X-Files

[Mothra]

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.

True, the movie was great. If they'd used it very sparingly, the alien stuff could've been really good.

I feel like Jose Chung could've been about anything, they just picked aliens. Incredible ep, but, not really due to it involving aliens at all.

It's also strange that the black oil aliens were much more weird and interesting, and used far more sparingly.

[Thad]

I got that Reyes is Lady Frank Black from the jump, but it's really a shame that all they can think to do with that is rehash Millennium season 1.

Season 1 was the boring one, y'all!

[Thad]

"Provenance" solves the mystery of whether I can identify Neal McDonough from his eyes alone, with the rest of his face covered by a motorcycle helmet.

That dude has some really striking blue eyes.

[Thad]

There are episodes of X-Files that are merely bad, and there are episodes that are morally offensive.

"Audrey Pauley" is an episode about how the world's most Catholic writer's room has some opinions about Terri Schiavo.

I'm not sure I've ever been this angry at an episode of X-Files, and that's including the "9/11 was an inside job and vaccines are a government plot, now let's check in with a Muslim terrorist" episodes in season 10.

[Thad]

the world's most Catholic writer's room

Like FR does X-Files have any protestants who aren't snake handlers or faith healers or something

[Thad]

There are episodes of X-Files that are merely bad, and there are episodes that are morally offensive.

Holy fucking shit they followed up the episode about how you shouldn't take braindead patients off life support with an episode about how you shouldn't let convicted killers out of prison even if they're exonerated by DNA evidence and were framed by the cops.

Like, I'm not nearly as angry about "Underneath" as I am about "Audrey Pauley", but I am completely baffled by it. What the fuck, y'all? What the fuck?

...anyway. Next up: we finally get to the Burt Reynolds episode. I hope it will prove to be a palate cleanser, but I also note that the writer credit is Chris Carter, so who the fuck knows.

[Thad]

There are episodes of X-Files that are merely bad, and there are episodes that are morally offensive.

And y'know, I've been focusing on the "morally offensive" part, but I don't want to ignore that they're also bad.

Nothing that happens in "Underneath" makes any sense. It opens with a flashback to Doggett and his old partner finding a guy at the scene of a triple-murder with blood spattered on his appointment book, and the entire episode revolves around the premise that this is not sufficient evidence to convict him. It's one plot contrivance after another, and that's before they explain the monster as "what if Catholic guilt created a split personality but, like, also he turns into a completely different person?"

"Audrey Pauley" is a mashup of two stories that were then in the news, Terri Schiavo and Dr. Death. It's the second Dr. Death episode in a year (Lone Gunmen did one, and no, "nobody watched Lone Gunmen" is no excuse). It's got a few bright spots -- a guest appearance by Stan Shaw, another of Robert Patrick's best performances -- but the morality is terrible, the plot's a retread, and it's one of those "people with cognitive impairments are magic" episodes.

[Thad]

...anyway. Next up: we finally get to the Burt Reynolds episode. I hope it will prove to be a palate cleanser, but I also note that the writer credit is Chris Carter, so who the fuck knows.

God I wanted to like this one! And I did, every moment Burt Reynolds was onscreen. And also the big dance numbers. You know what? I'll say something nice about Chris Carter: he is a good director. In particular he is good at big, silly, memorable sequences that break the formula of the show. Like the acid trip scene in "Babylon", and everything about "The Post-Modern Prometheus".

The problem is that he also wrote the script.

"Improbable" is an episode where a murder is committed in a casino and the word "cameras" is never uttered, and where Scully forgets how elevators work.

But mostly it is an episode about numerology, where Reyes drones endlessly about the subject and is treated as a crank.

Here's the thing: "serial killers sometimes choose their victims based on numerology" is not actually a controversial statement. You can simultaneously believe that numerology is bullshit and accept that there have been serial killers who believed in it and used it as a basis for their murders. There's not actually any contradiction there! This is, perhaps, the single most uncontroversial premise for an X-Files episode, but they treat it as if it's exactly as looney as aliens or vampires or Flukeman.

There is a nice moment where one of the suits drily recites the killer's criminal profile -- the subtext being that law enforcement relies on all kinds of nonsense that isn't any more scientific than numerology is -- but it's over all too quickly, so we can go back to Chris Carter Purple Prose on an extremely boring topic. Like, Robert Anton Wilson could pull this shit off, but it's because he was having so much fun with it; Carter is just so earnest about it.

But hey, Burt Reynolds is in it, as a character I'm going to call Clyde Bruckman With More Job Satisfaction, and there are some good dance numbers. It's not a total loss. It's just too bad those are wasted on an otherwise boring, frustrating, and nonsensical episode.

[Thad]

i could have sworn i just watched an episode that started out by implying a little boy was being abused by his father but then the plot twist was that he just had an overactive imagination, and then doggett saved the day by literally lighting gas

but that can't possibly be right there's no way a tv episode with that premise could go through all the steps from conception to broadcast without somebody at some point in the process saying "uhhhhh are we sure about this" and suggesting maybe it could use a rewrite or all the rewrites

[Mothra]

hahahaha

The hits keep coming!!

[Thad]

The initial run of episodes in season 9 was...well, I won't say good, but at least typical, ranging from "bad, but not unusually bad" to "mostly-great but pretty racist".

That led me to think "uh-oh, the really bad stuff must be later in the season."

I was not wrong!

And actually "Scary Monsters" even had its moments, and could have worked if, y'know, they'd managed to spot its deeply problematic subtext, and maybe had the returning Leyla Harrison stop short of telling everybody in dialogue that no you guys actually Doggett and Reyes really are just as good as Mulder and Scully.

[Thad]

"Jump the Shark" is an above-average episode of The Lone Gunmen and a satisfying conclusion to their story.

This may not seem like high praise, but a satisfying conclusion to an ongoing story on X-Files is a goddamn miracle, and the last time they did a backdoor finale to a cancelled series it suh-huuuuuuucked.

The retcon that at some point after "Dreamland" and before "All About Yves" Morris Fletcher quit the MIB and became a freelancer doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense (in fact I'm pretty sure when I watched this episode in 2002 I thought Michael McKean was playing an entirely different character than the one he'd played back in season 6), but it's a quick shortcut to dispense in a couple sentences with TLG's only real ongoing mystery, "Who is Yves really and what is her deal, anyway?"

Good use of Jimmy, too! This one mostly avoids using him for comic relief and instead plays him straight, as the heart of the team, the guy who may not be as smart as TLG but has the emotional intelligence they lack. I like to think he and Yves are still out there somewhere, fighting the good fight. (Since I'm feeling generous, Kimmy can come too, if he can stop being such an insufferable little shitweasel.)

IDW did a licensed X-Files comic some years ago (before the TV revival) and brought them back; it gave Frohike a throwaway line saying they'd faked their deaths and that's all the explanation we got. Then they teamed up with various other characters IDW had the license to at the time, including Transformers, Ghostbusters, and TMNT, and if you want to read those comics you should probably just go ahead and pirate them, because the odds of a crossover like that ever getting reprinted are about the same as Conan and Red Sonja Meet Rom and the Spaceknights, a comic I just made up.

As for TV, I know Langly, at least, shows up in season 11, because his face is an episode thumbnail, but I still haven't seen any of season 11 so I don't know what they do with him.

But this is it, isn't it? As its title implies, "Jump the Shark" is a turning point. Word's come down; this is the beginning of the end. The last scene in this episode is a funeral, with a guy folding up the empty chairs. That's the rest of season 9.

[Thad]

(I think) two episodes of season 9 I saw during the original run

Three. Jump the Shark, William, Release. Clearly I was gearing up to catch the end of the series but I never did see Sunshine Days or The Truth. I even taped the finale; I've probably got the damn VHS somewhere in my house, but I never actually got around to watching it.

They ran May 12 and 19, 2002; my recollection is that I was still in the dorms and hadn't come home for the summer, so I was probably busy with finals and getting ready to wrap up the schoolyear. Though I could be misremembering and I may have been back in Tempe when I set the VCR.

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.

Now, when I say "maybe the nadir of the series" I'm referring specifically to the pointless need to jerk the audience around and tease that Mulder is coming and then he doesn't. It's the endpoint of the "Where's Mulder?" problem that's plagued seasons 8 and 9 and prevented the show from ever really moving forward in any significant way.

As for "William" itself, it's not egregiously bad by the standards of this season; it's just boring as shit. It takes William off the board, making official what we already knew: the "Scully's baby" arc was the most pointless digression in the entire series, which is really saying something.

(Also, it was directed by David Duchovny. So not only is it an episode where they spend the whole thing teasing that maybe Mulder is in it and then he never shows up, but you can't chalk it up to Duchovny being unavailable because he's literally right there in the room; there's no reason he can't be in the episode. Like, at least appear in a cameo at the end to set up the finale!)

At any rate. It's a regular-bad episode, which is a change of pace after Audrey Pauley, Underneath, and Scary Monsters, which are all bad due to their horrifying subtext. On the one hand, at least stuff happens in those episodes; on the other, Audrey Pauley actually made me angry, and I'm probably better off being bored than angry.

Okay, three to go. Four if you count the double-length finale as two episodes.

[Mothra]

It is brutal. I'm so glad this show got shitcanned back then, it was a mercy.

[Thad]

Yeah, like, even at this stage (well, not this stage because this is the "we know the show is cancelled and we're wrapping things up" period, but, like, even as late as "Scary Monsters") I'm still thinking of ways they could have righted the ship, but...it really would have required a different they. I don't know how much of season 8 and 9's problems are down to Carter and Maeda and the writer's room and how much are edicts from Fox, but regardless, the problem was the people making the decisions.

And then there are the elements out of their control. Carter blamed 9/11 for the show's cancellation, and I really don't think it's the main reason the show cancelled -- it got cancelled because of low ratings, and that downward trend started well before 9/11 -- but I'm sure it played a part. We've discussed how season 10 shows that the whole government-conspiracy angle of X-Files is a poor fit for the present day, and they certainly would have had challenges if they'd continued into fall 2002. (On the plus side, none of that "9/11 was an inside job" shit would ever have made it to air.) I think there's a reasonable argument to make that no matter how good a hypothetical 2002 season 10 was, Fox would never have been comfortable with a show that critical of the government at that point in time.

Plus, we're talking about Fox in 2002 here.



I don't think any other network at any other time has ever been that infamous for canceling shows. Though Netflix is working on it.

I think there's a reasonably high likelihood that even if season 9 had been good, the show still would have gotten cancelled. If Lucy Lawless's butt didn't help the ratings, I don't see how better scripts would have.

I still wish they'd handled Mulder's departure more competently -- let "Closure" be the end of his arc, he leaves, shows up in an occasional episode after that but no need for this thing where whenever Mulder's not onscreen all the other characters are asking "Where's Mulder?" -- but there's no guarantee that would have saved the show from cancellation either. It could be that the best possible outcome would have been a better season 9 followed by the show getting cancelled anyway.

Course, we'll never know.

[Thad]

Good use of Jimmy, too! This one mostly avoids using him for comic relief and instead plays him straight, as the heart of the team, the guy who may not be as smart as TLG but has the emotional intelligence they lack. I like to think he and Yves are still out there somewhere, fighting the good fight. (Since I'm feeling generous, Kimmy can come too, if he can stop being such an insufferable little shitweasel.)

oh my god the lone gunmen's sidekicks are named jimmy and kimmy

[Mothra]

I mean, at the end of the day, they never committed to Big Dogg, the new administrator, or especially Reyes, as their new characters. They were never interested in these people, and they for some reason expected the audience to care when they didn't.

They were certain that they did not have a show without David Duchovny, and this led them to not have a show without David Duchovny.

And then they got David Duchovny back, and the show still sucked, because it already sucked when David Duchovny was in it, in the later seasons.

Weird show, glad I got the full X-Files experience though.

[Thad]

I mean, at the end of the day, they never committed to Big Dogg, the new administrator, or especially Reyes, as their new characters. They were never interested in these people, and they for some reason expected the audience to care when they didn't.

And yet they committed to Dogget enough that it purportedly made Duchovny and Anderson unhappy, and was the reason he didn't come back in season 9 until the end and she spent it as a top-billed third wheel. They committed to the new cast just enough that nobody was happy.

I mentioned before that where season 8 stumbles out the gate is it doesn't take the time to build the Scully/Doggett partnership. It gets one solid episode in, the one with the bat-creature, and then there are a bunch of episodes where it's just Scully or just Doggett or where both of them are relegated to supporting roles in a story that's driven by the guest stars. And those are actually mostly good episodes, but it's too soon; they needed to spend more time foregrounding the leads' relationship before backgrounding it.

The other thing is that the big season premier/midseason finale/sweeps week/season finale arcs suck all the oxygen out of everything else. That episode with Mulder and Doggett on the oil rig and Scully and Skinner investigating back home proves the show could juggle a full cast when it had the breathing room to do it, but you start crowbarring in all that Scully's Baby stuff and bring back Krycek and Kersh and whatever the fuck Adam Baldwin's character is named and there's just no time to develop the shifting central cast's relationships to each other.

[Thad]

The ep that resolves the mystery of Lil' Dogg's abduction and murder was very strange in how unremarkable it was, all the way through. It's like an NCIS episode or something.

That's one of (I think) two episodes of season 9 I saw during the original run; I haven't seen it since but I remember thinking that was actually kind of a nice touch. It's fitting that Doggett's big closure episode doesn't involve any supernatural X-Files shit, it's just a regular, mundane police case.

Sort of still true, but having rewatched it, it sure does skirt the line with the "mental illness is a superpower" trope. It doesn't quite cross the line into a supernatural story, but it's got a guy who has Sherlock Holmes deduction skills because he's schizophrenic.

And you know what?

It's another Millennium episode.

Guy who investigates serial killers, who's able to see connections nobody else can see because the crime scenes "speak" to him, who becomes scarily obsessed with them and then ends up kicked out of the FBI and put in a mental institution? That's Frank Black! Again! In fact, if I were writing Carterverse fan fiction, Stuart Mimms 100% gets scooped up by the Millennium Group sometime after this episode.

I'd misremembered the government coverup subplot. The way I'd remembered it, the guy who abducted Luke turned out to be a senator or somebody else powerful, rather than just some dirtbag. That probably would have felt more X-Filesy, what with the corruption in high places (well, even higher places), but the actual resolution -- Cary Elwes's character, whose name I refuse to learn, had been on the take and covering up the killer's other crimes, so even though he didn't know he was connected to this specific crime, his other coverups resulted in the case falling through the cracks -- is the kind of messy that's ultimately a lot more realistic than a typical X-File.

Plus, it closes Cary Elwes's arc, and even if that arc was ultimately pointless and resolved abruptly at the last minute and god damn were Elwes's talents wasted on this role, I have to give them credit for actually trying to tie up loose ends as the show wraps up.

[Thad]

Ah of course - I looked at the writer of Sunshine Days, and sure enough, Vince Gilligan.

Gilligan does The Brady Bunch. I bet Sherwood Schwartz got a kick out of that.

I've still got the actual finale to, let's say, look forward to, but I have a sneaking suspicion Sunshine Days should have been the finale. It's a perfect note to go out on.

But I'll have more to say about it when I update My Favorite Episodes of The X-Files, where it will be the only season 9 episode to make the list. Unless the finale really surprises me.