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

did anyone like this last one? it sounds like no; I thought it was ok but what happened to the resolution of the trashman story? It was almost like a scene got cut. Ok so he goes and kills the last person; why did Lint from Rancid get away, why did it have a happy face, blah blah....just just dropped the main story for the scene on the beach.

even in the good episode --

"mulder, the internet is not good for you"

c'mon! mulder would have been online in fucking 1994!

duchovny is kinda way too big in the shoulder-to-elbow region to convince as washed-up dropout fox mulder

why did it have a happy face

The angry vibes inspiring his sculptures were coming to life in the form of the bandage man so he changed it to a happy face!

hope a bouncing happy face is committing serial murders in a season 11 ep

The trashman character was dumb as hell and Tim Armstrong looks and sounds like hell.

Other than that the episode was sort of okish. The monster was pretty scary.

A friend emailed me about this before I saw it and said it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. I'm stumped as to why - I thought it was ok! Agree on the sudden ending though.

And while the stuff with Scullys mum was moving, I wish she'd stop banging on about her kid if there's nothing going to be done about it.

Trash gollum was great. Pulling people completely apart with his bare hands! Nice and gory.

it was good but it just ended like...I don't know.

I'm assuming william will come into play in the final episode....otherwise this is going to seem like one long tease (I realize the irony of saying that about x-files). kind of relieved we only had one myth episode so far with one brief vision of smoking man.

it will probably turn out that William will be living in a trailer with Joel McHale controlling drones with his mind

people who demand serious x-files are going to love this one

Tonight's episode was possibly the worst the show has ever had

Ill-conceived on every level

Someone take Chris Carter's laptop away from him

It starts with a Muslim suicide bomber and literally ends with the Lumineers playing on the soundtrack

This episode was certainly, uh, insane (it felt like he'd just watched Southland Tales or something similar and wanted to replicate the vibe) but I don't think it was appreciably worse than some of the high-concept Carter-penned episodes from the original series. Aside from the Muslim stuff, which I think he was trying to present even-handedly and in good faith and at which I think he failed pretty wildly.

I think there's a germ of a really fantastic episode in there somewhere but it would take someone a little more sophisticated than Carter to tease it out.

The AV Club review is pretty otm, right down to the comparison to 'Post-Modern Prometheus' (which is exactly the OG episode I thought this most closely resembled).

gah this was so cornnnnnny it was unbearable

Tonally it resembled a really lazy Family Guy episode

someone physically take chris carter's keyboard away for heaven's sake

It starts with a Muslim suicide bomber and literally ends with the Lumineers playing on the soundtrack

Okay I haven't seen this yet (Channel 5 is only up to the first new one), but seriously, board description.

If the show comes back properly and if Chris Carter is smart (which, well...) he really should scale his creative involvement waaaay back. I'm sure there's a whole new generation of writers who were heavily influenced by the show and would love to contribute. Which could be a good or a bad thing but at least it means less Carter, who I don't hate but who I find to be most tolerable in small doses.

It's never going to come back properly, but a short series every year or two seems to be in the leads' scope of interest.

Wong's was okay and Glen Morgan's was good. If they can get a Vince Gilligan episode next time and Carter takes the response to the mytharc stuff this time as an excuse to suppress it and be more standalone, six eps would still be okay. (He did good standalones sometimes!) Going to eight and getting some new-to-the-series but notable writers would be great.

(Though I'm saying this from a perspective of having always planned to skip the Carter eps.)

I appreciated that ep for being completely OTT bugfuck insane, even if it wasn't exactly "good"

Yes, I can't wait to read more reactions to Mulder's "shroom" trip. I'm sure Fox was all "uhhhhhhh..." after Carter handed in the ep.

They wouldn't go wrong to let Duchovny write another episode, either. The Unnatural is great, and Hollywood A.D. was pretty hilarious as well. And Anderson could do one too, even though her episode from the original series was a bit goofy and had 1000% too much Moby in it, at least it wasn't lazily racist like last night's ep.

all i could think while watching this ep was that if i were muslim i'd be pretty horrified. throughout the opening sequence i kept saying that obv it was a fakeout and it was going to turn out they were just a gay couple going to an art gallery. like surely in 2016 you don't show a muslim man praying just to establish that he's a radical fundamentalist suicide bomber? and then even after the bombing i was sure that it was going to turn out to be some kind of supernatural spontaneous combustion or something up until they explicitly said that they were wearing suicide vests at which pt i checked to see if CAIR twitter had condemned it yet.

Yeah, the cold open was both a betrayal of Muslims and classic X-Files. I couldn't believe how bad that was.

Mordy, that was almost exactly my train of thought. A lot of very unfortunate choices.

lol I thought it was going to be a gay couple too

I defy anyone to watch the start of that episode and assume that the character was going to be a terrorist. I also thought they were a gay couple.

Then Mulder's idea of using mushrooms to talk to the vegetative terrorist, and then him doing so with only a placebo - just extremely silly, even for the X-Files, even for nu-X-Files tbh!

I didn't think he was going to be a terrorist because it was both the most obvious and the most tone deaf direction Carter could've gone in 2016.

it makes you wonder in what decade and country he wrote that episode

also does every episode have to try and cram in some reference to William. This week the mother of the terrorist's love for her dying terrorist son makes scully think about her child

last week a weird street artist creates a trash Gollum anti-gentrification monster and that "creation" was linked to Scully's creation of her child. All really hamfisted and aiming for emotional resonance but failing awfully.

this has been a bad, bad miniseries. I will still watch the final episode, and any further episodes they get commissioned, but it's definitely out of a sense of fanboyish nostalgia, not because this is good tv. the darin morgan episode was really the only one i would give a passing grade to.

Although, okay, wait. The whole episode was such a scramble that I think I missed this: his mother said she had communicated with him psycically or whatever and knew that he wasn't able to go through with it, and I guess that's borne out by the fact that he wasn't blown to bits as he surely would've been if he'd actually been wearing a vest. So he was working with a terror cell but didn't actually commit an act of terror himself...but I guess he still ultimately abetted an act of terrorism anyway so the distinction is pretty fuzzy.

it makes you wonder in what decade and country he wrote that episode

― μpright mammal (mh), Tuesday, February 16, 2016 11:22 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, Homeland is still airing.

I just listened to an episode of Kamau Bell's Denzel Wahington podcast where the 2 women from Good Muslim Bad Muslim talked about all the ways that The Siege was terrible from a muslim standpoint

The opening of this episode was a total utter facepalm, even more so in light of just finishing listening to that conversation

Yeah, I kinda want to rub the nose of every butthurt Christian with a persecution complex in this episode and say "do you see what actual institutionalized, cultural persecution looks like???" but I know they'd just champion the crazy nurse or vilify that character as slanderous.

haven't watched this yet, not really feeling the urge to now

odds on fox bringning xfiles back again next year for a short run? do people still want it?

Seems to be doing pretty well so there will likely be more

I mean, I want it to return about as much as I wanted this miniseries in the first place. Which is, as someone else said earlier, basically to the extent to which I'm still nostalgic about the initial, mostly good stretch of the original series. I can acknowledge that it was kinda shitty for about as long as it was kinda good, though, so I didn't have any illusions about the revival blowing my mind. I hoped for a couple of good episodes in the classic mode and got one solid classic new episode and some memorable moments, so my low expectations have been satisfied.

yeah this sounds like its about as good/consistent as the original run

Well, Homeland is still airing.

You saying you think Gordon ghostwrote this one due to contractual issues?

a trash Gollum anti-gentrification monster

guys, golems and Gollum are different things

watched this because of reaction. really enjoyed the alternate Mulder & Scully, seeing Lauren Ambrose onscreen in general, the Mulder tripping sequence, the extra joke of the placebo, wrapping it up with a painful extended self-important dialogue between ersatz M&S... though that was ruined by then having another actual extended etc from the real M&S. Without insane racism/bigotry/clichesplosion and hideous tonal shifts, some of Carter's ideas for this could have been an interesting and fun stand-alone.

wow, this finale was really the nadir.

lol at Smoking Man hiding out in Spartanburg, SC (I live in Greenville)

http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/fef72609be4842b395fab06ed7c384b2dfbf0073/c=251-0-2307-1546&r=x483&c=640x480/local/-/media/2016/02/23/CarolinaGroup/Greenville/635918138887021470-Screen-Shot-2016-02-23-at-8.44.16-AM.png

But yeah this whole revival has been mostly atrocious aside from the Darin Morgan episode

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/02/23/its-time-for-chris-carter-to-pass-the-x-files-to-the-next-generation

Yeah :(