the x-files s/d

I think it was Satan. Yes sir, Satan it was.

Syzygy is so awesome. Especially the psychic who won't help them until their credit card clears.

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Sunday, September 6, 2009 8:10 PM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I watched Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell a few days ago, which used this trope as well.

Just started the whole thing, really enjoying season 1 more than I remember doing so in the past.

We just started Doggett era this week. First time I've seen any of this since it originally aired (having watched s1-5 more times than I can count, s6 at least several, and s7 maybe only twice through). It's...kind of a very different show at this point (or at least this seems like a very different Scully) but not too shabby so far. I don't remember particularly disliking the new direction at the time but I don't think I even made it to the end of the season after previously being a very avid fan.

Never had a problem with the Doggett era myself, some good episodes, main alien arc started to get a bit grating though.

I think everyone hated that Mulder and Scullly were taking a back seat but there are some solid Doggett/Reyes episodes

The highlight of 'Jersey Devil' may just be Mulder gravely pondering for far too long a crude line drawing of a stern Neanderthal with large breasts.

I forgot Deep Throat would sometimes turn up in non-alien EPs like 'Shadows'.

in my current rewatching I’m appreciating the goofiness of “surprise, it’s Alex Krycek again!”

Teso Dos Bichos

Scully: Label that.
Cop: As what?
Scully: Partial rat body part.

*autopsying a human intestine, the only body part found from a missing man*
Mulder: Do we know for sure it’s Lewton?
Scully: Yeah, by what he had for lunch: corn chowder and it looks like he’d been snacking on sunflower seeds all afternoon.

This episode is nasty as fuck.

https://preview.redd.it/nd9jm009y4m71.png?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=4ffaa5aa60eafd4e83494d6ffcc14a365c4faeb9

Wow 'Space' is bad, surely a VFX nadir the show. Should've just gone and had the front of the space shuttle morph into the contorted alien ghost face.

Sorry for X link, bur this is a great thread about the search for a song that played in the background of an episode:

just had the weirdest experience

was watching an X-files episode & there’s this country song playing in the background of the bar they’re in

& it’s so good it jars me out of my idle multitasking to Shazam it

except

— auntie cistamine (@laurenancona) December 5, 2023

but*

Awesome.

just came here to post exactly that!

Incredible

still some life in the old hellsite!

It's moments like this that the ol' internet justifies its existence.

big deal. figure out the mystery of grim reapah brrrrb brrrrb brrrb

Ryan Coogler and Disney eyeing to reboot?

This sounds like a terrible idea to me, though Coogler being involved is interesting. Not clear at all if they're talking about bringing back Mulder and Scully but I don't know how this show works without them.

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-x-files-reportedly-getting-a-new-version-from-black-panther-director

Two brave FBI agents discover a vast conspiracy to make everyone wear masks and stay indoors for a few weeks

Starring Letitia Wright as Scully

The Doggett/Reyes run had some decent plots and mostly suffered from everyone asking “but where’s Mulder and Scully? Is Scully’s baby ok?” every five minutes in 80% of the episodes

feels like in order for this to succeed it would need to be a reboot along the lines of "same characters, different actors, different conspiracy plot" and even then I'm pretty doubtful.

just put a couple interesting young people in doing monster of the week stuff and make it friendly for fans of anime

i mean it is disney+ so that is likely. my expectation: lasts one season, everyone is disappointed.

the overarching conspiracy stuff was less interesting the more they explicitly told you, and they just kept writing it off by saying the previous explanation was part of an even broader conspiracy. just give me informants like X (this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(The_X-Files) ) popping in but never explain who they work for

just don't feel like this show is gonna work in the internet era

conspiracies were fun in the 90s, now they're just... the Republican Party doing stuff

they should just reboot Kolchak

the first revival season of x-files in 2016 used an unproduced Darin Morgan script from the 2005 Kolchak reboot, so an even clearer path exists

They already rebooted the X Files btw. It was called Fringe, and it ruled.

Sovereign Citizen Mulder and Scully travel the country solving crimes, unraveling conspiracies and handing out letters of marque.

Could go the full Strange New Worlds route and have every frame HDR'ed or Stage Crafted to the nth degree instead of Vancouver by flashlight.

The Lone Gunman 9/11 episode needs to be canon.

Just flip it - mulder and scully travel the US explaining how everything has a reason, debunking conspiracies. Although I guess that’s also “Evil”

Set it waaay back in the 50's, where paranoia was exploding! New actors as well please, would be surprised if Gill and Dave gave a shit about this anymore tbh.

Duane Barry: seeing a bit more of the Greys eyes than I remember at the start there and Duchovny certainly making sure we can all see those worked-on abs as he gets out of the pool. Never enough sexual tension between him and Krycek for my money tho.

ok lol I never watched this properly the first time or just didn't remember this one ep gives more glimpses of Greys faces than you get in probably the entire rest of the show.

i just watched that episode too! not just mulder abs, but mulder speedo (smuggling budgies?)

i'm on season 3 now and it's more uneven than I remembered - some of their best episodes plus a stretch somewhere in the middle where it seems like they were trying to turn the show into a rom-com, but it mostly just ends up making scully look like an insane girlfriend

also wtf i had no idea ryan reynolds was in an x-file

i def misremembered the amount of non-alien episodes between the alien episodes

i’m on s4 and i do like a lot of the eps at this point but i feel like the intensity of the alien ones & the throughline is the thing i like more, as opposed to babies with tails or killer bees or whatever

middling on S5 right now. bummed I'm in office today so can't watch. The hacker girl in Trip Switch is just hilariously cartoon and cliche.

(but hey, maybe wasn't back then?)

Still enjoy the Lone Gunmen so much they are perfectly pitched and weighted (including Frohike's unfortunate lecherous attitude to Scully I guess) - never bothered with their spinoff but would now like to see it.

The spin off is great, last time I looked all on youtube

I know the current take is that "the standalones are the best ones" but, at the time, the ongoing storyline was *really* exciting. As a teenager I always hoped it was going to be an alien episode, not a monster-of-the-week storyline. Once the alien stuff started spinning in circles, maybe the season after the movie, I think I stopped watching (although I remember being really into Ally McBeal, my quality control was probably not great).

My wife and I had been watching straight through since October. I threw in the towel last week as we ground our way through season 7 (there were definitely some fun standalone episodes, but the lows were abysmal).

Going into this watch, I had only seen a handful of episodes back in the '90s. I had remembered the alien conspiracy stuff fondly - oooh, the cigarette-smoking man, sneaking into military bases, mulder's father, that creepy ol' alien guy who could assume other people's identities. I didn't pay enough attention to know what was going on, but it was still pretty fun.

This time, watching in order and taking it all in, it started off fine, but by the time I checked out, it had just absolutely curdled.

Overall, my realization is that this was a very uneven show, and I might even say (from a modern perspective) that it was mostly middling-to-bad. But the best episodes are really, really good.

on recent rewatch I kind of agree with that conclusion, but also I find Mulder and Scully's interactions consistently delightful even when there's not much else going on around them. And usually also Skinner's. Next time I'm unemployed I'm going to devote myself to making a supercut of every time Skinner says something like 'my ass is on the line', ending with him saying that he'd been 'getting my ass chewed'.

On the next rewatch (probly sooner than yer think) I'm going to keep track of my top ten favourite eps list.

The Lone Gunmen origin story will certainly be in there