the x-files s/d

omg Tim Armstrong monologue

My Struggle II is cringe on top of cringe

Cutting between Mulder’s foot stomping on the gas, revs climbing and then zoom-zoom is so funny in this context.

I'm surprised that you have no comment on 'Babylon'. Particularly the shroom trip.

We're verrrrrey slooooowly rewatching, in season two rn, enjoying the casual stroll. I may actually eventually make it through those late season episodes I still haven't seen and I guess even rewatch the reboot, god help me.

Oh, yeah, that whole episode was a mess. I have a soft spot for Lauren Ambrose because of Six Feet Under but the millennial version of Mulder was a void + ripped from the headlines terrorist plot (Garland Muhammed exhibition), Mulder line dancing while tripping balls was the only saving grace.

It's hard to believe this show (by which I mean pretty much anything after S6E1) is from the same team that created "Home" and "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."

I picked up season 8 from the library cos it was free. Didn't notice it was 8 until after I took it home. Has no outer cover just the sleeve the dvd fit into.
Did wonder if that was too late.
Not tried to watch any yet. Imdb rates individual episodes anyway.

Not seen season 8 but just started in on 9. It's not the fault of the new (to me) leads but yeah the writing sure is a significant step down from where I left it in season 7, jarringly cliched and corny at times. I'm liking the mythology stuff more than the MOTWs so far. Very awkward weird what they're doing with Scully, as much as I love the character and actor.

It's hard to believe this show (by which I mean pretty much anything after S6E1) is from the same team that created "Home" and "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."

― papal hotwife (milo z), Friday, September 3, 2021 5:57 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well, the writers chiefly responsible for those episodes had long moved on by then. It was pretty much just Vince Gilligan left delivering the goods, basically any of the handful of worthwhile episodes you can name from seasons 6 - 9 was probably one of his. Drive, X-Cops, Je Souhaite, etc.

xp might have skipped over s7 as well, looking at the episode titles.

What was the season and episode name of that one where it was mainly flashback cuts to previous eps but with the bloke inserted into the scenes, it was a comedy episode pretty much.

Season 11, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat." That season's Darin Morgan episode.

Well, the writers chiefly responsible for those episodes had long moved on by then.

I agree that Gilligan is responsible for nearly all the good eps from 6-9, but milo has just watched S10, in which the only writers apart from Carter are the writers of Home and Clyde Bruckman. (The Darin Morgan ep in S10 is great though.)

S11 Black Mirror episode was pretty good. Most of the season feels like they're doing Skinner dirty, though.

They always kind of do Skinner dirty, don't they? He spends his life cleaning up Mulder's messes, and in return Mulder periodically accuses him of murder.

one of the wildest moments in x files pic.twitter.com/OtAqikhnr9

— dangerous man with a gun (@dgahk) December 11, 2021

S2E2 The Host

god what a great monster of the week
that makeup looks SO fucking good even now, they shot it so percectly

Something must have worked because I haven't seen that episode since it aired, and I can still perfectly picture the monster and his disgusting ring mouth

so gross!

yeah that episode was some top tier body horror, everyone barfing up flatworms in the bathroom and shots of them slithering into the drain!

Something must have worked because I haven't seen that episode since it aired, and I can still perfectly picture the monster and his disgusting ring mouth

same, thats one of the first images that comes into my mind when i think 'the x files'

He's definitely one of the better XF monsters. I love Tooms, Flukie, and the critters from "Ice" and "Darkness Falls", as they're vaguely believable in a pseudo-scientific kind of way, and more effective than traditional werewolves, vampires, etc

there’s some great shots where its like Nosferatu yknow, the monster emerges from darkness but only the head is fully lit

from imdb trivia performing the monster sounds like hell, 20 hrs in the suit etc (darin morgan, brother of glenn, also writer of some great eps himseld, was in the suit) & this is wild, the materials of the suit itself were i guess water soluble in some way & it would deteriorate & they had to recraft it every day !? … you like to think its longevity on screen, and how great they made it look on film, kiinda maybe makes up for all the trials & tribulations (somewhat)

fuck that “Duane Barry” S2 E5&6 two parter w Steve Railsback is so fuckin GOOD

i really wish they hadn't given away that Krycek was a villain in his first episode - it would have made that second part even better if he just seemed like a normal agent up to the moment he knocks out the cable car operator.

anyone that handsome is always a villain

watching S6 ep15 "Arcadia" haha love this one

30 years old tonight!

we’re still rewatching - just heading into s3 now

s3e4 clyde buckman’s final repose
Weirdly had no memory of this one despite Peter Boyle, awards, etc but wow, yeah total BANGER

i just realized how old i was when i saw the first airing of "home." i have to assume my folks were on a dinner date that night.

Have a vivid memory of babysitting, putting the kids to bed, watching the episode by myself and being terrified as I waited for their parents to come home. Also wanna say it was a Friday 9-10pm, and I think the local Fox newscast that followed the episode led with something about X-Files and aliens, which was also terrifying. IIRC the show got a lot of hype early on but barely anybody watched it on Friday nights, then maybe they moved it to Sunday nights?

I watched from the beginning, but I was initially fake-annoyed by the show's early marketing that claimed the stories were taken from true tales of the paranormal. I had just graduated from college, but still sharing a house with my college friends so it was the perfect show for us to dig into since Twin Peaks. Somewhere in the middle of season 1 I started taping it so I could get my Friday nights back.

it was on crazy late at night in Australia iirc, started airing in 1994 when i started uni

one of the resident tutors at our dorm was a night owl & her and a couple other students were watching i think the Bigfoot ep? and i was hooked

we always kept all the the lights off in the common room for added vibes

once my friend decided to do a drinking game where he had to drink shot of tequila every time they said “agent”
he was so wasted it took four of us to carry him to bed

unless wiki is b/s they didn't re-air it for a spell. which would make sense, because i remember catching it on tv a few years after and being amazed it was on air again.

there are very few "tough" episodes of a series i would put up against with this, the sheriff's bedroom scene in particular hit me hard.

I was a kid when it premiered - was not allowed to stay up late to watch it during the first season, but did watch pretty regularly from around halfway through s2 onwards (my older brother would tape episodes so we could watch them together in daytime). think i mentioned upthread one of the earliest episodes I remember watching was the one with Tony Shalhoub, that one messed me up for a bit.

also just remembered that when I was about 11-12, I used to go over to our neighbour's house to play with their kids and we would come up with elaborate scenarios involving Mulder, Scully, alien abduction/torture, that would also somehow involve Disney princesses/villains lol

Glad I didn’t know Gillian Anderson was only like 22 when the first season filmed until I rewatched it during the pandemic, saved me from a complex about levels of accomplishment. Scully was on the Doogie Howser track, medical school by 15, Quantico before she could drink.

There's different versions of the drinking game, but I always remembered "Drink once when the Cigarette Smoking Man smokes, drink twice if he's smoking in front of a No Smoking sign"

I've been bingeing this with my wife. I only got into the X-Files much later in the decade and never saw the beginning of the show. We're in season 2 right now and came up against Irresistible and Die Hand Die Verletzt. Both episodes have strong sexual assault themes, so much so in Die Hand Die Verletzt that we had to bail on it. Hopefully, we'll pick it up on the next episode later this week.

If you have the disk space to keep it around, Apple occasionally puts the entire series - seasons 1-11 - on sale for $40. I dunno- sometimes I just literally hit a random number generator and watch an old episode

We're doing an X-Files re-watch too right now, fascinating that this seems to be the zeitgeist! We're up to Ascension in S2 so far. Stray thoughts:

- It's amazing they had the foresight to stick the Smoking Man in that scene in the pilot where they assign Scully, as it does tie the whole thing together from the outset in a first series that is (enjoyably) otherwise casting around for a tone. A lot of the individual episodes feel very 80s procedural in both direction and narrative. The car chase at the beginning of Erlenmeyer Flask feels like it's from a much earlier era! Then weirdly that ep stumbles on a much more paranoid tone and basically stick with that far more consistently in S2 (with what looks like a substantial injection of cash).

- I'd forgotten how Deep Throat is 100% a function of the plot - basically only appearing in order to move things along quickly when Mulder and Scully need to get to the next bit of the story. Also, his appearances seem to follow a pattern of (1) a first appearance where he talks super cryptically about all the things he can't tell them, and then (2) a second appearance where he hands over a bundle of paperwork that more or less answers all their questions.

- From a 2023 viewpoint, all the characters dress incredibly, both on an off duty.

- Huge fan of all the one-off FBI boffin characters whose skillsets are "enhancing" things - cleaning up audio, or - my favourite - zooming in on a picture with absolutely crystal sharpness.

- The HD remaster job is amazing - when you get the occasional shot source from the original video masters, you realise what an incredible job they've done on it.

- It's absolutely brilliant, and at this point I'm loving both the standalone and the mythology episodes.

is it a rewatch if you never stopped watching?

I was just thinking that I did a series rewatch recently, then realized it was in 2009

I can't remember many years of my life when I haven't watched at least a few dozen X-Files episodes, I've got the original DVD box sets and even though I have them ripped to a Plex server now I still think of them in the four-episode blocks they appear on in disc form, hahaha

Weirdly apart from the first revived series, I haven't watched any of it since the original run!

This revive is very cool and weird inasmuch as falling asleep to The X-Files has been a staple in our household for quite a long time. Generally this consists of rewatching the first five seasons on a loop (although we did just finally rewatch the first film and move into the less intimately-familiar territory of season 6...which I do not vibe with nearly as much).

Glad to see that Disney is finally pulling their heads out of their asses a bit wrt physical media, which apparently means some X-Files Blu-ray reissues are on the way. It just seems ludicrous to me that the BR box set is totally out of print and going for mad $$$ (and I'm so glad that I got mine long before Fox was bought out).

The blu ray sets really made me appreciate how ambitious the cinematography of the show was, and how they approached each episode as a short film (pioneered by Twin Peaks, of course, which similarly looks stunning on blu-ray). That's old hat now in the era of prestige TV, but easy to forget how boring most TV looked back then.

My first exposure was, ironically, one of the worst episodes. I was channel flipping and came into a rerun of "Space" midway through. The "face on Mars" image thoroughly spooked me (granted, I was in fifth or sixth grade) and led me to seek out more.

Despite the rewatch I posted about upthread awhile ago, we never did finish the show--stalled out around season sixth. So I suppose there is still more X-Files I haven't seen, giving me an incentive to try again when the next bout of nostalgia hits me.

yeah in early S3 we noticed the cinematography level-up even more

the Giovanni Ribisi/Jack Black early s3 episode that I call “Lightning Boy” bc I can’t remember the ep name right now - that one def has a more noticeably stylized cinematic look. it looks really good, like a theatrical movie of the time
(episode is hella dumb, but fun nonetheless)

plus other s3 episodes i’ve caught a brief. silence of the lambs reference, or Abyss, etc which has been fun

The show looking as good as it did kinda knocked the wind out of the movie, I realized this time around. Like it looks good but not really any better than what we got on our tv set every week.

Watching Annihilation and it reminded me of my least favorite X-Files trope - Scully’s skepticism running deep into the series. “That’s not possible!” - excuse me, I’ve seen the shit you’ve seen. Flipper men and shapeshifters and a giant UFO rising up from Antarctica and etc..

You might have doubts but impossible should probably not be in your vocabulary.

xxp oh yeah DPO/Lightning Boy looks fantastic and has one of the most “lmao are you fucking kidding me” lines in the show - “I’m saying he is lightning. And we’ve got to stop him before he strikes again.”

But also the bleak, hopeless River’s Edge-style vibe to the whole thing combined with the stylization is pretty effective!