Where's All The X-Files Love?

[Holdfast]

To fight the conspiracy, assemble a team of flukeman, teenage witches, fat sucker guy, butt dwarf, vampires, gender swappers...all under Skinner, who'd be like Professor X.

That would be a fucking awesome spinoff.

 

[Vendikarr]

To fight the conspiracy, assemble a team of flukeman, teenage witches, fat sucker guy, butt dwarf, vampires, gender swappers...all under Skinner, who'd be like Professor X.

Butt Dwarf: What about my idea for our name?

Skinner: I'm sorry, we can't call ourselves the X-Men.

 

[Ghost Bones]

I'd seen quite a few episodes of The X-Files in the past, but recently thought I'd make an effort to watch it all from the start. I'm up to the season 4 episode Home. It was quite unpleasant.

 

[RoJoHen]

Unpleasant. That is certainly one way of describing that episode.

 

[Ghost Bones]

The teaser might just be the most horrific thing I've ever seen. And I've seen Alien: Resurrection. That's the only other thing I've seen though.

 

[Forbin]

The wife and I are in early season 2 of our rewatch now. Gillian is SO pregnant, and it's quite annoying watching the show's obvious attempts to hide it.

 

[RoJoHen]

The wife and I are in early season 2 of our rewatch now. Gillian is SO pregnant, and it's quite annoying watching the show's obvious attempts to hide it.

I always enjoy watching how TV shows handle that particular situation. I love all the random shit they make actresses hide behind.

 

[Pingfah]

I'd seen quite a few episodes of The X-Files in the past, but recently thought I'd make an effort to watch it all from the start. I'm up to the season 4 episode Home. It was quite unpleasant.

Also brilliant, though.

 

[Ghost Bones]

I'd seen quite a few episodes of The X-Files in the past, but recently thought I'd make an effort to watch it all from the start. I'm up to the season 4 episode Home. It was quite unpleasant.

Also brilliant, though.

Well, is it? Just seemed to be an excuse for a load of gruesome to me. The Peacocks were a bit too unreal to be convincing in my view. If I were to list the episodes that have stood out for me from the first three seasons thus far, I'd say:

Ice
Eve
Beyond the Sea
E.B.E.
Darkness Falls
Roland
Little Green Men
The Host
Duane Barry
Die Hand Die Verletzt
Humbug
Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
The Walk
Nisei/731
Hell Money
Jose Chung's From Outer Space
Quagmire

But it's pretty much a consistently good show. There's probably less than half a dozen episodes I would really call bad. I have seen episodes later than these in the past, but that's where I am at the moment.

 

[DevilEyes]

Home is one of the scariest and most awesomely scary episodes of TV I've ever seen.

My favorites from the first 3 seasons:

Beyond the Sea
Eve
Squeeze/Tooms
Roland
The Erlenmeyer Flask
Little Green Men
Duane Barry/Ascension
One Breath
Irresistible
Colony/End Game
Humbug
Soft Light
Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip
D.P.O.
Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
Nisei/731
Grotesque
Piper Maru/Apocrypha
Jose Chung's From Outer Space
Talitha Cumi

Top 20 episodes of the show:
1. Beyond the Sea
2. Gethsemane/Redux/Redux II
3. Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
4. Humbug
5. Home
6. Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"
7. Nisei/731
8. Duane Berry/Ascension
9. Milagro
10. Paper Hearts
11. Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip
12. Small Potatoes
13. The Post-Modern Prometheus
14. One Breath
15. Two Fathers/One Son
16. Tithonus
17. Folie a Deux
18. Irresistible
19. Grotesque
20. Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man or How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

 

[GemHaters]

Where's All The X-Files Love?

Not sure, but keep looking. The truth is out there...

 

[GemHaters]

Just for the record, I realized I didn't answer my own questions, my favorite character is A.D Skinner (I'm sorry, is he not badass? ), with The Lone Gunmen close behind(every episode involving them minus 'Jump The Shark' is too awesome) and my favorite episode is either 'Musings Of A Cigarette Smoking Man' or 'The Unnatural'(X-Files and baseball, um hell to the yes!), and if not those two, definitely Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', or, Beyond The Sea...gotta give props to Brad Dourif

 

[JWD75]

The X-Files is my second favorite show behind DS9. The 90's really were the golden age of television - at least compared to the dreck that is on today. I thought that the show was beginning to lose it's steam during season seven, but was revitalized during season eight - which is a better season than it gets credit for. There were a few problems with season eight though. While I liked agent Doggett, he lacked the chemistry that Mulder had with Scully. Also Mulder injected a great deal of humor into the series which was sorely missed in the episodes that he was absent from.

By season nine the show was running on fumes and was painful to watch for an X-phile like myself. At this point the show seriously needed some new blood on the writing staff and Doggett and Reyes were uninteresting Mulder and Scully substitutes. And don't even get me started about the deaths of the Lone Gunmen.

I hope that we get a resolution to the 2012 alien invasion storyline. Though I fear at this point that a movie would lack the budget to do the concept justice. It probably will never happen, but I would love to have it all wrapped up in an epic novel.

 

[sidious618]

Season seven isn't awful, but Duchovny looks so bored in almost every episode. Without the crazy enthusiasm he brought to earlier seasons, it just wasn't the same. But he brought that back in season eight.

Really? I thought Duchovny had some of his best episodes that season: Amor Fati, Closure two-parter and Requiem.

 

[Lumi]

The X-Files! My first geeky obsession.<3

I can't tell you ONE favourite character. There is no choosing between Mulder and Scully. I love them both, and I love them TOGETHER. At least in the series. In the last film, I think they sort of ruined the relationship... and I don't think I'm the only one that feels that way.

Ahem.

Favourite episodes.
Here goes...

One Breath
Squeeze
Ice
Beyond the Sea
Tooms
Darkness Falls
War of the Coprophages
Irresistible
Wetwired
Home
Unruhe
Leonard Betts
Never Again
Memento Mori
Small Potatoes
Redux
Redux II
Detour
Christmas Carol
Emily
Bad Blood
All Souls
Folie a Deux
Dreamland
Dreamland II
How the Ghosts Stole Christmas
Agua Mala
Monday
Arcadia
Milagro
The Unnatural
Field Trip
Biogenesis
The Sixth Extinction
The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati
Millennium
Closure
All Things
Requiem

I end it there. I loved some of seasons 8 and 9... but I can't be bothered to add anymore.

 

[Harvey]

Season seven isn't awful, but Duchovny looks so bored in almost every episode. Without the crazy enthusiasm he brought to earlier seasons, it just wasn't the same. But he brought that back in season eight.

Really? I thought Duchovny had some of his best episodes that season: Amor Fati, Closure two-parter and Requiem.

Thus my qualifier; he looks bored in almost every episode.

Yes, he has a few moments to shine, but the season is filled with a lot of monster-of-the-week stories, and Duchovny doesn't bring the enthusiasm of earlier seasons to them.

 

[Enterprise is Great]

The X-Files is a great show. Ever since it's gone off the air Fox has been trying to get a sci-fi show as big as it was. That's one reason why they've done so many sci-fi shows over the last ten years. Maybe one day they'll find one.

 

[Warped9]

I revisited the series about a year ago and overall quite enjoyed it. Here's what I thought in summation:

Within the space of a month I've gotten through all nine seasons of the show. Presently I have only five or six episodes left to go to the end.

It's been something of a tear getting in a few episodes each day, rather easily done when you eliminate the time usually taken up by commercials and also skip opening and closing credits. My impressions, particularly while catching many episodes I'd never seen or barely remembered, are that this was overall quite a good series albeit with its share of ups and downs.

Seasons 1-5 are pretty consistently solid I think. I'd say there are only about one or two episodes per season that while not at all bad are simply not really on par with the rest. They were just kinda dull. Season 6 starts out very well and then seems to fall off a bit. It's nowhere near bad, but something feels off somehow until about midway through the season when the show gets back into its groove. That continues in a hit-and-miss way throughout Season 7.

Season 8 are where things get shaky and the show develops something of a different mood overall I think. There are still some decent episodes here, but there are also more than a few sleep inducers. After the first few episodes of the season I don't feel the show feels like its old self until Mulder's return in the latter half of the season. John Doggett's character isn't a bad pairing with Scully and it's amusing to see her painted as the one with extreme ideas. I found how much I missed Mulder's presence when he actually returns, and it's funny seeing him view Reyes as one with "out there" ideas. We're not hit over the head with it, but we can see Mulder as matured and he recognizes something of his younger self in Reyes. The conspiracy arc was really getting tiresome. Also in the end I never really did get a sense of which side Alex Krychek was really on.

Season 9 comes off much like a write-off. After an okay start here are way too many sleep inducing episodes, particularly with stories that a very slow paced and trying so hard to create a dark mood. Monica Reyes was okay as a guest character, but has next to nil screen presence and just doesn't work for me as a main character. And it looks like the show was trying so hard to create a Mulder/Scully dynamic with Doggett and Reyes, but it doesn't really come off.

In retrospect the show would have been better served if Seasons 8 and 9 could have been condensed and some of the plot arcs really tightened up. If the better segments of the last two seasons could have lumped into one season I think the show would have ended on a better note. Both seasons just feel dragged out just to fill air time.

I will say that throughout Seasons 8 and 9 I really felt for Scully. She so painfully misses Mulder for whom each of them feel incomplete without the other, each finding in the other what they feel they lack in themselves. I think Mulder and Scully are one of the best character dynamics I've ever seen on television. In their own way they remind me of the wonderful dynamic we had with Kirk, Spock and McCoy in Star Trek TOS.

I also think Gillian Anderson did a fantastic job of portraying a smart and powerful woman with loads of allure yet without ever resorting to cliched tough broad or TV femme attributes. Scully could feel pain and doubt and fear, but she always gets through and gets the job done. She makes so many of genre TV tough girls look like posers. She radiated sex appeal (in my eyes) without ever resorting to cliched notions of sex appeal. And I can't recall once seeing her in anything really skin tight or overly revealing. The catsuit girls of most sci-fi are a joke compared to Scully.

Five episodes to go including the barely remembered series finale that I saw only once way back when...

Just finished watching the series finale...and while not bad it's a bit of a letdown. We like to see our heroes win yet here Mulder and Scully are essentially hunted and on the run. Maybe they're both believed to be dead, killed by the black helicopters that finally puts Cancer man out of our misery. I will say that it was effectively done how much the stories really made me hate Cancer Man. Similarly I also hated Deputy Director Kersh with a passion.

In a broader sense things are left very open ended. We don't know what happened to Skinner, Doggett and Reyes or even Kersh. I still can't believe they actually killed off the Lone Gunmen! That said I've never seen anything of the short lived Lone Gunmen spinoff series so maybe it was a blessing.

I have to say that while I haven't heard many good things about the last X-Files movie I'm now very curious to see it.

Okay today I finally rented The X-Files: I Want To Believe.

And I have to say...not bad. I understood a lot of scorn was heaped on this film for reasons not immediately obvious.

Firstly, I thought it felt very much like an extended X-Files episode, like a two-parter without the commercial breaks. It does serve as a chapter telling us that Mulder and Scully are still together after all these years. And it was neat seeing Skinner again even if it was ever so briefly.

It isn't really the execution that lets this down I think. I think it's the subject matter. Yes, it ends up as being about something to creep you out sufficiently, but until that point it feels much like a regular crime drama. And in the end as creepy as it was there simply wasn't enough weird shit in it.

I actually applaud the attempt not to just revisit/rehash the alien conspiracy stuff because many of the best episodes revolved around the investigation of weird shit.

No, the film isn't stellar, but it certainly isn't horrible either. It doesn't rank among the series' best, but it is better than the show's snoozers, which averaged out about one or two a season and with more frequency in the last two seasons.

I now find myself wanting to revisit the first feature film and thinking about revisiting the whole series again.

 

[od0_ital]

Any love I may have had for The X-Files died at the end of the second movie's credits, when the camera panned to show Mulder & Scully on a vacation, wavin' to the camera.

Made me glad I had one of those movie bucks coupons to see it in theaters, haven't watched the movie since, and only one episode, 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space', on Netflix. Guess that makes it my favorite episode of the series.

 

[Lumi]

Any love I may have had for The X-Files died at the end of the second movie's credits, when the camera panned to show Mulder & Scully on a vacation, wavin' to the camera.

Made me glad I had one of those movie bucks coupons to see it in theaters, haven't watched the movie since, and only one episode, 'Jose Chung's From Outer Space', on Netflix. Guess that makes it my favorite episode of the series.

That scene after the credits. My sister and I were huge fans and saw it in the cinema straight away.

We... cringed. It's awful. No idea where it came from. Didn't fit in any sort of way. Funny how such a short scene at the end can have that kind of effect.