the x-files s/d

someone was telling me recently that the real scoop around why x files moved to la from vancouver wasn't to do with david duchovny "hating the rain" or wanting to be closer to his family, instead he'd managed to get himself barred from all the strip clubs in the area, including one ran by the Hell's Angels, and pissed off lots of sex workers.

allegedly

The Lone Gunmen standalone series is a 'little bit' silly and totally ridiculous and I love it. It's also all available on YT HA!

Also notable for being cancelled after a cliffhanger ending which was resolved in a later X-Files episode.

and for the WT bomb plot in the pilot episode, whoa.

Mulder travels back in time from 1998 to 1940 : "Hey don't worry the world is at peace, there's a little trouble back at our White House but that'll blow over - so to speak"

Krycek: "you must be losing it mulder, I beat you with one hand"
Mulder: "isn't that how you like to beat yourself?"
Krycek: *points gun*
Mulder: "if those are my last words I can do better"

I rewatched the first six seasons or whatever for like the fiftieth time a couple years ago, maybe this is the time to push through the last three seasons + TLG + Millennium (many episodes of which I've never seen at all let alone more than once).

Somehow Satan Got Behind Me is the awesome Millennium episode with Charles Nelson Reilly, don't miss that one

oh wait I'm confused, obviously that's Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense, SSGBM is also written by Darin Morgan though

Trying to recall if there was anything from the second of the reboot seasons that would make it worth owning (as it's the only thing from that franchise not currently in my possession). Even the Darin Morgan ep was somewhat of a stinker iirc.

Via Negativa from the 8th season is creepy and great. I liked the weird little smart-technology morality play in the most recent season.

yeah that one wasn't bad, but it was definitely more bleak than funny... but the AI one (memorably titled "Rm9sbG93ZXJz") is pretty great, absolutely spooky in how empty it makes the city, IIRC there's nobody in it except Mulder and Scully at all.

I rewatched the first six seasons or whatever for like the fiftieth time a couple years ago, maybe this is the time to push through the last three seasons + TLG + Millennium (many episodes of which I've never seen at all let alone more than once).

I recently finished a first-time-ever watch of the intersting-looking episodes and:

loads of good Vince Gilligan eps in Season 7, the Duchovny-written-and-directed episode is fun, the Anderson-w-and-d one is not but was worth seeing what she was drawn to make in the context of the show.
Lone Gunmen is nearly bad but almost always silly and fun enough not to matter; a few eps are good.
One Vince Gilligan ep in S8. It's... fine.
S9 has a Gilligan spotlight-on-Doggett ep that's notable bcz it's the first thing directed by Michelle Maclaren and has lots of desert-y sunshine, so is a curio years before Breaking Bad. But that's about it. Similarly, the Jackass-referencing episode (by Tommy Schnauz) is fun to see a younger Aaron Paul. Gilligan's ep where the Brady Bunch house is haunted and murdering people is a little better. Carter's episode "Improbable" is fun, like most of his weird stand-alone experiments.
Dunno about Millennium, I only watched the pilot and the two Darin Morgan written-and-directed episodes.

But overall I reckon you can tap out happily at S07e21, the final stand-alone Mulder & Scully ep (it's a Gilligan).

Trying to recall if there was anything from the second of the reboot seasons that would make it worth owning (as it's the only thing from that franchise not currently in my possession). Even the Darin Morgan ep was somewhat of a stinker iirc.

Darin Morgan one was great, Rm9sbG93ZXJz was great, but you'll probably live a fine life without having them on a disc in your house.

Also notable for being cancelled after a cliffhanger ending which was resolved in a later X-Files episode.

Not even! Had a cliffhanger episode (including Michael McKean's X-Files character capturing the Gunmen & telling them their colleague is a bad 'un) end on To Be Continued, then aired an unrelated stand-alone a month later, then put the Lone Gunmen back into the X-Files and pop up across the season making jokes about their show being cancelled, then have McKean's character turn up at the end of the series and tell the feds, unrelated to The Lone Gunmen, that someone the Gunmen used to know is a bad 'un.

I'm dragging through the final series.

Is there a reason why Gillian Anderson constantly whispers or appears to have a gravily throat in most of these episodes?

I don't even know why I just asked such a dumb question. ignore.

watching that Rm9sbG93ZXJz episode now, best of the series for sure.

I have been wondering that about her voice as well. Seems like in the final series they started setting important scenes in churches or courtrooms so that the whispering would seem natural.

I thought Season 11 started out stronger than Season 10 - I genuinely liked Ghouli and Forehead Sweat - but really fell off in the second half except for that silent episode.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/1927385/the-fall-viewers-moan-they-cant-cope-with-the-shows-constant-whispering/

We started a rewatch this week :D

We’re watching on Hulu and damn the show looks good! Mr Veg said he read that they recreated it with the 35mm footage (sorry too lazy to google, sicbot will provide perhaps?)
So it’s still a parade of 90’s floppy hair and brown lipstick & ill fitting suits ... but in gorgeous film-level quality

Scully is not quite yet the Scully I love, she yells a lot more than I remember which is annoying

but it just starts so GOOD right out of the gate, l am glad it holds up.

also i noticed how, to me anyway, the look & color palette & settting of the first episode is like a venn diagram overlap of Silence of the Lambs + Twin Peaks ... so much my wheelhouse <3

Yes! so good, even in Season 1. A few dud episodes but still the general atmosphere of the show is just so appealing. And Mulder is at his prettiest.

The shoulder pads were so large

I started a casual selective rewatch a little while back. I watched the living hell out of all the episodes that were released in those old-school VHS box sets so now I've been occasionally watching the (almost entirely MOTW) episodes that I haven't seen as much. Something so soothing and transportive about M+S mumbling about killer computers against those washed-out Vancouver landscapes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1ninCOmqu0

The remasters do look great! They actually re-edited all the episodes from the original negatives and re-created a lot of the special effects. The first three seasons are converted to widescreen format too... the only real issue is the font on the intro and establishing text is different from the original.

Wow, just had a look, the remaster really does look terrific, font notwithstanding (they remastered hundreds of hours of footage but couldn’t get the janky font right?)

I need something like the ds9 spreadsheet so I can just watch the good ones. Last time I rewatched I just stuck to the Vince Gilligan and Darin Morgan episodes

yeah there's something so satisfying about the way the show tends to start post-credits, hearing the piano and string wash coming up over footage of the misty evergreens of Kansas or Georgia or wherever.

I have a spreadsheet of good 'uns but it's probably 2/3 Gilligan and Darin

(boop beep rm9sbg93zxjz: I haven't seen them but: the blu-ray remastering was outsourced to a rando company, so the widescreen reframing was done without any input from directors or Carter, and Fox would not supply the font to them for the titles; the company also delivered 4:3 versions of the remasters but Fox didn't want them; and yeah there's a mix of upscaling old effects shots and the remaster company's new effects)

xp well, what's your definition of good? Essential/v good from S1 - First 3 episodes, Ice, Eve, Beyond the Sea, E.B.E., Darkness Falls, Tooms, Erlenmeyer Flask. But there are plenty of decent or dumb-but-entertaining episodes. I'd say Space and Fire are painful enough to avoid entirely, and the several vengeful ghost episodes all tend to be boring as hell.

I've said it before, but the rewatch value of X-Files (at least through season six, from seven they moved shooting to LA) is the lush, rainy Vancouver locations, same reason the first two seasons of Twin Peaks are such a pleasure.

name a season and have everyone here give their top five from it

There’s something about watching these on the sofa with my mum while dad was out playing bridge that can never be remastered

gonna see if I can break it down to an extent without breaking spoiler tags

Season 1

S01e03 Squeeze - first Monster of the Week, imo mythology eps are deleterious to rewatch enjoyment (nb: I also thought so on first run and gave up occasionally watching bcz I hit too many of them)
S01e08 Ice - Thing riff
S01e13 Beyond The Sea - fun bcz it flips who's sceptical
S01e17 E.B.E. - mythology ep but intros the Lone Gunmen so I recommend it for n00bs
S01e21 Tooms - not only good, and a fun sequel MOTW, but intros Skinner

I'd go with...

S01E05 The Jersey Devil - a gloriously stupid MOTW episode that sets the tone for dozens of them to come - the local sheriff hates Mulder because you would, really, if an FBI agent turned up looking for lady bigfoot based on a drawing a homeless guy did for him MEANWHILE Scully goes on a date!
S01E08 Ice - as sic says, it's a solid Thing riff
S01E10 Fallen Angel - top tier UFO episode, featuring Max Fenig, predator aliens in the woods, a bogey on the radar screen, dastardly, lying military officers, indignant ER doctors, Mulder ranting about the truth... everything you'd want in a UFO episode
S01E11 Eve - genetically-enhanced girls from Brazil-style preteen murderers, plus amazing performance from Harriet Harris as the insane Eve 6 (hey isn't that a band)
S01E20 Darkness Falls - Body horror + eco-thriller, the gang gets desiccated by glowing green bugs set free from prehistory by amoral logging companies

re that second one not just that it's a Thing riff, but it's the first case of them going for a really direct Mulder-and-Scully-ising of another genre or story (and a p good Thing riff) ha xp!

There's something weirdly charming about doofy early episodes like 'Jersey Devil' where it's clear that they're still figuring out the characters and their world. Like what other episode is going to take a non-negligible amount of time to showcase Scully tolerating a birthday party full of screaming children.

well, to some extent that's a plot point... or I guess thematic variant... on the main storyline in the episode. at my office we printed out a copy of the homeless person's drawing and use it to surprise and annoy our co-workers by acting like there's some important document we need them to see and then showing them that.

lol. Yes, it's a hilariously shitty drawing iirc.

xp lmao

Darkness Falls has some plot issues but has the best creepy PNW vibes.

Also not a very good Scully episode, but the way they use the PNW setting and the creepiness of the glowy green bugs mostly makes up for it.

Was recently re-watching the totally batshit Red Museum, which throws together a cult, kidnapped/drugged teenagers, a pedophile who is also a concerned citizen, bovine growth hormone, Mulder and Scully eating ribs, alien DNA, an extremely convenient plane crash, and a government assassin who has shown up in rural Wisconsin. Apparently it was originally planned as a Picket Fences crossover.

Sorry for no spoiler tags but honestly there’s no amount of information I could provide that would make that episode less baffling.

There's something weirdly charming about doofy early episodes like 'Jersey Devil' where it's clear that they're still figuring out the characters and their world. Like what other episode is going to take a non-negligible amount of time to showcase Scully tolerating a birthday party full of screaming children.

Scully's first date outfit is seared into my mind. White lace and shoulder pads!
Very important character-building, really, as it establishes that Mulder will never let Scully date.

xp I don't really know what counts as a spoiler at this point. I don't think of basic episode descriptions as spoilers, unless they mention some major show-altering plot development, but I'm happy to spoiler-tag that kind of thing if people would rather.

well, the revive is a rewatch so the spoiler tags probably aren't strictly necessary

and yeah, Scully doesn't get to go on another date until season four when Mulder goes to Graceland!

I guess I don't tend to think of this as a heavily spoilerific show. The MOTW either gets captured/killed or doesn't, and the mythology is ultimately so labyrinthine and incoherent that I'm not sure I'd be able to say for sure if the divulgence of any particular detail was a legit spoiler or something made up to amuse the divulger. I guess generally I'd just avoid discussing the fates of characters whose stories take surprising and/or tragic turns (like when Marita Covarrubias got alien cloned and then subsequently fused into a slavering two-headed monster alongside her alien clone, oh whoooooops).

wow I guess I need to watch season 9

running through the rest in case Chuck or anyone really do want rewatch recommendations

Season 2

S02e02 "The Host" - Carter MOTW, Darin as Flukeman
S02e03 "Blood" - first Darin writing, a week after his first monster role. story credit, teleplay by Morgan & Wong (all my S1 picks are M&W btw)
S02e13 "Irresistible" - no paranormal elements! Carter script, it's always cool when he tries something out of his ordinary
S02e20 "Humbug" - Jim Rose Circus Sideshow ep, Darin's first full script. this is where I started watching, so the show always struggled to live up to itself
S02e23 "Soft Light" - the show's first freelance script purchase discovers Vince Gilligan. Tony Shalhoub as dweeb baddie

bonus track: S02e14 "Die Hand Die Verletzt" - haven't seen this one but it's Morgan & Wong doing parody on their way out the door to run their own shows, so curious

Season 3

S03e03 "D.P.O." - lightning boy, Jack Black / Giovanni Ribisi
S03e04 "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" - Peter Boyle & Darin both won Emmys for this
S03e12 "War of the Coprophages" - Darin Morgan cockroach episode
S03e17 "Pusher" - classic Vince Gilligan, lesser sequel later
S03e20 "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" - Darin's second stone-cold gold-plated classic this year. has a sequel in Millennium

bonus tracks: S03e13 "Syzygy" - Chris Carter attempt at a Darin-style irreverent genre-breaker. he doesn't pull it off but it's interesting to see him try
S03e22 "Quagmire" - not credited but heavily rewritten by Darin Morgan: has his jokes and signature characters

Season 4

S04e02 "Home" - Morgan & Wong come back after their own series flopped, with an ep so horrific that Fox never repeated it
S04e04 "Unruhe" - Vince Gilligan, spooky photographs
S04e07 "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" - Morgan solo, Kennedy assination counterfactuals, no Mulder & Scully on set
S04e10 "Paper Hearts" - VG, child killer
S04e20 "Small Potatoes" - another great nebbish monster written by VG, played by Darin who needed work after burning out on writing for the show

bonus tracks: Millennium S01e01 "Pilot" if you want a bit of context for later, not rly essential. fake Seattle.
S04e12 "Leonard Betts" - cancer vampire
S04e13 "Never Again" - Gillian Anderson requested an ep to show Scully's darker side. intended to be directed by Tarantino!

Season 5

S05e03 "Unusual Suspects" - VG: origin of Lone Gunmen, crossover Belzer as Munch, no Scully
S05e05 "The Post-Modern Prometheus" - CC: B&W Frankenstein homage
S05e12 "Bad Blood" Cliff Bole - A++ VG, comedy Rashomon with Luke Wilson
S05e19 "Folie à Deux" - VG, white collar work is a mechanism for invisible bug monsters to suck your soul
saving my fifth choice for...

also essential:
MS2e09 "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"
MS2e21 "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me" - two episodes of Millennium written AND directed by Darin, including his X-File sequel.

bonus tracks:
S05e06/e07 "Christmas Carol" & "Emily" - if you happen to be watching at Christmas, it's a dece Scrooge riff involving Scully's family
S05e08 "Kitsunegari" - sequel to S03's Pusher

Season 6

S06e02 "Drive" - A++ VG, starring Bryan Cranston
S06e03 "Triangle" - CC time twister and Rope homage. double-feature it with the Australian horror film of the same title.
S06e04/e05 "Dreamland" - Michael McKean is a MIB who bodyswaps Mulder
S06e010 "Tithonus" - VG: death photography, callback to Darin making Scully immortal
S06e014 "Monday" - Gilligan & Shiban, fun time loop bank robbery

bonus tracks: S06e06 "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" - Ed Asner & Lily Tomlin in a Carter comedy, fun if yr watching syncs up with the season
S06e015 "Arcadia" - Mulder & Scully undercover as married couple in a suburban subdivision
S06e018 "Milagro" - spooky writing-becomes-real story written for John Hawkes to star
S06e019 "The Unnatural" - Duchovny written-and-directed alien in the Negro Leagues baseball story
S06e020 "Three of a Kind" - sequel to Unusual Suspects with Scully, no Mulder
S06e021 "Field Trip" - Scully and Mulder get fucked up on mushrooms and their respective hallucinatory perspectives on the episode merge

Season 7

S07e03 "Hungry" - classic VG, shown from monster's perspective
S07e08 "The Amazing Maleeni" - sleight-of-hand-or-magic ep with Ricky Jay
S07e12 "X-Cops" - A++ VG, straight-up made as an episode of Cops
S07e19 "Hollywood A.D." - parody ep w/d by DD, including Garry Shandling & Tea Leoni
S07e21 "Je Souhaite" - first VG direction, final regular Mulder & Scully ep, Will Sasso is in it, great place to stop if you're on a pure nostalgia hunt

bonus tracks:S07e04 "Millennium" - patch-job finale for that series: not good, but if you want to see M&S kiss...
S07e14 "Theef" - dece MOTW that's not riffing on anything for a change
S07e17 "all things" - not good but GA w/d, if yr curious or want to compare to Duchovny's effort the next week

Season 8

S08e04 Roadrunners is a decent Scully focus in the Doggett era, and the only Gilligan ep this year bcz he was off running Lone Gunmen

Season 9

S09e05 "Lord of the Flies" - not great but: Jackass riff, Aaron Paul & Jane Lynch act, first Thomas Schnauz script (he came from Lone Gunmen and later wrote lots of Breaking Bad/BCS)
S09e07 "John Doe" - first VG / Michelle McLaren collab (she later directed loads of Breaking Bad, a bit of BCS, The Deuce pilot)
S09e013 "Improbable" - Chris Carter loopy Burt Reynolds fantasia
S09e015 "Jump the Shark" - end of Lone Gunmen, bonus Michael McKean (nb that TLG's second-last episode was a cliffhanger involving McKean's character, but that the two don't actually connect
S09e018 "Sunshine Days" - second VG direction, Brady Bunch house does some murders