The X Files is coming back! (1 Viewer)

[Chris Will]

I'm sure it'll be back, it's just a question of when everyone's schedule is open to do more episodes.

If this is the best they can do then I hope their schedules never open up.

I really didn't like a single one of these episodes and the finale has to be the worst X-Files episode ever. Joel McHale's character was just downright stupid and, I'm sorry, but he is just not that good of an actor. The story of this last episode was just dumb, pathetically dumb. I hated the 5th episode and thought it was the low point but, boy was I wrong. I just really expected something more from a limited 6 episode run but, all 6 episodes rank near the bottom of X-File shows for me, I didn't really enjoy any of them. Oh well, it is what it is.

 

[TravisR]

I really didn't like a single one of these episodes and the finally has to be the worst X-Files episode ever.

Not that it's saying much but this episode was much better than the bottom of the barrel episodes from the original run like Space, Teso Dos Bichos, El Mundo Gira, Schizogeny, Fight Person Shooter or Fight Club *shudder*. Personally, I didn't even think it was the worst episode of this season (Babylon- the previous episode with Mulder's trip- was worse to me).

 

[Simon Massey]

Didnt that last episode effectively say the aliens were here and had shown the Syndicate guys etc how toeffectively depopulate the world by only infecting the chosen few with alien DNA that would protect them.

Not saying that it wasn't convoluted, just that i didnt think they tried to undo the whole alien thing - the mythology for me started to unravel in terms of understanding what was going on exactly after Season 6.

 

[Simon Massey]

Agreed I watches Space and Ghost in the Machine recently from Season 1 and they are pretty poor episodes. Fire was another one that doesn't hold up well.

 

[Simon Massey]

I think there was also a line in there from CSM that this had all started in 2012, presumably an implication that the date we all know that was set from the original series which was mean to be the takeover date was actually the start of putting into place the virus etc to depopulate the world. At least thats what I took from it

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

My biggest disappointment over this is that they had what, a DOZEN or so years before this came back. And in that time we've seen unbelievably good serialized short run series (Sherlock, Downton Abbey, Fargo, Breaking Bad, Justified, Torchwood, etc. etc.) often with a single writer, but turning out well conceived greatness.

It just baffles me that with all that time, or just within the time they decided to revive, they couldn't put a coherently excellent six episode story together. Or just six separate mini-masterpieces (Black Mirror, anyone). It's just such an epic fail for what could have been.

Please let go the reins, Carter, and turn your baby over to a master showrunner and re-visioner next time so that the legacy of this show is not tarnished and the revival is not a complete waste.

 

[TravisR]

Agreed I watches Space and Ghost in the Machine recently from Season 1 and they are pretty poor episodes. Fire was another one that doesn't hold up well.

Yeah, The Jersey Devil and Shadows are pretty lousy too but to be fair, those were the earliest episodes and the writers were still finding their footing. Thanks to nostalgia, I even have a fond spot in my heart for the crappy S1 episodes.

 

[Chris Will]

It just baffles me that with all that time, or just within the time they decided to revive, they couldn't put a coherently excellent six episode story together. Or just six separate mini-masterpieces (Black Mirror, anyone). It's just such an epic fail for what could have been.

My feelings exactly, just a waste of six episodes.

 

[Simon Massey]

I think overall the miniseries is a microcosm of exactly what the original series was like and no amount of good or bad can overcome the fantastic chemistry between Anderson and Duchovny - I know some here have expressed their dissatisfaction with their performances, particularly Duchovny, but for me I think they have slipped comfortable back into their roles albeit at a later point in their lives.

And if it means a limited series every year or two Im certainly up for that. I suspect next run they may well go for eight or so and give themselves more time.

 

[Carabimero]

Let's hope they hire some good writers next time. Overall, that was some of the worst writing I have seen on network TV in a long, long time. Just painfully bad.

 

[Craig Beam]

Three days later and I'm still horrified at that finale. I was so excited when this limited series was announced---- finally, they'd resolve the dangling mythology! I watched all nine seasons and both movies in anticipation (in less than three months!).

And... this is what we got. This was a fucking insult to everyone who actually cares about this series. It seems a bit ridiculous to be devastated over a TV series at my age (46), but... yeah, I kinda am.

 

[TravisR]

Three days later and I'm still horrified at that finale. I was so excited when this limited series was announced---- finally, they'd resolve the dangling mythology!

You didn't really expected them to go back to loose ends, did you? Whatever mythology they were going to do had to self-contained.

 

[Craig Beam]

You didn't really expected them to go back to loose ends, did you? Whatever mythology they were going to do had to self-contained.

They never resolved the Super Soldier/FBI infiltration storyline from season 9, so yeah, I kinda expected Carter to address that in some fashion someplace. Or was that another "didn't really happen" misdirect? God, what bullshit.

 

[sidburyjr]

Well I finally watched my DVR last night. I was underwhelmed. There are a bunch of questions that come to mind that no one seems to have discussed in this thread. Some of them could be resolved by looking at the ep again but I erased it from my DVR and don't want to go to the trouble of reacquiring it from the cloud.

Did Scully actually put the IV needle into Mulder at the end?

And how could she diagnose that he needed stem cells that quickly?

And why does she need stem cells from their son (OK, maybe this is something that anyone with the correct training would know instantly, but it gives me that feeling that I have whenever someone in a TV show or movie starts doing preposterous things with computers that I know aren't possible [or necessary]).

Why did the conspiracy "innoculate" Scully?
Why didn't they innoculate Mulder?
Why did CSM choose Reyes to be his enabler? And why did she believe him at the time?

I wont even go into the traffic that Scully and Miller had to get through.
But, it appears that practically everyone on earth had their immune system wiped out, so if they deteriorated at the same rate that Mulder did, it looks like about a billion or more people are going to die due to the simple fact that the antidote cannot be delivered in time for then to recover

On the plus side, I did like the idea as spewed by CSM that this whole alien plot was to save the earth from the global warming crisis.

I would watch a series with Einstein and Miller.

And as bad as the taste is in my mouth right now, I would accept twice as much just to get the Darin Morgan episode -- it wasn't Jose Chung or Clyde Bruckman but it would be in my top 20 x-files episodes, maybe higher.

 

[MarkMel]

Maybe our standards have changed. The quality in the writing and acting on current TV shows has drastically improved.

Has anyone that has gone back and watched the earlier episodes recently think they have held up to your memory of a great show? I'm asking because in my mind the show was great but I haven't gone back to revisit. Could it be that if we saw this current season years ago our perception would be different?

I was recently showing my teenage daughter some of the shows I thought were great from when I was her age. As I was watching, I thought man I was sure this show was better than what I'm watching. And she even asked me if this is what I thought was so great.

 

[TravisR]

Has anyone that has gone back and watched the earlier episodes recently think they have held up to your memory of a great show? I'm asking because in my mind the show was great but I haven't gone back to revisit.

I think nostalgia frequently plays a factor in people's assessment of a show. The show isn't one of the all-time greats like The Twilight Zone or Seinfeld or The Sopranos or The Wire but it would still be my pick as the best drama of the 1990's. Twin Peaks would be a close second but I give it to The X-Files because TXF had nearly 7 times the episodes of TP (and TP 'only' had about 15 great episodes, 10 OK ones and 5 sucky ones).

I said it in another thread recently but The X-Files' greatest achievement or legacy is what it did for the medium of TV. Today, you just expect TV shows to look like movies and that stems almost entirely from the high level of production that The X-Files achieved. There were shows that did that before The X-Files (Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues) but TXF was the show that made it mandatory that all 'serious' have movie-like production values.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Has anyone that has gone back and watched the earlier episodes recently think they have held up to your memory of a great show? I'm asking because in my mind the show was great but I haven't gone back to revisit. Could it be that if we saw this current season years ago our perception would be different?

I was recently showing my teenage daughter some of the shows I thought were great from when I was her age. As I was watching, I thought man I was sure this show was better than what I'm watching. And she even asked me if this is what I thought was so great.

I started rewatching the series when the Blu-rays came out in December - I'm currently in the middle of season two. In the interest of full disclosure, The X-Files wasn't one of my all-time favorite shows. I held it in that next tier of really good shows that I enjoyed but not necessary desert island stuff..but probably one of the last things that I take out of the too heavy suitcase before I'm forced to go. I had previously owned the Mythology Collection DVDs, but not entire seasons, so many of the episodes I'm watching now I hadn't seen since they first aired.

My take? I was right not to think of the show as an all-time favorite, at least for me. When it's good, it's very good, but the moments of brilliance are spaced out. The balance between mythology episodes and monster of the week episodes continues to bother me. I found it annoying back then, and it continues to annoy me, how they'll basically press the "reset" button at the end of almost every episode. I love Scully, but her continuing skepticism about everything in the early years, even about things she's witnessed with her own eyes, drives me crazy. It's one thing not to believe in some of Mulder's more far-fetched theories, but it's another thing to continually deny that maybe some things are happening that are beyond our scientific understanding. Then they'd do these giant mythology episodes which were frequently awesome, with huge revelations, and then all of that would be forgotten by the next episode. It strains credibility to me that some of these things wouldn't at least come up in conversation.

I've said it in other threads and perhaps even earlier in this one, so I apologize if I'm repeating myself here, but the absolute wall that existed between the mythology episodes and monsters of the week episodes was the thing that made me stop watching during the original run around season 6 or 7. That the movie was so awesome, and then they came back to TV and basically pretended that nothing in it had happened for the vast majority of the season, was just too much of a letdown for me. Later shows that were clearly inspired by "The X-Files" found a better balance. "Fringe" for example had mythology episodes balanced with monster of the week episodes, but neither kind of episode tried to pretend the other kind didn't happen. Sometimes in a mythology episode, they'd get distracted by an unrelated case, and sometimes in a monster of the week case, the evidence would lead to something mythology related. Or at the least, they'd have a few lines of "Since we're not making any progress on mythology stuff this week, let's go out and work on a regular case".

I think the new "X-Files" episodes have at least improved in that regard. Ironically, the mythology episodes which I loved so much in the original series were the worst part of this revival. They tried to undo nine seasons and two movies worth of mythology, and in a particularly clumsy way, filled with characters that shouldn't be alive and characters behaving in ways that go against everything the show has ever established. I didn't buy it. For the first time, I liked the monsters of the week episodes better. But this time, the monster of the week episodes weren't completely self-contained. The mythology episodes this season make a big deal about William (Mulder and Scully's son), and had this been during the original run of the show, that would have been all we heard about William. But this time around, they incorporated Mulder and Scully's reflections and feelings about William into the monster of the week episodes, and it made those episodes stronger feeling that they were actually part of the whole this time.

 

[TravisR]

I found it annoying back then, and it continues to annoy me, how they'll basically press the "reset" button at the end of almost every episode. I love Scully, but her continuing skepticism about everything in the early years, even about things she's witnessed with her own eyes, drives me crazy. It's one thing not to believe in some of Mulder's more far-fetched theories, but it's another thing to continually deny that maybe some things are happening that are beyond our scientific understanding. Then they'd do these giant mythology episodes which were frequently awesome, with huge revelations, and then all of that would be forgotten by the next episode. It strains credibility to me that some of these things wouldn't at least come up in conversation.

I find that to be an unfortunate symptom of the time that it was made in. The network and probably even the writers to some degree felt they had to make sure that the believer vs. the skeptic aspect of the show was always intact so infrequent viewers wouldn't be lost. The same basically goes for the mythology too. The fact that they were even able to tell any kind of long running story is pretty amazing given the time that the show was made. A great "What if?" question for me is what this show could have been like if it was made in the last 5 or 10 years when serialized storytelling was accepted and change was part of TV shows.

And eventually, Scully did start to believe but that seems to have vanished in these new episodes.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

I've been re-watching the series with my 19 year-old son (a couple episodes per weekend home from college visit) and have to say that I think the original series holds up pretty well. The fact that he is totally into it as a millennial helps confirm that assessment for me. And I don't think he'd be into it at all if the new HD upgrade picture wasn't so awesome.

Having said that, I'm going to do everything possible to dissuade him from watching the current series finale. That's how bad I think it serves the original series.

 

[sidburyjr]

Has anyone that has gone back and watched the earlier episodes recently think they have held up to your memory of a great show? I'm asking because in my mind the show was great but I haven't gone back to revisit. Could it be that if we saw this current season years ago our perception would be different?

I was recently showing my teenage daughter some of the shows I thought were great from when I was her age. As I was watching, I thought man I was sure this show was better than what I'm watching. And she even asked me if this is what I thought was so great.

When my daughter came for Christmas this past year she was in a pseudo-binge to do the entire original series before the new series came on. So she watched half a dozen or more episodes (on my Prime) and we watched them with her. And when Target had seasons 1-6 on Blu for 15 each a few weeks after Christmas, I bought them all and have been watching them on a sort of regular basis. To me they seem about as good as I remembered.

OTOH, I have in the past bought entire series of shows based on my good memories of them and found my memories of them to be grossly exagerated. *cough*ManFromUNCLE*cough*