ambivalence, well, there was a competent way they could have done that, and this ain't it. The moral quandary she's in -- trying to protect her baby and trying to figure out whether the best way to do that is to expose the conspiracy or give in to their threats -- is a solid hook, but the execution is just tonal whiplash from telling Doggett to leave her alone in one scene to telling him she changed her mind five minutes later to changing her mind again five minutes later and declaring that it's all just a coincidence and nothing paranormal actually happened like this is season four or something. It's a fucking mess is what it is.

It's not just frustrating because it's bad. It's frustrating because it has so much to work with and bungles it so badly. How can an hour of television that features Lucy Lawless's butt feel like such a huge waste of time?

So far season 9 has lived down to its reputation. When do we get to the Burt Reynolds episode?

[Friday]

I cannot imagine what Friday went through watching this shit in real time.

Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster (season 10, ep 3) is legitimately in the best top ten X-Files episodes of all time, but I have to admit that part of the reason why I love it so much is because it was finally, finally, a return to form after the nonstop slop of post-Mulder X-Files. I'm not saying seasons 8 and 9 are -completely- devoid of value, but yeah, it's mostly just boring, dingy crap and poor writing that had clearly gotten away from Carter.

It left me with a very sour taste in my mouth about the X-Files, similar to how people reacted to Deus Ex HR's ending, or Mass Effect's ending. Or Game of Thrones.

Years later, Season 10 was announced. I was tepid, I knew what the series had become. I watched the first two eps and my reaction was mostly "eh, it's fine I guess" but then Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster comes along and it's like for just a moment, just one hour, the old magic was back and as strong as ever. I remembered why I fell in love with the show in the first place.

Clyde Bruckman and Jose Chung might be better episodes than Were-Monster, but man, seeing the magic come back after all that time was something else.

And of course by magic, I mean Darin Morgan.

[Thad]

Season 9 premier part 2: well, at least they gave Lucy Lawless more to do. Pity so much of it is just monologuing about how they're putting chemicals in the water to corrupt our precious bodily fluids.

I like the part where she karate-chops Adam Baldwin's head off and then his headless body punches through her torso, though.

Kersh's face turn at the end is weird and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, either in the context of his previous behavior or his role in the show. If he's the high-ranking member of the FBI who's in charge of the X-Files and who routinely bawls the heroes out but is secretly on their side and trying to advance the X-Files while also trying not to ruffle too many feathers among the leadership so they don't have an excuse to shut them down, then...the show already has that character. That's Skinner. I just described Skinner. Were they worried Mitch Pileggi was going to leave the show too? Did they think they needed a new Skinner to go with their new Mulder and Scully?

[Mothra]

Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster (season 10, ep 3) is legitimately in the best top ten X-Files episodes of all time

We just reached that ep, and it absolutely killed with this group. Like you said, it was a full return to form that absolutely none of us thought was remotely possible (except I guess me since I've seen it twice before). Pretty much every part of that ep is just two characters having a wonderful exchange. I could watch Mulder and Guy Mann chat about how fucking weird it is to be a human for hours.

[Mothra]

[Mothra]

The season 10 finale was somehow ten times worse than I remember it.

Absolutely nothing about that felt like X-Files.

[Thad]

Ritual murders, demonic possession, psychic visions -- "Daemonicus" is a mediocre episode of Millennium awkwardly shoehorned into an X-File. And in case you missed that, the bad guy uses the phrase "a snake eating its own tail" in dialogue. And in case you missed that, Doggett repeats it at the end of the episode.

(Also, in an unusually pure example of cop-show morality, Doggett shoots a fleeing suspect in the back, then finds out it was the wrong guy, and there is never even a hint of an implication that he bears any moral responsibility whatsoever for killing an innocent man.)

It's still somehow a better X-Files episode and a better Millennium episode than that X-Files episode with the Millennium guy in it.

[Thad]

I kinda liked "4-D", actually. At least, it was a solid premise, even if the ending doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. And you'd think putting Doggett in a hospital bed, paralyzed, for most of the episode wouldn't work, but I thought it did. In part because Robert Patrick is really good at underplayed, minimalist acting -- think of his roles in Terminator 2 and Peacemaker, f'rinstance.

One thing I've noticed in the last couple episodes is a nice attention to detail for the minor characters who are just there to get killed by the bad guy. There's that bit in "Daemonicus" where the guy looks at his wife's Scrabble hand after she leaves the room, and then plays all his letters on a triple word score. That's a lovely little bit of business; he didn't even have to cheat, he already had the game in the bag, he just cheated because he could.

And then in "4-D" you've got the bad guy's mother who's a shrill Jewish mother stereotype, but her favorite beverage is clamato. So she's clearly ethnically Jewish, but doesn't keep kosher. It's a nice little bit of shading for a character who doesn't really have a lot of complexity.

[Thad]

I...actually kind of liked "Lord of the Flies"? Like, it's dumb and bad, but I feel like it's exactly the kind of dumb and bad X-Files needs at this point in its run. I've been saying since the end of season 7 that what the show really needs is to make a clean break and start fresh. And here we are with something that feels straight out of season 1 or 2. Complete with a couple of guest stars who would be big a few years later (Jane Lynch and Aaron Paul) and a douchey guy creeping on Scully.

It's silly, inconsequential nonsense, but I feel like that's exactly what X-Files needs in season 9. It's a breath of fresh air after all the...well, silly inconsequential, self-serious nonsense that's dominated the mythology since about season 4.

[Thad]

I don't know if "Trust No. 1" is the worst episode yet, but the thing in season 9 where there are multiple episodes that tease that maybe Mulder is going to show up but then he doesn't (which you already knew because he's not in the opening credits) may very well be the nadir of the series. How many of these are there? I remember there's at least one more; Scully meets a burn victim and maybe he's Mulder but then it turns out he's Spender.

The whole Super-Soldier storyline is bad too, but I get what they're going for; they're trying to give Doggett his own conspiracy that's his thing, like the alien invaders and the Syndicate were Mulder's thing, so Doggett gets his own thing where it turns out a bunch of his old Marine buddies have superpowers now. And we get guest stars like Lucy Lawless and Terry O'Quinn, and Adam Baldwin before I knew he was an asshole, out of it, so it's not a total loss, but it's not really an improvement over all that alien-human hybrid shit I was already sick of, either.

Speaking of Terry O'Quinn, it's always nice to see him and I kind of love that this is the third character he has played on X-Files (and the fourth in-universe including his regular role on Millennium) and they just don't give a fuck.

It's also positively quaint how this is an episode about the paranoia that government agents are covertly watching you through a camera. Remember when that was something people hadn't just kind of shrugged and resigned themselves to?

Anyway, moving on. "John Doe" has a great Vince Gilligan script and a career-highlight performance from Robert Patrick but is marred somewhat by its use of racist-ass tropes like Mexico being sepia-toned and grainy, and every single Mexican character with a speaking part being a criminal except Reyes and I think there's a lady who tells Doggett it's his turn to use a pay phone.

Props for casting Zitto Kazann as Mexican William B Davis, though. I love that there's a Cigar-Smoking Man down south who has pretty much the same demeanor and mannerisms.

So! 7 episodes in and season 9 isn't quite as dire as I'd feared. Yet. The mythology episodes have been pretty bad, but the MotW have ranged from mediocrity to enjoyable trash to mostly great but kind of racist. I will see if it is downhill from here.

[Mothra]

Agree that John Doe was a standout ep that was marred by the ridiculous yellow-filter bullshit. Pretty good story though.

I'm only now realizing the the Super Soldier plotline was not a continuation of an earlier Mulder-era X-Files episode. It just felt so poorly planned I assumed it had to be an older, iffy story stretched far past the breaking point.

[Thad]

It kinda is in that it dovetails with Scully's baby so it's a continuation of all that stuff about her getting abducted by aliens and they take her eggs but then it turns out later maybe it wasn't really aliens at all it was just the government faking alien abductions and now there are super-babies that may or may not be alien/human hybrids and the super-soldiers have the implants in the backs of their necks just like Scully and the other abductees did.

I think. I'm gonna be honest I've taken some very long breaks in this X-Files watch-through and even if I hadn't it's really hard for me to care about any of the mythology stuff past the first movie or so. I hear the phrase "alien DNA" and my brain kind of rejects whatever happens for the next ten minutes.

[Mothra]

Hard agree that literally anything having to do with aliens in X-Files causes my ears to fill with a distant, building ringing sound until the scene ends.

[Thad]

I like the early alien stuff fine, aliens in jars and shit, whatever that business was with the train at the end of season 1. I'd say the mythology stuff doesn't really start to wear out its welcome until season 4-5. And even in there you've still got the movie, which is pretty good.

And then of course there's alien stuff, or at least possible-alien stuff, in some of the good MotW episodes; Jose Chung is the biggest example but there are some other good ones I can think of like The Unnatural. (I think I actually classifed Unnatural as a mythology episode in my list because it's got an alien bounty hunter and an Arthur Dales in it, but the categories tend to be a little fuzzy around the edges. Anyway, it's a good one, and Jesse L Martin sings in it.)

But alien DNA and alien-human hybrids? When those phrases appear in a script, nothing good is going to come of it.

I have come to understand why a certain subset of X-Files fandom hates Chris Carter as much as a certain subset of Star Wars fandom hates George Lucas. Even Carter's best episode is rapey and problematic.