Musings of an X-Phile

The upside of being sick and stuck in my apartment for the last four days is that I've watched a lot of X-Files DVDs. I finished up season five yesterday (though I may not have had my eyes open for all of it…but I've totally seen those episodes before!), which brings me right about to where I started as a viewer. I started watching X-Files mid-season six, caught the first half of that season in reruns, saw the movie, then saw previous seasons completely out of order on FX. Now I can safely say I've seen every episode of the X-Files, and I have a bit more perspective on the arc of the show as a whole.

( On jumping the shark )

What hurts for so many disenchanted X-Files fans is that when it was good, it was so very, very good. So even when it had declined, as it had in season six, to a level still greater than most TV shows ever reach, it felt like a betrayal. We knew what it was capable of, and instead we got this. Part of that was the inevitable toll of a long-running show—there are only so many relatives you can kill or villains you can resurrect or alternate theories you can float. But a lot was just the degradation of the in-between episodes. Episodes like "Pusher" were genius and had nothing to do with the ongoing storylines. Maybe the mytharc would have been tolerable if the filler episodes had been as good as they used to be.