the x-files s/d

Sorry to spoil that the Jersey Devil is actually Ric Ocasek

My house rewatch just got to Season 4, which means we got to watch the scene where Mulder dumps gasoline all over his head and into his eyes and then is like, "You'll have to lead me! I can't see!"

First absolute dog of an episode, episode 9, "Space."

We watched ep3 tonight - “Squeeze”
TOOOOOOOOMS D:

First Morgan & Wong-penned episode! first flashlight scene! the dialogue feels noticeably snappier in places, some v good laugh out loud lines (“what’s the quickest way to get this off me without betraying my cool-guy exterior”)

I lovw how the mythology of Tooms is laid out with ~just~ enough breadcrumbs - bitsized info to make it creepy & wtf but no deepdive attempt at explanation to take you out of it.

Still as creepy as the first time I saw it. Maybe even more so now since it was established that Doug Hutchinson is an irl actual creep.

Squeeze! I love that the first monster-of-the-week episode is such a good one. Is that the one that also has the Mulder line, "Sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation?"

I noticed at some point that Mick Jagger on the Ed Sullivan Show looks freakishly like Tooms when he's just about to eat a liver, and now I can't unsee it. Look at him around the 20-second mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ANhU4AcK04

SCULLY: You're so consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or mysteries, everything takes on a warped significance to fit your megalomaniacal cosmology.

MULDER: Scully, are you coming on to me?

milo otm re S1E9 Space

definitely a dud. even as a space nerd, i was trying to find something to like about it but it’s just so “...huh”?

Yeah if I remember it just blunders on and nothing really great happens. A shame because I like the actor who plays the astronaut hero, Ed something? (fuck google imo)

oh Ed Lauter, remember him from Family Plot

In the second half of Duane Barry/Ascension, Krycek pistol whips the tram operator and temporarily stops the tram, Mulder never asks what happened with the tram and somehow the operator doesn’t complain to anyone?

Season 4 with all the conspiracy stuff leading into cancer stuff is kind of a drag.

I think some of the conspiracy episodes that season are highlights - the black oil one where everyone is constantly beating up Krycek is pretty fun, and the UFO/plane crash episodes are really well done if completely bonkers. The cancer stuff is a drag, and there are an awful lot of flat and depressing monster-of-the-weeks that I never feel compelled to rewatch. And there’s the chupacabra episode.

Watching two a night instead of one a week, the clash between conspiracy-then we're just FBI agents checkin' out a case-never mention that cult that committed mass suicide again-back to conspiracy is jarring.

The chupacabra episode was the least offensive of the run of 'exploring other cultures' episodes but I'm so happy that I'm past almost all of them.

I do find some of the S4 conspiracy episodes a bit aimless and boring (just wait until you get to Redux in S5!), but really like Tempus Fugit/Max, partly because it has an actual narrative and feels coherent, and has some good characters.

Leonard Betts was one of the best XF monsters-of-the-week. He's essentially another Tooms/2Shy variant, but a sympathetic one. Teliko is a bit rubbish though.

The Chupacabra episode was commonly known as "El Mucho Sucko" back in the day

I like Tempus Fugit/ Max as well, and I'm not usually a fan of the conspiracy episodes. I love the opening scene in the bar with the keychain; it might be the warmest, most natural Mulder & Scully hanging out scene in the whole show.

I just started rewatching this last night and was trying to decide if I should try to slog through every episode or be more selective. I guess I might as well go for it, at least to begin with.

xp I did a season 4 rewatch a while back and I agree that season is all over the place. some really high highs and really low lows. Where are you in the season now?

Just before Tempus Fugit. Leonard Betts was great, and I liked the Scully tattoo episode of the last few.

The Lone Gunmen recounting the supposed life of the Cigarette Smoking Man is another highlight. What if George HW Bush was also a frustrated action novelist?

Well, at least George W. finally got to paint dogs and wounded veterans from his wars (also interviewed them, I think)(the veterans, not the dogs?)

Which reminds me, I liked the episode that told how Scully got her dog.

The dog getting eaten also A+.

I guess that 'queg getting eaten

One in between: Mulder peeking in Scully's (motel?) window, sees her blowdrying dog, big cig hanging out of her mouth, near the doggie.

The chupacabra episode was the least offensive of the run of 'exploring other cultures' episodes but I'm so happy that I'm past almost all of them.

― Joe Bombin (milo z), Saturday, June 5, 2021 9:20 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

They're all awful but the Chinese one is probably the most offensive.

I find the chupacabra one to be one of the worst because of the "it's a telenovela!" conceit. It wouldn't be quite so bad if everyone was acting like a telenovela character, including Mulder and Scully, but Mulder and Scully are acting like their normal selves (though more callous than usual), so you end up with all the Latinx characters being hyper-emotional and melodramatic and Mulder and Scully making fun of them.

The effects in the Inca episode have not aged well.

Kaddish was pretty bad as well.

The Duchovny-directed ‘wot if Jackie Robinson was an alien’ episode is still to come.

Kaddish didn't bother me as much for some reason; it struck me as pretty respectful if a bit flat story-wise, but then I am the most non-practicing of Jews so it's not my area of expertise.

I’m curious if they actually thought Roma was just short for Romanian in the cursed stillborn twin episode.

xp and Duchovny-written, right? I actually like that one in spite of myself. It's just such an accurate and loving pastiche of the whole baseball movie genre, I can't not like it despite its obvious flaws.

yeah, written too. that one mainly comes off as Duchovny being well-meaning but cheesy and doofy in many directions at once

his later meta-satirical ep w/ Garry Shandling and Tea Leoni is similarly unfocused but much better

The thing I really like about the Duchov-written episodes is that they aren't Mulder-centric and they show a very warm and funny and charming side of Scully. I'm sure he's a tool in real life, but as a writer/director of the X-Files he does not make it all about him and I appreciate that.

I wish beefier douchebag Californication Duchovny wasn't the image that popped into my head of him vs. Mulder.

Was watching rando old eps but then my gf decided she just wanted to full-on rewatch so I guess that's what's happening now!

Anyway, 'Beyond the Sea' just never gets any less good.

this week (for no particular reason) I was thinking of Duchovny saying he realized he wasn't cut out for Lit Scholarship while listening to Naomi Wolff speaking in Howard Bloom's class

Post-modern Prometheus - just a wee bit problematic

Problematic and (challops alert!) not actually good

It looks good and has some fun moments (the cuts between townspeople and their animal parents) but you’re not wrong.

Mulder and Scully openly flirting in season 6 is so uncomfortable.

The whole vibe of season 6 is so weird. They sort of come off like angry exes who still hook up sometimes.

Feel like although it's not all bad, and there are some great eps, everything after they moved to LA from Van is not as good.

I actually like the Mulder and Scully romance/ sexual tension thing in every other season, but season 6 made it wrong and gross somehow.

With S6 I feel like the individual episodes are often good in a big technicolor movie kind of way, but there are too many episodes that are very similar and the overall tone of the season is really off.

Season 7 has a slightly weird tone (Gillian Anderson is playing Scully like the grizzled veteran cop tired of Mulder's bullshit - which is fair, really) but Millennium to the Amazing Maleeni is the longest run of good episodes in several seasons (Maleeni is not great but Ricky Jay compensates for the plot).

“All Things” is the worst thing

The Amazing Maleeni is pure comfort food for me; it was the first episode I saw and it just makes me happy. Totally absurd, in retrospect, to start the series with this cheerful sun-drenched episode where there are no deaths and nothing supernatural and the only crime is attempted fraud.

There’s a song that gets repeated a dozen times in “All Things” that makes a bad episode unbearable… it was Moby.

All Things is the worst, I agree. I love the weird vibe of Season 7, though. I had this epiphany while watching X-Cops that the defining thing about Season 7 is that Mulder and Scully aren't scared anymore. Or in danger, or really personally invested in the cases in a big way. it feels like they're way more interested in hooking up offscreen than in whatever's going on with the X-files. It could actually have been a really good way to ease into ending the show if Chris Carter had been willing to let it end.

The range of the show is really impressive, that in the span of a month they could produce both “First Person Shooter” and “all things,” which are both so awful in such vastly different ways.