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

but you do get one of the best OTT death sequences ever (Cancer Man) and all the old characters make appearances (dead or alive) - Gibson Praise totally roXors. shame many aspects were left completely unresolved (what happened to the bounty hunter aliens? and those crafty Greys? not a sniff) but overall a fitting climax all things considered.

http://36.media.tumblr.com/178a9425ef086c44182e59dab823beb1/tumblr_nftu1mSCyx1r77qhao1_1280.png

http://comicbook.com/2015/03/21/the-x-files-revival-closer-than-ever/

what color will scully's hair be

The first of six last-ever episodes aired last night! Or maybe not, if the ratings are good.

I watched it, it was fun but bad in most of the ways classic Chris Carter-penned mytharc episodes were bad (when they were bad... he wrote some awesome ones too). Consensus of reviewers who got to watch the first three episodes are that episodes two and three are significantly stronger. Episode two airs tonight, then we get one a week through February.

Anyone else tune in?

I did. Agree that the debut was dull, but I'm committed to watching the whole thing.

Not sure it would continue past six, though. Duchovny might be on board, but I think Anderson is enjoying doing too many other things to be tied down to a role she started playing 20 years ago.

i thought this was really bad! yet i enjoyed it. writing was pretty poor, there was quite a lot of mulder going on about "we've been lied to all these years" to scully without bothering to explain what he was talking about. the acting was poor, duchovny seems like he just woke up or something - really slow-paced and labored delivery.

but im going to keep watching for sure.

Reviews were pretty dire.

Joel McHale always seems to look younger than he actually is, but it's like he had 20 years cgi'ed off of him for this.

Super dumb. Trying to do too much in a single episode. They should have kept it simple. Also, the show already did the "everything we've discovered about aliens and the gov't was a lie!" thing back in season 5. It's such a cheap move.

Anyway I did enjoy watching it and it was great seeing everyone back and I loved how much Mulder looked like complete garbage.

Mulder in 2016 is problematic, especially since he doesn't seem to be working for the FBI anymore. He is now an old unemployed white dude ranting about government conspiracies, which these days means racist right-wing lunatic. Teaming up with mirror-world Glenn Beck helps this image not at all. Writers should have taken steps to avoid this, although I'm not sure what that would be.

I did think it was funny they took a pretty nice swipe at O'Reilly on a Fox show.

weird that they even bother with the mytharc/continuity stuff - isn't it abundantly clear by now that the best stuff about this show was always the "monster of the week" episodes? They should've just stuck with those.

Up until the first movie, a lot of the mytharc episodes were really good! Certainly essential to the show, even if the monster episodes are a lot more pleasurable to re-watch (and at their best, manage to hit all of the show's major themes with requiring a ton of continuity).

without requiring that is

I was fairly invested in the mytharc until it became apparently they didn't have any idea what to do with it.

tbh, I don't even remember what happened in either of the movies now except that one of them had to do with bees.

I was also invested in the mytharc during the shows earlier years. although I found the monster of the week episodes more entertaining I was excited when it became apparent that an episode was going to advance the overarching plot. then of course the whole damn thing, but especially the mytharch, came off the rails and I ended up not even watching the show.

the contrast between schlubby mulder in his army jacket and botoxed, besuited scully was pretty funny

I really enjoyed the first movie despite the plot being incredibly silly

This first episode felt like Carter was trying to write to every one of the 5,167 X-Files-related notes he'd jotted down over the past 15 years. A little rushed, a little OTT. It was all right. I'm down with more.

FWIW, we're supposed to get a mixture of mythology and monster of the week episodes with this revival.

I'm not sure there's anything you can do about it... the thrill of uncovering a conspiracy kind of relies on most of the conspiracy still being uncovered. After 80-100 episodes, there just won't be any dark spots left on the map, and the exercise ceases to be exploration and becomes... keeping an org chart up-to-date.

Seasons 1-5 and the first movie are classic. The show became less classic after the movie, for sure, to the extent that I went from watching religiously to maybe only seeing 4 or 5 episodes from the last three seasons. I didn't feel a burning need to catch up prior to the revival but I would kinda like to try watching through the original series again.

I just checked and saw that we're getting a Darin Morgan episode!

oh did anyone else notice the fairly poor cgi trying to make it look like they were in dc?

The show really lost something when they moved production from Vanvouver to Los Angeles.

I literally can't remember a single thing about the mytharc conspiracy, it all got so convoluted - there was the smoking guy, and aliens abducted Mulder's sister, and then Scully had an alien baby? or something?

The Darin Morgan episode is supposed to be on par with his classic episodes, if the journos who got preview copies are to be believed.

E2 was quite an improvement.

feels like this whole thing is a reboot so far, with most of the old episodes with alien mythology swept under the rug. episode two was decent, although apparently the alien hybrid children are the x-men

Haven't watched e2 yet, but e1 was so wack. It felt like a neverending parody sketch without a punchline. And for me most egregious was presenting that grab bag of midnight AM radio conspiracies, Mulder AND Scully teaming up with a 9/11 truther, barely batting an eye...bleuch. It was all just too stupid & on the nose for me

Yeah, the scene where Winger comes back to tell Scully important plot stuff and then ends with his mouthbreathing "and... I wanted to see you again" being followed with a scene of Scully sipping champagne in his limo is just utterly mystifying. That line worked? The old Scully would have shot him and gone home to read medical journals.

In other news, episode two was about a hundred times better.

E1 was a strong reminder of how much I hated all the conspiracy shit. I could watch MOTWs for days on end but drop some alien illuminati bullshit (without a solid MOTW) and I'm out.

omg ep2 is like night & day

yeah episode 1 didn't do more than make me thankful that my x-files influenced interest in conspiracy stuff was nothing more than a passing teenage phase, otherwise i too would be living in a world where alex ross / glenn beck were actually right about everything. but maybe that's the point! fun weirdo spooky mulder is actually a tea party loony. guess i'll watch episode 2 and find out!

uh alex JONES, that is

Alex Ross conspiracy: his dad did 9/11 / aliens / the illuminati

lol at Darin Morgan's IMDB bio photo - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0604587/

same reaction as everyone else; episode one pretty bad, episode two marked improvement (although still not great). I'm still down for several more of these miniseries and would watch them if they made them.

i kind of missed how they reopened the x-files at the end of episode one though; like episode two starts and they got their suits back and they're back investigating shit like nothing ever happened?

Yeah, that seemed weird. Just back in the ol' office, taking a case, no biggie.

Gillian has so much more gravitas than DD these days that their scenes together are almost embarrassing

Not watched it but

He is now an old unemployed white dude ranting about government conspiracies, which these days means racist right-wing lunatic.

is what I'd be looking for.

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

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

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, February 2, 2016 9:48 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hahaha are you kidding me

that's a weird equivalency to draw - the WHAT IS THE REAL CONSPIRACY stuff was deeply irritating to me precisely because it was so sloppy and open-ended, it was just a trail of breadcrumbs leading nowhere (or at worst, around in circles). Serling's monologues may be silly but their just structural bookends, it's not like they undermine the stories sandwiched in-between. Whereas X-Files mytharc conspiracy nonsense fell apart any time you gave it any close examination, it was just an exercise in delayed resolution that inevitably just became frustrating and irritating. At least for me. This is why I preferred the monster-of-the-week stories so much, they were self-contained little mystery/sci-fi stories, like something from an anthology, a format I've always appreciated in serialized TV shows.
xxp

for the record I don't have a problem with hamfistedness, ridiculousness, or corniness or whatever, but I *do* have an issue with incoherence, which is where X-Files inevitably went.

xp to Morbs - I have affection for Star Trek but don't hold it in particularly high regard but I know it's so special to so many people that I just keep my opinions to myself most of the time, I have to give it credit for reaching ppl's hearts. tbh morbs I feel about Star Trek like I feel about Spielberg movies

arrrghhh you

i think in the last 15 years there's quite a spectrum of Spielberg movies

i was parroting your intro on the essence of Greek tragedy at A View from the Bridge last week btw

Rhys Darby was dressed as Kolchalka, right?

*Kolchak*

Fkn autocorrect

Ha ha, the two stoners at the beginning were the same ones in War of the Coprophages and Quagmire back in S3!

I've seen two different rankings of every XF episode recently - I agree with that Thrillist list linked above a little more than the Vulture one, despite the Burt Reynolds as God episode getting into the top ten...! The Deep Roy episode is also surprisingly high!

Ha ha, the two stoners at the beginning were the same ones in War of the Coprophages and Quagmire back in S3!

lol yeah I noticed that too! Same actors even!

This ep was a lot of fun.

what would you do if you were a werewolf?

uhhh, get high every day?

Rhys Darby was dressed as Kolchak, right?

This was originally a Kolchak script from a Spotnitz reboot that Morgan wrote on, which got cancelled before they made it to that episode

http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Night_Stalker/Night_Stalker_1x12_-_The_M_Word.pdf

(your phone autocorrects to a misspelling of James Kochalka?)

"it's just too silly!"

"it's my life you're talking about!"

this was excellent. finally made me really appreciate the show coming back. I'm glad that they seem to be hitting every 'type' of episode in this run. also...ratings have been huge, right? surely they're going to do this again next year.

so good! all the beats of quirky humor that i remember, lovely heart to it also

rhys darby is the best

Gillian Anderson looked like she was having so much fun this episode.

"While Scully cracks a smile midway through “Were-Monster” and remarks, “I forgot how much fun these cases can be,” Morgan (and Mulder in the moment) disagrees. Morgan cites his “very real fear” of angering fans who would rather watch a mythology episode, or one that dwells more on the intricacies of Mulder and Scully’s relationship. "

Someone tell Morgan that literally no one would rather have more conspiracy or relationship episodes vs Morgan eps or more serious MOTWs.

The series ran for another six years after Morgan last wrote an episode, so there must have been some people other than Chris Carter who give a shit about conspiracy and relationship eps.

I'll happily tell him that I only want Morgan eps, rather than any other kind at all, though.

I'd like a Gilligan episode or two but he's probably too busy these days

He said he wanted to, but was too busy with Saul. Guess he could have taken the Carter MOTW slot.

Or maybe just take the show away from Carter altogether.

i'd be up for a millenium revival

Uncovering the sinister workings of a mysterious organization that they eventually dissolved when nobody really noticed for sixteen years.

they

i liked the alien conspiracy episodes early on, oily eye ppl & kryacheck (sp?).... but over the course of many seasons it def got tiresome. lone gunmen helped a bit but still, i got bored with it all eventually

I always preferred motw episodes because they're nice & self-contained

I prefer MOTW, but a lot of the awesome two-parters were mytharc episodes... Duane Barry/Ascension, Colony/Endgame, Tunguska/Terma, Nisei/731, Tempus Fugit/Max, Dreamland I/II... a good rule of thumb for two-parters is to avoid them if they occur at the beginning or end of a season or after season six.

The alien conspiracy stuff really hits the skids post-movie, because after you have a giant spaceship in Anarctica where the hell are you gonna go from there?

Season 6 onward is such a depressing slog. There are a few bright spots here and there but man oh man did the show fall off hard. We find out what happened to Samantha and it's the dumbest most anticlimactic thing imaginable (she was returned by the aliens and lived with the Smoking Man and then she died/was turned into a spirit or something).

And then Mulder leaves (sort of) and dies and Robert Patrick/Annabeth Gish come in and then the wisecracking puppet dragon and cousin Oliver and they all go to Disneyland and yeah

Yeah, the best of seasons six and seven could have made a strong season six, and everything from eight and nine should be erased from the timeline... the show being so established is a mortal blow to good mytharc stories but opens up the MOTW episodes to all kinds of hilarious and interesting variations on the theme.

But prior to that, it's like F. Hazel says, there are so many great mythology episode two-parters. The Anasazi/Paperclip/The Blessing Way 3-parter is just fucking EPIC

yeah I loved a lot of the mytharc episodes from the early seasons when they were first aired, though i tend to go back to the motw episodes now if im bored and want to watch some old x files on Netflix

i was the perfect age for the whole conspiracy theory stuff though i feel, was probably 9 or 10 when the first season was aired on british tv and used to watch the show religiously until seasons 5 or 6. i never thought at the time that x files was remotely silly as i probably would now if i was to go back and rewatch, i was enthralled, thought it was the best tv ever.

"she was returned by the aliens and lived with the Smoking Man and then she died/was turned into a spirit or something"

i missed this completely

Piper Maru was the shit, yo

Though I agree that the show should have been put to rest after S7, I honestly though S8 had some really good episodes. Maybe not quite enough to justify the show's continued existence at that point, but some good stories which brought back some horror & mystery after S6 and S7 over-dosed on the light-hearted comedy somewhat. And Robert Patrick was really good, I thought.

The show was really resonant and powerful when it was using UFOs, themselves a mythological outgrowth of the post-WWII era, as a lens to examine the USA's real-life legacy of complicity with former Axis-power scientists during the Cold War. The idea that it's not just a cover up but a kind of collusion with evil that taints the very foundations of order and power in our country. That shit is still relevant.

xp the one where Doggett is being stalked in his dreams was really good.

omg i forgot about anasazi/blessing way/paperclip

awesome

I think what latebloomer is talking about is why this show outshines Star Trek or the Twilight Zone for me... it's less universal maybe, but it explores a lot of themes and myths running through American History (especially post-WWII history and myth) in ways that are deeper and (for me) far more interesting. America coming to terms with being afraid of itself.

anasazi and paper clip are rad but the vision quest parts of blessing way are pretty cringeworthy

Is the Blessing Way the one with Mulder cracking jokes inside a Native American tent after his Deathy Hallows interlude?

just watched monster of the week. fuckin excellent monster of the weak, the rhythm was so great

Havent seen ep 3 yet but if Rhys Darby is in it, I'm sold, must hassle the lad to download it stat.

Just watched this week's ep last night. It seemed possible for a little while that it was going to wobble and go off the rails completely but it was ultimately just lovely. Darby's jaunty last leap as he ran off into the woods had me in stitches.

it would be cool if X-files had never gone off the air and kept swapping out lead actors to the point where it was now a teen show about Willy Mulder being trained to use his alien powers by his sinister aunt Samantha

X-Files: TNG, would watch

Dagoo!

Daggoo!

I loved this episode. I love Rhys Darby so that helped but it was interesting a lot of my xfiles fan friends hated it. The first 2 eps had me annoyed at the suspension of disbelief but then I was like "hang on, its the xfiles duh".

I watched the first two after the D. Morgan ep, confirmed my lack of interest in seeing them in the first place. Carter one was just stunningly ill-judged for taking up 1/3 of these handful of episodes 14 years after anyone was last trying to follow / care about the alien conspiracy stuff, and then overturning everything those ppl HAD followed, then dropping this volte face for a whole month. Also not making any actual plot sense.

(Wong one was fine tbh, ancient threads of continuity I never saw in the first place being picked up, but in service of the characters' long distance from each other rather than fanwank.)

*bcz they were on telly b2b on a night I was home

I can understand why this last episode might've turned off casual fans who only remember the show as spooky and brooding and monster-y and alien-y. Episodes like this might not have been the norm back in the day but they were very much a part of the show whether some people remember that or not.

lol at Rhys grabbing Mulder's gun and tossing it away

batcrap crazy!!

Darren Morgan was at that live X-Files marathon that Kumail Nanjiana hosted and after they played "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" he said, "Watching even episodes I wrote all these years later I catch things I missed the first time. Did they really say that Scully is immortal?"

Darin, Nanjiani, and he presumably wouldn't have included a joke about Scully's immortality in the callback-to-his-own-work-heavy new ep if he didn't already know he'd initiated it with a joke in his old work.

Or he'd written the script for this new one where she jokes about being immortal and jokes about not remembering it, knowing the audience was going to know he was messing with them

I saw Tim Armstrong in the credits and figured it couldn't possibly be that Tim Armstrong but whaddayaknow.

Or he'd written the script for this new one where she jokes about being immortal and jokes about not remembering it, knowing the audience was going to know he was messing with them

this is what I'm saying - he'd written, directed, and edited the episode months before the Cinefamily event.

I guess the popularity of this shows stems from ancient wonder about beings from space with a love story thrown in.

But I don't buy it. Maybe not enough detail to the mythology.

that episode was fun, but what a mess!

ad xpost yeah it was obviously a joke what the fuck dude

Let me give you some more names to autocorrect: Scrully, Moulder, the Cankerman

Sigur Ros Smirking Man

Eugene Victor Toonces

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 :(

I give them a half point for CHEMTRAILS!!!! in the last episode, but that might be the only point

ALIEN DNA

literally everyone in America's immune system has shut down but not to fear scully is homebrewing some antidote in a d.c. hospital, there'll be plenty to go around folks

gah do I even want to watch these last two episodes?

guys, golems and Gollum are different things

I am really embarrased I spelled that like I did, because I do know the difference. WTF me.

c'mon the last ep literally had the line "This is so unnecessary, Fox!", gotta give Carter moxie points for that

can I just watch the Darin Morgan episode and skip the rest then?

(And is that episode even good?)

it's not terrible, but not really on the level of the great darin morgan episodes. i think people are overrating it some because of how absolutely dire every single other episode of this run was.

The Darin Morgan episode was great, except for the transphobic stuff about which they should have known better, and then Founder's Mutation and Home Again were passable with some great Mulder/Scully interplay. The other three episodes were complete garbage.

lol, the commonality b/w the other three episodes? written and directed by carter

"Babylon" was fucking insane.

it's not terrible, but not really on the level of the great darin morgan episodes. i think people are overrating it some because of how absolutely dire every single other episode of this run was.

I agree completely

One question re the suicide bomber ep (which yeah, that was a pile of insulting dung). What was with the 2 "homeland security" guys. Were they HS? Why did one speak to the other in Arabic and they started looking shifty, then cover their faces when their photo was being taken. Were they part of the terrorist cell? That bit was compeltely wtf confusing - hell the whole everyone fighting over him in the hospital bit was, tbh.

And I refuse to believe the placebo effect can make people trip their balls off.

It's the third-best Darin Morgan episode, and the trans stuff is unfortunately a little clunky but plainly ally-focused, not phobic. M&S accept her wholly on her stated identity, and Mulder tells Mann that it's entirely common and no big deal.

refuse to believe the placebo effect can make people trip their balls

Fox wants to believe!

I assumed she did not actually give him placebo, but was lying about it to cover her own ass

That did occur to me, yeah.

***WARNING***NERD ALERT&&&I mean one of the things I liked most about original X-Files was that it exploited the "diegetic reality"(??) of the implausible things we witness *typically in the opening sequence, so that we spend a good deal of every episode yelling "Shut up! You weren't there!" at all the people who are pooh-poohing Mulder's crazy explanation for this week's crazy phenomenon (NB this is not so much true of the mythology episodes)

... so I feel like with the drug trip itself, they were already violating this longstanding convention of having the camera give us "objective reality" and not subjective delusion (although I can think of counterexamples & I'm sure you can think of more); but to then follow up with "SIKE! that drug trip wasn't a real drug trip; Mulder is an unreliable narrator of his own mental state" just pissed me off more!!

"longstanding convention" more like BONGstanding convention amirite folks /signs off

Straigh up tho that whole scene was gratuitous and gross, but maybe I'm getting prudish in my old age who knows.

that scene was america 2016 through filtered through chris carter

the trans stuff is unfortunately a little clunky but plainly ally-focused, not phobic.

I dunno, the reactions of trans people online were pretty uniformly negative. Also following up two episodes later with some lazy Muslim-bashing doesn't really make me feel like giving them the benefit of the doubt on the trans thing.

Morgan and Carter are plainly two very different writers; this show is not group-written.

also lol at "he couldn't have freaked out on a placebo!" when last night I watched the Vince Gilligan episode where a serial child-killer can implant dreams into Mulder's head a decade later because Mulder profiled him so hard that he understood his mind

Mulder's brain has to be pretty mushy by this point after all the torture and alien abuse and profiling

Morgan and Carter are plainly two very different writers; this show is not group-written.

A lot of people work on that show, in 2016 at least one of them should have realized that a scene with a crack-smoking prostitute trans woman might need a rethink. Doesn't matter who is writing the episode. Same goes for having Muslim characters that are suicide bombers. Their terrible depiction of Texas can be chalked up to the crippling jealously non-Texans have for our state, however.

depiction of Philly totally otm though

Did they ever actually set an episode in Vancouver?

the Marco Rubio one

talk about a werelizard

Damn, that final episode was a-grade baloney.

Carter has said FOX wants more episodes so I suppose there are more years of disappointment ahead

William peeks his head out of the ship. "It's ok mom and dad, I'm here!"

Does anyone else think that they may continue the series with the two younger agents (Lauren Ambrose and the other guy) as the leads? I can't believe Duchovney and Anderson want to restart their roles, and maybe Carter picked the other two because they look so much like them. When I saw ep 5 I thought it was going to be a joke episode because of how similar they looked.

When I saw ep 5 I thought it was going to be a joke episode because of how similar they looked.

Well it was a complete joke of an episode so they were nearly there.

I really don't get how after all this time, with so much potential and just a few eps, they messed this up so badly and so lazily. What happened? Did they have a week to write and shoot everything? So weird.

Chris Carter happened, is what happened. He needs to relinquish the reins, but the fantastic ratings and the nearly assured renewal is just a refutation.

Carter explicitly said (sometime this week, I believe) that there are no plans to pass the baton to the younger agents.

WTF, not a refutation. Too damn early. I'm sure at this point that Carter is convinced that he's still got it when in fact he hasn't had it in a long time, and when he did have it, 'it' wasn't much to write home about.

The porn Mulder and Scully really need to be axed... no chemistry at all, especially next to Duchovny and Anderson.

Agree, but Lauren Ambrose is Lauren Ambrose.

it's not enough.

Agree with that too, but I'd probably give it a one or two episode trial run.

Generally enjoyed the minseries, but the Carter episodes had a lot of problems. He was always hit or miss as a writer (and in the latter half of the original series' run, more miss than hit) but it's a pity the guy who wrote "Deep Throat", "Paper Clip" and (Millennium episode) "Lamentation" seems to have forgotten how to write an episode of television altogether.

The two new agents seem to be Carter's attempt to create a new long-term continuity (or the potential for one); I don't think he's quite given up the idea of "franchising" his one and only commercial hit.

It was almost as though the show did everything possible to sabotage itself-- from that Joel McHale character who simultaneously supposed to be ridiculous and right about everything, to Scully making crazy leaps of logic, to having Mulder be depressed, drugged or sick all the time, to relying on continuity nobody remembers or cares about, to those new agents out of some CW show.

Yeah the Alex Jones-esque character rang so false for me. Maybe the concept of truthers and shit has taken on a tarnish rather than just being a flight of fancy, since the Xfiles was around initially? I dunno.

I couldnt at all buy Scully believing him tho. WTF.

My question from having missed basically everything after season 5 to now - didn't this use to be more equivocal? Wasn't that largely the thing, where something was going on but maybe Mulder was right and maybe Scully was right and even when it was something weird, there was always the possibility kept alive that the government was just fucking with them? But by the second episode of this season, there's kids throwing people around with telekinesis - did this happen in the later series of have they just gone for broke with this one?

There was definitely another episode with kids throwing people around with telekinesis. They kind of gave up on the attempts at balance later on.

My hot take is that these last 6 episodes are mostly farce and camp, and I appreciate them in that light. I think some people if not everyone involved in making them are just fucking with us. It all seems too knowing to be just a simple failure. I mean, the new agent is named Einstein? Come on, that's ridiculous. Having a lark was all that was left to do after Chris Carter ran the show into the ground the first time... Even if Carter really was honest in his intentions about the episodes he wrote, Duchovny is supposedly a Beckett scholar IRL. He must appreciate the unreality and absurdness of the writing, right? He seemed to be playing those aspects up in his performance. Anyway, he and Gillian Anderson grew a lot as actors since the original series, and that seeing them acting together again was my favorite part of the whole thing.

tl;dr: I want to believe they were just dicking around and having fun

yeah this felt a lot closer to the actual hodgepodge clusterfuck feel of OG X-files than I was expecting. That said, if he wants to bring in some new-school ringers to write and direct next time around, I won't complain.

But by the second episode of this season, there's kids throwing people around with telekinesis - did this happen in the later series of have they just gone for broke with this one?

the third episode of season 1 featured a guy who could stretch through tiny spaces like Mr Fantastic. episode 12 featured a pyrokinetic. etc

I'm forced to admit that this was ultimately a shit sandwich of X-Files references. A "hey we got the band back together" victory lap and possible reboot rather than an actual half-assed attempt at figuring out what X-Files 2016 would actually look like. We're surrounded by real world everyday Weird Shit apocalypse and none of that sense permeates into the reboot.

Watching the final ep after all bcz I'm housesitting and a repeat was on TV. It's already worse than ep 5 [crazy racism aside] before the titles, thanks to a three-minute recap of ep 1 leading into Scully's four-minute verbal recap of a bunch of episodes I didn't want to watch 20 years ago... with WHOOSHT! PPPEEWH! kung fu sound effects over every photo illustrating her narration.

how does holding a hanky loosely over the bridge of your nose stop you from catching a virus?

if it can, wouldn't taking it away from your face to talk make you catch the virus after all?

is Joel McHale's character's show (or shows? how many does he have?) even broadcast on TV or is it just youtube?

either way, how is the virus causing digital interference in the transmission?

Just reached the third one on UK terrestrial TV, god almighty I have missed Darin Morgan and his profound affection for the awkward despairing schlubs of the world.

(I can pretend this season stopped at 3 episodes, y/n?)

xpost I'm sure Joel has his own streaming network kind of like Baze TV and has created this virus hoax to mask its impending bancruptcy

^ this would actually be the best resolution to this plot

Andrew - no, the Glen Morgan one next week is the place to stop, it feels like a good monster of the week the same way Darin's feels like a classic Darin Morgan episode.

In a way, I kinda thought this was a test run to see how much interest there still was in the X-Files series. The way end was setup for this season, if there wasn't a huge amount of interest, you could finish the story line in a movie, if there is interest, you could expand it and keep going.

Much obliged, sic!

if there wasn't a huge amount of interest, you could finish the story line in a movie

sure, this makes sense

god this ep is just endless scenes of everyone explaining the fucking plot. like, more than normal

and does carter know how to end an episode WITHOUT someone staring into a giant beam of light

jfc

http://tvline.com/2016/08/08/x-files-season-11-episode-count-premiere-date-2018-fox/

more eps plz even if only to continue fueling my crush on gillian anderson

Fingers crossed for zero episodes written by Chris Carter. We will probably get ten. Which I'll deal with if the eleventh is a Darin Morgan joint.

Oh wait, misread the url (which is blocked at my stupid work for some stupid reason) as saying there were eleven episodes.

Ten episodes would be awesome, provided (as Old Lunch states) that as few as possible are penned by Chris Carter, and more MOTW vs mytharc. Which is basically the same as saying less Carter.

That final episode was like Carter setting up a whole new alien conspiracy arc which he'd usually dick around with for a couple of seasons except it was 40-odd minutes long. I honestly don't know wtf he was thinking.

Please don't make me remember that last episode

I'd take the original last episode before it

Mytharc eps by Carter are the price you pay for having new X-Files; at least they were clearly marked on Wikipedia months before they aired, so easy to skip.

If it was eight eps, then three Carters (two mytharcs and one weirdo experiment that might be remarkable or might flop, just like the old days), one each again from Morgan, Morgan & Wong, a promising newbie and a Gilligan would be the absolute highest improvement we could hope for, I reckon. If ten, Carter would probably cram more disease conspiracy plot in, no matter who's writing.

Obviously I'd wish for as many Morgan Minors as possible, but one wonders if he has it in him to write two in a year, given his historical pace - even last year's episode was an old script.

A Gilligan would be sick.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't rewatched any of Gilligan's episodes since BB fully opened my eyes to his talents.)

Oh, I see that that's not true. I just saw 'Pusher' the other night. I guess I didn't realize he started on the show that early.

He said he would have loved to do one this year, but couldn't work it around Better Call Saul's schedule.

might be remarkable or might flop,

I loved the mushroom trip and the dynamics of the ersatz Mulder & Scully with Lauren Ambrose in btw, as incredibly bad as the pacing and ~race~ issues were in that ep btw. But I also recently saw the teenage witches ep that Carter wrote, & enjoyed that hugely too

they need to do another season to wash the taste of this last one out. I think I liked one episode out of that run.

did he do the episode where mulder needs to keep driving or the guy's head will pop? or possibly mulders head will pop?

i watched that one "recently" (couple years back) and was p impressed

That was a Gilligan. The guy was Cranston.

also according to cranston on npr a while back, that episode was integral to his being cast as Walter White.

back again next year, per the X files FB page.

If they try a big effects scene like the nu-finale, I hope they have a higher budget

I hope they just pretend that Carter two-parter didn't happen

we all got mindwiped

100% agree

cosign

we have a third motion passes

i'd be interested in them bringing it back and making it even worse. why stop where they did; lets see just how low the x files can go

on the bright side, maybe more Dagoo

Anyone going to bother with the new season? I’ll at least watch the Darin Morgan episode.

of course I'll watch it. I don't have high expectations but maybe it'll surprise me.

Gillian indicated she's probably out after this, which is unfortunate. I hope it will actually finish then and they don't try to do another season without either her or Duchovny, there's zero point in that now.

bring back john doggett

in for Darin Morgan, happy to lay back this time unless any others get especially good reviews

nice that there are a bunch of new writers, shame that Gilligan couldn't come back too but I'd rather have Better Call Saul

had not noticed that the guy from the "x-files agent everyone forgot"/mandala effect episode, which was the fourth episode of the ill-conceived second revival season, appears in the scanned x-files documents in the second episode. his badge clearly visible for a moment when Skinner opens up the scans

say Brian Huskey's name u bitch