X-Files

[Grath]

I'm sure that's the main thing, yeah; they were worried fans would quit watching once he left the cast. (I know I never watched the last season of Scrubs, because "My Finale" was a satisfying ending.)

What are you talking about? My Finale was the very last episode of Scrubs, just like how Game of Thrones ended on a weird cliffhanger at the end of season 6, and Heroes only had one season, and...

[Thad]

god dammit x-files

It's not enough to do an episode where Robert Patrick investigates a man made of smart metal who is super-strong, indestructible, and going around terminating people, on top of that you're going to have him say "That only happens in movies" as actual dialogue?

[Thad]

Halfway through season 8 and I think the biggest problem is that they back-burner Doggett and Scully's partnership.

The first two episodes introduce Doggett, and then the third is a quite-good monster-of-the-week that sets up what their dynamic is going to be, with Doggett taking over as the skeptic and Scully trying to think more like Mulder. And then we get a series of mostly good-to-great episodes that don't include that dynamic (and also Badlaa, which is the opposite, an otherwise terrible episode that does a pretty good job on Scully and Doggett).

Duchovny and Anderson both complained that season 8 became The John Doggett Show (and said that's why she ended up leaving the main cast and he didn't come back as often as he'd intended), and there is some of that going on; there are more Doggett-without-Scully episodes than Scully-without-Doggett ones. But there are also episodes that relegate both of them to minor supporting roles, and while those episodes are actually quite good they're exactly what the series doesn't need right after that kind of huge shakeup. So you end up with --

S08E04 - Roadrunners - Scully, almost no Doggett. Not one of the better episodes; has a cool worm-thing at the end

S08E05 - Invocation - One of the better episodes for highlighting friction between Scully and Doggett; introduces Doggett's Tragic Backstory without resorting to having him monologue about it and spell everything out; still ends up being an episode where Doggett is more important than Scully

S08E06 - Redrum - Focuses on a one-off character, with Scully and Doggett in supporting roles; Scully's barely in it, Doggett has a minor role but his is bigger than hers

S08E07 - Via Negativa - Doggett/Skinner episode; it's a good teamup but another one Scully's barely in

S08E08 - Surekill - Another one that focuses on its one-off cast and relegates both leads to supporting roles

S08E09 - Salvage - Pretty good; mostly uses Scully and Doggett effectively, but, as noted, is fucking distracting in how much time it spends calling attention to its too-cute "the guy from Terminator 2 fights a guy who's like a Terminator" premise

S08E10 - Badlaa - The best exploration of the Scully/Doggett dynamic since episode 3; unfortunately it is also racist, ableist dogshit (and ends with the leads feebly acknowledging that the plot makes no sense)

S08E11 - The Gift - Another Doggett/Skinner episode (with Mulder appearing but not sharing any scenes with the principal cast); Scully's not in this one at all.

And, again, with the exception of Badlaa these episodes are all good-to-great! It's just that they're not what the show needs right now, which is to foreground the relationship between its main characters. Scully leaving the show already feels inevitable at this point; they have a good hook for her and what her role is in a post-Mulder era, but they aren't using her effectively (or, in some episodes, at all), and as much as I like Doggett, this show is supposed to have two leads, and as much as I like Skinner, he isn't Scully.

[Mothra]

We did not survive season 9. We just can't make it through this.

Enthusiasm is still very high for beloved character Agent John "Big Dogg" Doggett, but the show continues to shoehorn in Mulder more and more, and Scully's storyline has completely fallen apart. Her going through the pregnancy thing absolutely torpedoed this show. It was a story arc they spent so, so much fucking time on, and it was completely contradictory to her character, and I just cannot imagine what they were thinking if anyone on creative still had any measure of control here.

We discuss powering through every now and then, but, I dunno. This might be it.

At the least, we'll be spared what we expect to be the unceremonious killing-off of Big Dogg.

[Friday]

I dunno if you've seen season 10 yet, Mothra, but trust me it's worth it for s10e3 if you can power through the rest of s9.

I have to confess I've never seen the Doggett era of X-files. I was too devastated that Mulder left.

[Mongrel]

Hell, I didn't even KNOW there was a tenth season.

(we weren't a big X-Files house, and "X-Files without Mulder" was looked on as just beating a dead horse for dead horse juice)

[Thad]

At the least, we'll be spared what we expect to be the unceremonious killing-off of Big Dogg.

Nah. If there's one thing X-Files would never do, it's give one of its leads a definitive ending.

(Though I don't think he ever shows up again after season 9 anyway. I guess he could be in season 11 somewhere; I haven't seen it. But he's not in I Want to Believe or season 10.)

I dunno if you've seen season 10 yet, Mothra, but trust me it's worth it for s10e3 if you can power through the rest of s9.

Or you can always just jump straight to that one and not worry about the rest of season 9 or 10. It's a standalone monster-of-the-week episode and you don't need any of the rest of that bullshit to understand it.

Darin Morgan has one more in season 11 (The Mandela Effect) which I hear is also great, but again, I haven't seen any of season 11.

Me, I am determined to make it through the whole series. Eventually. Though I'm on the fence about whether I'll bother re-watching any of season 10 aside from Were-Monster. I remember the rest of the episodes, while not very good, at least had good moments. Like the super-racist one with the Muslim terrorist at least had a good acid trip scene.

I did catch a few episodes of season 9 during the original run, when they were hyping up the end of the series. I definitely caught Jump the Shark and Release; I remember both of them being pretty good.

I know I set the VCR for the finale but then never got around to actually watching it.

[Friday]

To clarify what Thad and I are talking about, while I would not put s10e3 (Were-Monster) on the same tier as Jose Chung or Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, it does not trail far behind.

[Thad]

It's definitely better than War of the Coprophages.

[Thad]

...and I see from looking back to earlier in the thread that Mothra has already seen season 10, so we can stop telling him he needs to watch Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster.

And I've made it to the end-of-sweeps act break, "This Is Not Happening", and the introduction of Monica Reyes. I haven't seen many episodes with her in them! I'm aware that she is not what you would call a fan favorite, and I can see why; I want to like her, and she has a few good moments in her first appearance, but it feels like Annabeth Gish doesn't have the chops that Gillian Anderson and Robert Patrick do to make a meal of bad dialogue, or David Duchovny's gift for understatement. (Though even Anderson couldn't pull off the final line of the episode: "This is not happening! Noooooooo!")

Plus, the very first thing we see Reyes do is exhale cigarette smoke, so I guess the thing where she comes back as CSM's lackey in season 10 wasn't really as far out of left field as it seemed at the time.

Anyway! Time to switch from X-Files to Lone Gunmen for a little bit, since I'm trying to watch these in order and the first 6 episodes of Lone Gunmen aired in-between "This Is Not Happening" and "Deadalive". I remember watching the pilot and not being terribly impressed by it, but there's probably some good stuff in there somewhere.

[Thad]

I do kinda like that Reyes introduces herself as an expert on Satanic abuse and then adds something like "I should say alleged Satanic abuse. I've yet to encounter a single case that was real."

Even in the X-Files universe, the Satanic Panic was total BS.

[Mothra]

I did see s10e03 back when it first aired, it's a fantastic ep. I think I have a post about it much earlier in this thread.

We slogged through a bit more of season 9 the other night. It is just absolutely excruciating.

My favorite shot right now was Agent Scully standing directly next to Agent Scully 2 aka "Reyes" in multiple scenes, so that it's impossible for the viewer to not see that Reyes is clearly supposed to be a straight-up CSI-ass replacement for Scully. The fact that the show cannot just cut the cord and let the two new main characters take the wheel has led to two sets of main characters, who stand next to each other throughout multiple scenes, and it's the stupidest goddamn thing.

[Thad]

Agent Scully 2 aka "Reyes"

She's at least Agent Scully 3, given how clearly Spender and Fowley were set up as replacement Mulder and Scully back in seasons 5-6.

(I'd just like to remind everyone that this show introduced a character named Diana Fowley as a potential replacement for Dana Scully. That is a thing that happened.)

Arguably Scully 4, since Krycek was originally introduced as Mulder's new partner during Gillian Anderson's pregnancy/Scully's alien abduction.

[Thad]

The other thing is that, while introducing Reyes and giving her some history with Doggett isn't a bad idea, their interaction in her first appearance consists entirely of her delivering stilted, heavyhanded exposition about his son.

Which they'd actually done a really good job not overemphasizing up to this point! They'd done a good job of introducing Doggett's backstory organically and not having people infodump about it like Mulder talking about his sister's abduction in the first episode. But "This Is Not Happening" is an episode that won't do subtlety.

Moving on: I watched the first episode of Lone Gunmen, and okay before I get to anything else I'm going to have to address the elephant in the room, which is holy shit this episode is about a government plot to crash a jet into the World Trade Center to provoke multiple wars and benefit the arms industry. It aired 6 months before 9/11.

I guess I understand X-Files season 10 going all-in on the "9/11 was an inside job" conspiracy theory a little better now. Like, if you completely ignore factors like good taste and social responsibility and focus solely on narrative to the exclusion of all else...real life blundered right into a pre-existing X-Files-universe plot point. In the context of this episode, where the government already attempted to crash a plane into the WTC, of course when that happened in real life you'd be tempted to incorporate that into the storyline. If you had Chris Carter's total lack of ability to distinguish between what is or is not appropriate to include in a script.

Speaking of Carter, he is one of four credited writers on the Lone Gunmen pilot, and boy howdy does it ever feel like a script written by four different people. It's really all over the place in terms of both tone and quality. Sometimes it's brisk and tense and exciting, other times it features dialogue like "A hacker of your calibre ought to be floating in a Silicon Valley hot tub, sipping champers and counting his IPO casho." And there's an important plot point involving multiple characters not noticing a carpet has recently been shampooed until they slip on it, and I guess at least that's consistent with that episode where Tooms hides in a closet and no one notices him even though he just crawled up through the sewer: smell does not exist in this universe.

In conclusion: pilots are hard. This one was a mess! But it's got potential and hopefully it'll get better.

[Mothra]

Okay I remember there being a very short-lived fifth Scully, as in she was in one episode, where she was opposite I think Mulder, and her main thing was that she was a huge X-Files fangirl. We all really liked her, and she never again appeared on the show.

Do you guys have any idea who this character was? I can't find mention of her on the wiki, and I do not know her name.

[Friday]

I don't know who you mean Mothra, but I can say for a fact that the best alter Scully was named Bambi.

[Mothra]

God, I loved Bambi.

Okay this is going to drive me insane. She was an FBI agent, assigned to work with either Mulder or Big Dogg in a single episode, post season 6. She had memorized every X-Files case and geeked out about it. I feel like she had either blonde or red/orange hair.

[Mothra]

FOUND HER: Leyla Harrison

[Thad]

They also had that replacement Mulder and Scully in season 10. Replacement Mulder was Arrow's cousin and Replacement Scully was the leading lady from Psycho Beach Party.

(There was a plot point involving government implants from the smallpox vaccine -- which, TBF, was from the original series, but hey Chris Carter maybe that's one you didn't need to bring back in 2016 -- and, y'know, it kinda seems like maybe by the point makeup had to put a fake smallpox scar on her because she is obviously too young to have been vaccinated for smallpox someone on the production team should have realized they had some problems with either their script or their casting choices.)

[Mothra]

I legit cannot wait until we hit ep 1 of season 10, so I can see everyone's reaction to Mulder's 9/11 Was An Inside Job theory.