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

but you do get one of the best OTT death sequences ever (Cancer Man) and all the old characters make appearances (dead or alive) - Gibson Praise totally roXors. shame many aspects were left completely unresolved (what happened to the bounty hunter aliens? and those crafty Greys? not a sniff) but overall a fitting climax all things considered.

http://36.media.tumblr.com/178a9425ef086c44182e59dab823beb1/tumblr_nftu1mSCyx1r77qhao1_1280.png

http://comicbook.com/2015/03/21/the-x-files-revival-closer-than-ever/

what color will scully's hair be

The first of six last-ever episodes aired last night! Or maybe not, if the ratings are good.

I watched it, it was fun but bad in most of the ways classic Chris Carter-penned mytharc episodes were bad (when they were bad... he wrote some awesome ones too). Consensus of reviewers who got to watch the first three episodes are that episodes two and three are significantly stronger. Episode two airs tonight, then we get one a week through February.

Anyone else tune in?

I did. Agree that the debut was dull, but I'm committed to watching the whole thing.

Not sure it would continue past six, though. Duchovny might be on board, but I think Anderson is enjoying doing too many other things to be tied down to a role she started playing 20 years ago.

i thought this was really bad! yet i enjoyed it. writing was pretty poor, there was quite a lot of mulder going on about "we've been lied to all these years" to scully without bothering to explain what he was talking about. the acting was poor, duchovny seems like he just woke up or something - really slow-paced and labored delivery.

but im going to keep watching for sure.

Reviews were pretty dire.

Joel McHale always seems to look younger than he actually is, but it's like he had 20 years cgi'ed off of him for this.

Super dumb. Trying to do too much in a single episode. They should have kept it simple. Also, the show already did the "everything we've discovered about aliens and the gov't was a lie!" thing back in season 5. It's such a cheap move.

Anyway I did enjoy watching it and it was great seeing everyone back and I loved how much Mulder looked like complete garbage.

Mulder in 2016 is problematic, especially since he doesn't seem to be working for the FBI anymore. He is now an old unemployed white dude ranting about government conspiracies, which these days means racist right-wing lunatic. Teaming up with mirror-world Glenn Beck helps this image not at all. Writers should have taken steps to avoid this, although I'm not sure what that would be.

I did think it was funny they took a pretty nice swipe at O'Reilly on a Fox show.

weird that they even bother with the mytharc/continuity stuff - isn't it abundantly clear by now that the best stuff about this show was always the "monster of the week" episodes? They should've just stuck with those.

Up until the first movie, a lot of the mytharc episodes were really good! Certainly essential to the show, even if the monster episodes are a lot more pleasurable to re-watch (and at their best, manage to hit all of the show's major themes with requiring a ton of continuity).

without requiring that is

I was fairly invested in the mytharc until it became apparently they didn't have any idea what to do with it.

tbh, I don't even remember what happened in either of the movies now except that one of them had to do with bees.

I was also invested in the mytharc during the shows earlier years. although I found the monster of the week episodes more entertaining I was excited when it became apparent that an episode was going to advance the overarching plot. then of course the whole damn thing, but especially the mytharch, came off the rails and I ended up not even watching the show.

the contrast between schlubby mulder in his army jacket and botoxed, besuited scully was pretty funny

I really enjoyed the first movie despite the plot being incredibly silly

This first episode felt like Carter was trying to write to every one of the 5,167 X-Files-related notes he'd jotted down over the past 15 years. A little rushed, a little OTT. It was all right. I'm down with more.

FWIW, we're supposed to get a mixture of mythology and monster of the week episodes with this revival.

I'm not sure there's anything you can do about it... the thrill of uncovering a conspiracy kind of relies on most of the conspiracy still being uncovered. After 80-100 episodes, there just won't be any dark spots left on the map, and the exercise ceases to be exploration and becomes... keeping an org chart up-to-date.

Seasons 1-5 and the first movie are classic. The show became less classic after the movie, for sure, to the extent that I went from watching religiously to maybe only seeing 4 or 5 episodes from the last three seasons. I didn't feel a burning need to catch up prior to the revival but I would kinda like to try watching through the original series again.

I just checked and saw that we're getting a Darin Morgan episode!

oh did anyone else notice the fairly poor cgi trying to make it look like they were in dc?

The show really lost something when they moved production from Vanvouver to Los Angeles.

I literally can't remember a single thing about the mytharc conspiracy, it all got so convoluted - there was the smoking guy, and aliens abducted Mulder's sister, and then Scully had an alien baby? or something?

The Darin Morgan episode is supposed to be on par with his classic episodes, if the journos who got preview copies are to be believed.

E2 was quite an improvement.

feels like this whole thing is a reboot so far, with most of the old episodes with alien mythology swept under the rug. episode two was decent, although apparently the alien hybrid children are the x-men

Generally enjoyed the minseries, but the Carter episodes had a lot of problems. He was always hit or miss as a writer (and in the latter half of the original series' run, more miss than hit) but it's a pity the guy who wrote "Deep Throat", "Paper Clip" and (Millennium episode) "Lamentation" seems to have forgotten how to write an episode of television altogether.

The two new agents seem to be Carter's attempt to create a new long-term continuity (or the potential for one); I don't think he's quite given up the idea of "franchising" his one and only commercial hit.

It was almost as though the show did everything possible to sabotage itself-- from that Joel McHale character who simultaneously supposed to be ridiculous and right about everything, to Scully making crazy leaps of logic, to having Mulder be depressed, drugged or sick all the time, to relying on continuity nobody remembers or cares about, to those new agents out of some CW show.

Yeah the Alex Jones-esque character rang so false for me. Maybe the concept of truthers and shit has taken on a tarnish rather than just being a flight of fancy, since the Xfiles was around initially? I dunno.

I couldnt at all buy Scully believing him tho. WTF.

My question from having missed basically everything after season 5 to now - didn't this use to be more equivocal? Wasn't that largely the thing, where something was going on but maybe Mulder was right and maybe Scully was right and even when it was something weird, there was always the possibility kept alive that the government was just fucking with them? But by the second episode of this season, there's kids throwing people around with telekinesis - did this happen in the later series of have they just gone for broke with this one?

There was definitely another episode with kids throwing people around with telekinesis. They kind of gave up on the attempts at balance later on.

My hot take is that these last 6 episodes are mostly farce and camp, and I appreciate them in that light. I think some people if not everyone involved in making them are just fucking with us. It all seems too knowing to be just a simple failure. I mean, the new agent is named Einstein? Come on, that's ridiculous. Having a lark was all that was left to do after Chris Carter ran the show into the ground the first time... Even if Carter really was honest in his intentions about the episodes he wrote, Duchovny is supposedly a Beckett scholar IRL. He must appreciate the unreality and absurdness of the writing, right? He seemed to be playing those aspects up in his performance. Anyway, he and Gillian Anderson grew a lot as actors since the original series, and that seeing them acting together again was my favorite part of the whole thing.

tl;dr: I want to believe they were just dicking around and having fun

yeah this felt a lot closer to the actual hodgepodge clusterfuck feel of OG X-files than I was expecting. That said, if he wants to bring in some new-school ringers to write and direct next time around, I won't complain.

But by the second episode of this season, there's kids throwing people around with telekinesis - did this happen in the later series of have they just gone for broke with this one?

the third episode of season 1 featured a guy who could stretch through tiny spaces like Mr Fantastic. episode 12 featured a pyrokinetic. etc

I'm forced to admit that this was ultimately a shit sandwich of X-Files references. A "hey we got the band back together" victory lap and possible reboot rather than an actual half-assed attempt at figuring out what X-Files 2016 would actually look like. We're surrounded by real world everyday Weird Shit apocalypse and none of that sense permeates into the reboot.

Watching the final ep after all bcz I'm housesitting and a repeat was on TV. It's already worse than ep 5 [crazy racism aside] before the titles, thanks to a three-minute recap of ep 1 leading into Scully's four-minute verbal recap of a bunch of episodes I didn't want to watch 20 years ago... with WHOOSHT! PPPEEWH! kung fu sound effects over every photo illustrating her narration.

how does holding a hanky loosely over the bridge of your nose stop you from catching a virus?

if it can, wouldn't taking it away from your face to talk make you catch the virus after all?

is Joel McHale's character's show (or shows? how many does he have?) even broadcast on TV or is it just youtube?

either way, how is the virus causing digital interference in the transmission?

Just reached the third one on UK terrestrial TV, god almighty I have missed Darin Morgan and his profound affection for the awkward despairing schlubs of the world.

(I can pretend this season stopped at 3 episodes, y/n?)

xpost I'm sure Joel has his own streaming network kind of like Baze TV and has created this virus hoax to mask its impending bancruptcy

^ this would actually be the best resolution to this plot

Andrew - no, the Glen Morgan one next week is the place to stop, it feels like a good monster of the week the same way Darin's feels like a classic Darin Morgan episode.

In a way, I kinda thought this was a test run to see how much interest there still was in the X-Files series. The way end was setup for this season, if there wasn't a huge amount of interest, you could finish the story line in a movie, if there is interest, you could expand it and keep going.

Much obliged, sic!

if there wasn't a huge amount of interest, you could finish the story line in a movie

sure, this makes sense

god this ep is just endless scenes of everyone explaining the fucking plot. like, more than normal

and does carter know how to end an episode WITHOUT someone staring into a giant beam of light

jfc

http://tvline.com/2016/08/08/x-files-season-11-episode-count-premiere-date-2018-fox/

more eps plz even if only to continue fueling my crush on gillian anderson

Fingers crossed for zero episodes written by Chris Carter. We will probably get ten. Which I'll deal with if the eleventh is a Darin Morgan joint.

Oh wait, misread the url (which is blocked at my stupid work for some stupid reason) as saying there were eleven episodes.

Ten episodes would be awesome, provided (as Old Lunch states) that as few as possible are penned by Chris Carter, and more MOTW vs mytharc. Which is basically the same as saying less Carter.

That final episode was like Carter setting up a whole new alien conspiracy arc which he'd usually dick around with for a couple of seasons except it was 40-odd minutes long. I honestly don't know wtf he was thinking.

Please don't make me remember that last episode

I'd take the original last episode before it

Mytharc eps by Carter are the price you pay for having new X-Files; at least they were clearly marked on Wikipedia months before they aired, so easy to skip.

If it was eight eps, then three Carters (two mytharcs and one weirdo experiment that might be remarkable or might flop, just like the old days), one each again from Morgan, Morgan & Wong, a promising newbie and a Gilligan would be the absolute highest improvement we could hope for, I reckon. If ten, Carter would probably cram more disease conspiracy plot in, no matter who's writing.

Obviously I'd wish for as many Morgan Minors as possible, but one wonders if he has it in him to write two in a year, given his historical pace - even last year's episode was an old script.

A Gilligan would be sick.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't rewatched any of Gilligan's episodes since BB fully opened my eyes to his talents.)

Oh, I see that that's not true. I just saw 'Pusher' the other night. I guess I didn't realize he started on the show that early.

He said he would have loved to do one this year, but couldn't work it around Better Call Saul's schedule.

might be remarkable or might flop,

I loved the mushroom trip and the dynamics of the ersatz Mulder & Scully with Lauren Ambrose in btw, as incredibly bad as the pacing and ~race~ issues were in that ep btw. But I also recently saw the teenage witches ep that Carter wrote, & enjoyed that hugely too

they need to do another season to wash the taste of this last one out. I think I liked one episode out of that run.

did he do the episode where mulder needs to keep driving or the guy's head will pop? or possibly mulders head will pop?

i watched that one "recently" (couple years back) and was p impressed

That was a Gilligan. The guy was Cranston.

also according to cranston on npr a while back, that episode was integral to his being cast as Walter White.

back again next year, per the X files FB page.

If they try a big effects scene like the nu-finale, I hope they have a higher budget

I hope they just pretend that Carter two-parter didn't happen

we all got mindwiped

100% agree

cosign

we have a third motion passes

i'd be interested in them bringing it back and making it even worse. why stop where they did; lets see just how low the x files can go

on the bright side, maybe more Dagoo

Anyone going to bother with the new season? I’ll at least watch the Darin Morgan episode.

of course I'll watch it. I don't have high expectations but maybe it'll surprise me.

Gillian indicated she's probably out after this, which is unfortunate. I hope it will actually finish then and they don't try to do another season without either her or Duchovny, there's zero point in that now.

bring back john doggett

in for Darin Morgan, happy to lay back this time unless any others get especially good reviews

nice that there are a bunch of new writers, shame that Gilligan couldn't come back too but I'd rather have Better Call Saul

had not noticed that the guy from the "x-files agent everyone forgot"/mandala effect episode, which was the fourth episode of the ill-conceived second revival season, appears in the scanned x-files documents in the second episode. his badge clearly visible for a moment when Skinner opens up the scans

say Brian Huskey's name u bitch