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

That did occur to me, yeah.

***WARNING***NERD ALERT&&&I mean one of the things I liked most about original X-Files was that it exploited the "diegetic reality"(??) of the implausible things we witness *typically in the opening sequence, so that we spend a good deal of every episode yelling "Shut up! You weren't there!" at all the people who are pooh-poohing Mulder's crazy explanation for this week's crazy phenomenon (NB this is not so much true of the mythology episodes)

... so I feel like with the drug trip itself, they were already violating this longstanding convention of having the camera give us "objective reality" and not subjective delusion (although I can think of counterexamples & I'm sure you can think of more); but to then follow up with "SIKE! that drug trip wasn't a real drug trip; Mulder is an unreliable narrator of his own mental state" just pissed me off more!!

"longstanding convention" more like BONGstanding convention amirite folks /signs off

Straigh up tho that whole scene was gratuitous and gross, but maybe I'm getting prudish in my old age who knows.

that scene was america 2016 through filtered through chris carter

the trans stuff is unfortunately a little clunky but plainly ally-focused, not phobic.

I dunno, the reactions of trans people online were pretty uniformly negative. Also following up two episodes later with some lazy Muslim-bashing doesn't really make me feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt on the trans thing.

Morgan and Carter are plainly two very different writers; this show is not group-written.

also lol at "he couldn't have freaked out on a placebo!" when last night I watched the Vince Gilligan episode where a serial child-killer can implant dreams into Mulder's head a decade later because Mulder profiled him so hard that he understood his mind

Mulder's brain has to be pretty mushy by this point after all the torture and alien abuse and profiling

Morgan and Carter are plainly two very different writers; this show is not group-written.

A lot of people work on that show, in 2016 at least one of them should have realized that a scene with a crack-smoking prostitute trans woman might need a rethink. Doesn't matter who is writing the episode. Same goes for having Muslim characters that are suicide bombers. Their terrible depiction of Texas can be chalked up to the crippling jealously non-Texans have for our state, however.

depiction of Philly totally otm though

Did they ever actually set an episode in Vancouver?

the Marco Rubio one

talk about a werelizard

Damn, that final episode was a-grade baloney.

Carter has said FOX wants more episodes so I suppose there are more years of disappointment ahead

William peeks his head out of the ship. "It's ok mom and dad, I'm here!"

Does anyone else think that they may continue the series with the two younger agents (Lauren Ambrose and the other guy) as the leads? I can't believe Duchovney and Anderson want to restart their roles, and maybe Carter picked the other two because they look so much like them. When I saw ep 5 I thought it was going to be a joke episode because of how similar they looked.

When I saw ep 5 I thought it was going to be a joke episode because of how similar they looked.

Well it was a complete joke of an episode so they were nearly there.

I really don't get how after all this time, with so much potential and just a few eps, they messed this up so badly and so lazily. What happened? Did they have a week to write and shoot everything? So weird.

Chris Carter happened, is what happened. He needs to relinquish the reins, but the fantastic ratings and the nearly assured renewal is just a refutation.

Carter explicitly said (sometime this week, I believe) that there are no plans to pass the baton to the younger agents.

WTF, not a refutation. Too damn early. I'm sure at this point that Carter is convinced that he's still got it when in fact he hasn't had it in a long time, and when he did have it, 'it' wasn't much to write home about.

The porn Mulder and Scully really need to be axed... no chemistry at all, especially next to Duchovny and Anderson.

Agree, but Lauren Ambrose is Lauren Ambrose.

it's not enough.

Agree with that too, but I'd probably give it a one or two episode trial run.

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.