Oh look the last ever episode of the X-Files is on!

I prefer MOTW, but a lot of the awesome two-parters were mytharc episodes... Duane Barry/Ascension, Colony/Endgame, Tunguska/Terma, Nisei/731, Tempus Fugit/Max, Dreamland I/II... a good rule of thumb for two-parters is to avoid them if they occur at the beginning or end of a season or after season six.

The alien conspiracy stuff really hits the skids post-movie, because after you have a giant spaceship in Anarctica where the hell are you gonna go from there?

Season 6 onward is such a depressing slog. There are a few bright spots here and there but man oh man did the show fall off hard. We find out what happened to Samantha and it's the dumbest most anticlimactic thing imaginable (she was returned by the aliens and lived with the Smoking Man and then she died/was turned into a spirit or something).

And then Mulder leaves (sort of) and dies and Robert Patrick/Annabeth Gish come in and then the wisecracking puppet dragon and cousin Oliver and they all go to Disneyland and yeah

Yeah, the best of seasons six and seven could have made a strong season six, and everything from eight and nine should be erased from the timeline... the show being so established is a mortal blow to good mytharc stories but opens up the MOTW episodes to all kinds of hilarious and interesting variations on the theme.

But prior to that, it's like F. Hazel says, there are so many great mythology episode two-parters. The Anasazi/Paperclip/The Blessing Way 3-parter is just fucking EPIC

yeah I loved a lot of the mytharc episodes from the early seasons when they were first aired, though i tend to go back to the motw episodes now if im bored and want to watch some old x files on Netflix

i was the perfect age for the whole conspiracy theory stuff though i feel, was probably 9 or 10 when the first season was aired on british tv and used to watch the show religiously until seasons 5 or 6. i never thought at the time that x files was remotely silly as i probably would now if i was to go back and rewatch, i was enthralled, thought it was the best tv ever.

"she was returned by the aliens and lived with the Smoking Man and then she died/was turned into a spirit or something"

i missed this completely

Piper Maru was the shit, yo

Though I agree that the show should have been put to rest after S7, I honestly though S8 had some really good episodes. Maybe not quite enough to justify the show's continued existence at that point, but some good stories which brought back some horror & mystery after S6 and S7 over-dosed on the light-hearted comedy somewhat. And Robert Patrick was really good, I thought.

The show was really resonant and powerful when it was using UFOs, themselves a mythological outgrowth of the post-WWII era, as a lens to examine the USA's real-life legacy of complicity with former Axis-power scientists during the Cold War. The idea that it's not just a cover up but a kind of collusion with evil that taints the very foundations of order and power in our country. That shit is still relevant.

xp the one where Doggett is being stalked in his dreams was really good.

omg i forgot about anasazi/blessing way/paperclip

awesome

I think what latebloomer is talking about is why this show outshines Star Trek or the Twilight Zone for me... it's less universal maybe, but it explores a lot of themes and myths running through American History (especially post-WWII history and myth) in ways that are deeper and (for me) far more interesting. America coming to terms with being afraid of itself.

anasazi and paper clip are rad but the vision quest parts of blessing way are pretty cringeworthy

Is the Blessing Way the one with Mulder cracking jokes inside a Native American tent after his Deathy Hallows interlude?

just watched monster of the week. fuckin excellent monster of the weak, the rhythm was so great

Havent seen ep 3 yet but if Rhys Darby is in it, I'm sold, must hassle the lad to download it stat.

Just watched this week's ep last night. It seemed possible for a little while that it was going to wobble and go off the rails completely but it was ultimately just lovely. Darby's jaunty last leap as he ran off into the woods had me in stitches.

it would be cool if X-files had never gone off the air and kept swapping out lead actors to the point where it was now a teen show about Willy Mulder being trained to use his alien powers by his sinister aunt Samantha

X-Files: TNG, would watch

Dagoo!

Daggoo!

I loved this episode. I love Rhys Darby so that helped but it was interesting a lot of my xfiles fan friends hated it. The first 2 eps had me annoyed at the suspension of disbelief but then I was like "hang on, its the xfiles duh".

I watched the first two after the D. Morgan ep, confirmed my lack of interest in seeing them in the first place. Carter one was just stunningly ill-judged for taking up 1/3 of these handful of episodes 14 years after anyone was last trying to follow / care about the alien conspiracy stuff, and then overturning everything those ppl HAD followed, then dropping this volte face for a whole month. Also not making any actual plot sense.

(Wong one was fine tbh, ancient threads of continuity I never saw in the first place being picked up, but in service of the characters' long distance from each other rather than fanwank.)

*bcz they were on telly b2b on a night I was home

I can understand why this last episode might've turned off casual fans who only remember the show as spooky and brooding and monster-y and alien-y. Episodes like this might not have been the norm back in the day but they were very much a part of the show whether some people remember that or not.

lol at Rhys grabbing Mulder's gun and tossing it away

batcrap crazy!!

Darren Morgan was at that live X-Files marathon that Kumail Nanjiana hosted and after they played "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" he said, "Watching even episodes I wrote all these years later I catch things I missed the first time. Did they really say that Scully is immortal?"

Darin, Nanjiani, and he presumably wouldn't have included a joke about Scully's immortality in the callback-to-his-own-work-heavy new ep if he didn't already know he'd initiated it with a joke in his old work.

Or he'd written the script for this new one where she jokes about being immortal and jokes about not remembering it, knowing the audience was going to know he was messing with them

I saw Tim Armstrong in the credits and figured it couldn't possibly be that Tim Armstrong but whaddayaknow.

Or he'd written the script for this new one where she jokes about being immortal and jokes about not remembering it, knowing the audience was going to know he was messing with them

this is what I'm saying - he'd written, directed, and edited the episode months before the Cinefamily event.

I guess the popularity of this shows stems from ancient wonder about beings from space with a love story thrown in.

But I don't buy it. Maybe not enough detail to the mythology.

that episode was fun, but what a mess!

ad xpost yeah it was obviously a joke what the fuck dude

Let me give you some more names to autocorrect: Scrully, Moulder, the Cankerman

Sigur Ros Smirking Man

Eugene Victor Toonces

did anyone like this last one? it sounds like no; I thought it was ok but what happened to the resolution of the trashman story? It was almost like a scene got cut. Ok so he goes and kills the last person; why did Lint from Rancid get away, why did it have a happy face, blah blah....just just dropped the main story for the scene on the beach.

even in the good episode --

"mulder, the internet is not good for you"

c'mon! mulder would have been online in fucking 1994!

duchovny is kinda way too big in the shoulder-to-elbow region to convince as washed-up dropout fox mulder

why did it have a happy face

The angry vibes inspiring his sculptures were coming to life in the form of the bandage man so he changed it to a happy face!

hope a bouncing happy face is committing serial murders in a season 11 ep

The trashman character was dumb as hell and Tim Armstrong looks and sounds like hell.

Other than that the episode was sort of okish. The monster was pretty scary.

A friend emailed me about this before I saw it and said it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. I'm stumped as to why - I thought it was ok! Agree on the sudden ending though.

And while the stuff with Scullys mum was moving, I wish she'd stop banging on about her kid if there's nothing going to be done about it.

Trash gollum was great. Pulling people completely apart with his bare hands! Nice and gory.

it was good but it just ended like...I don't know.

I'm assuming william will come into play in the final episode....otherwise this is going to seem like one long tease (I realize the irony of saying that about x-files). kind of relieved we only had one myth episode so far with one brief vision of smoking man.

it will probably turn out that William will be living in a trailer with Joel McHale controlling drones with his mind