Oh look the last ever episode of the X-Files is on!

lol at casting McHale as "charming"

this seemed rushed but i'm along for the ride

It's not an X-Files episode unless Mulder spends half the episode earnestly convincing Scully to take his batshit crazy line of inquiry seriously and then once she does, follows her around cracking jokes.

best thing about the debut was Annet Mahendru because

I just watched the first new episode, and it was OK, but it displayed some of Carter's worst tendencies in writing MythArc eps. Characters stating that someone or something is really important in some way, without convincingly showing how or why. Why exactly was this woman "the key to everything"? What about the multitudes of abductees M&S encountered throughout the series?

Anyway, I'm more looking forward to the Morgan(s) and Wong episodes.

second episode was good! a few pieces being moved around with the mytharc stuff but mostly felt like an enjoyable standalone episode

I couldn't make it past the first 15 minutes of ep 1.

"I have alien DNA" was the last line I made it though.

Yeah it was moronic on every level. I suspect a psyop.

Glad to hear the next episode is better!

yeah the first episode was monumentally terrible. just a badly written piece of tv, and the acting wasn't much better.

episode 2 was better. episode 3 the best of the first 3 according to a few critics, nice traditional monster of the week, big lighter and more humorous too apparently. looking fwd.

first ep should've just gotten it over with and had a montage of mulder sharing 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' posts on social media

haaaaaa

otm

chemtrails!

episode 3 the best of the first 3 according

If anyone didn't expect episode 3 to be the best of the six, they hadn't looked at the writing credits

truth. 'Humbug' is still one of my favorite episodes

oh god this is hilarious

Keith Uhlich has ranked all 201 pre-reboot episodes:

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/the-x-files-episodes-all-201-episodes-ranked

I guess I wouldn't be an ILXor if I didn't say that I disagree with those rankings in the strongest possible terms

Can't check that list at the moment. Can someone just confirm real quick that number one is the episode where Deep Roy keeps crawling up people's asses? Thx.

i have seen v few eps but the Peter Boyle one is great.

(#2 on KU list)

furious to see all of these season 1 and 2 episodes so low, though i suppose it's conceivable that what i loved when i was 13 wouldn't shine so brightly now

the guy loves the show, i wdn't be too hard on him.

Peter Boyle ep was another Darin Morgan (aka writer of last night's episode) joint.

Rhys Darby in last night's episode manages to channel the Darin Morgan pathos almost as well as Peter Boyle did!

have we polled the original X-Files episodes? that would be fun.

Mrs. Chachi pointed out, while we were enjoying the first one of these: "People forget that the X-files was often pretty bad. Enjoyable, fun, watched it every week, but often pretty bad."

Last night's was really great and it was fun to watch with my wife who hadn't seen any of the old ones and only saw the first two of the new season, and had no idea how fun and campy and sentimental the show could be. While I was like "oh yeah, I remember how this feels" she was just like "wtf!"

That was really outstanding.

xxpost As someone who's generally a fan of the show, can I just say that Mrs. Chachi is OTM.

very much so

There was stuff about it that I liked (generally self-contained episodes) but even those could be overly silly or boneheaded, the show was really erratic. and on for a long time!

what the hell were those Lone Gunmen all about?

Rhys Darby in last night's episode manages to channel the Darin Morgan pathos almost as well as Peter Boyle did!

Yeah he was as perfectly cast as Joel McHale was miscast

Also I'm starting to think Fox wanted to pay Anderson half Duchovny's salary because she has half as many scenes

X-Files in its heyday was great in the way old Star Trek or Twilight Zone was great. It was often corny and there were always bad filler episodes but the good stuff was transcendent.

X-Files is not even close to the quality level of either of those shows imo

Bullshit

latebloomer otm

eh you guys are philistines, the production design alone on both those shows was way better/consistent/creative than the X-Files. Even the dud episodes (and I'm not denying that there's duds in both ST:TOS and TZ) have style.

tbf I am one of those people who considers TZ to be one of the greatest TV shows ever, all-time top 10 material

I think you have your "it blew my mind when I was a kid" glasses on. X-Files at its peak is on pretty much exactly the level of those shows.

did X-Files blow any childrens' minds I sort of doubt it

are you crazy

yes

only the things we liked when we were kids have true value. these kids today don't understand. every generation says this, but for ours, it was true. right? srsly man that seem to be yr stance here and it's a real bad one

I admit I've been pretty glib but part of that's because I feel like the odds of me breaking down some kind of quantitative analysis of the shit:gold ratio of the three shows and convincing anyone is close to zero. In general (and I would have to look and trawl through all - ugh- 201 episodes and figure out how many of those are actually decent) X-Files has at least one entire season that is total garbage - which I don't think is the case with TOS or TZ. Throw in pretty much all the conspiracy/mytharc episodes (which really are terrible) and that's a significant chunk of the show. TOS was only on for three years and most of the garbage is concentrated in the tail end of the third season, when they really started flailing. Even then though, the design of the show is so consistent and strong and vibrant I can still enjoy watching it. I don't think you could ever say that the production aesthetic of X-Files is so great that it carries otherwise shitty material, but that is definitely the case with TOS. And I think that's by and large the case with TZ too. Aside from the episodes shot on video, which are just painful to watch, and some of the drearier hour-long episodes towards the end of the series run, the stylistic tics that TZ relied on - the music cues, the tilted camera angle, the aggressively modernist lighting, the penchant for abstract, minimalist sets - could carry weak material along nicely enough, and really make the stronger material shine with an intensity and strangeness that was remarkably groundbreaking at the time, and still resonates today. I don't think you can say the same for the generally grey-green washed out color scheme of X-Files or its crappy sub-Close Encounters/Dr. Who themesong. imho.

with TOS and TZ the shittier episodes are the exception, not the rule - with X-Files it's something like 50/50 (and even there I think I'm being generous)

feel like anybody who felt like it could run exactly the same sort of "here's the strong suits" schtick with the X-Files or any number of decent shows, I really do think yr on a nostalgia trip - the objects of our nostalgia are dear to us, so their fine points seem remarkable, but any wrought thing has fine points aplenty. the x-files was fuckin cool if often ridiculous. that's about exactly how I'd rate the twilight zone: fuckin cool, often ridiculous. that serling does the "and now I elucidate the point for you hicks" bit at the end of every episode is certainly no less ridiculous than the x-files hamfisted WHAT IS THE REAL CONSPIRACY thing - it's something that's a little stupid, but fun if you buy into it, so you do, because fun is better than just stroking our chins and going "you know what was real quality? this other thing that I liked first."

ditto Star Trek TOS and Kirk's imperial LBJ interventions / serial seductions of alien maidens