Musings of an X-Phile

[ivyfic]

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.

In previous debates with other X-Files fans, when they had said the X-Files jumped the shark somewhere around season five, I'd always denied this fact. After all, I started watching season six, and it was clearly still good enough to draw me in. But with the perspective of seeing everything in order—I'd say the X-Files probably jumped the shark at the beginning of the fifth season, maybe as early as the fourth, and definitely by the beginning of the sixth.

I'm basing this on the number of stand out episodes per season. I'm completely ignoring the mythology episodes because, frankly, the X-Files mytharc is a freaking mess and it's impossible to address any one of those episodes independently since they invariably don't have a definable storyline and tend to be filled with long pseudo-philosophical voice-overs about life over starscape visuals and lots of scenes with the Syndicate saying vaguely threatening but meaningless things to each other. So basically, though the mytharc episodes have some cool shit sometimes (exploding oil guyser? Fuck yeah) they really don't enter into my evaluation of the show.

No, the best part of the show has always been the monster-of-the-week episodes. In rewatching, I was amazed by the number of episodes I would recommend to anyone, not just X-Files fans, and that I would rank as some of the best hours of television out there. Episodes that were creepy, tense, suspenseful, with few or no plot holes, great details and lots of snappy dialogue.

These are my personal "god, I love this one," episodes. I know some of these are disliked by most X-Files fans ("Born Again," I know), but these are my favorites. The rest of each season is made up of usually around six mytharc episodes and then a bunch of standard, nothing special, filler episodes, with one or two clunkers a season (hello, "Fearful Symmetry").

Season 1
5 of 24 Episodes
Squeeze, Ice, Eve, Beyond the Sea, Born Again

Season 2
6 of 25 Episodes
Blood, Duane Barry, Ascension, Aubrey, Irresistible, Humbug

Season 3
10 of 24 Episodes
Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, Oubliette, Revelations, War of the Coprophages, Syzygy, Grotesque, Pusher, Hell Money, Jose Chung's From Outer Space, Wetwired

Season 4
6 of 24 Episodes
Unruhe, Paper Hearts, Leonard Betts, Never Again, Kaddish, Small Potatoes

Season 5
6 of 20 Episodes
Unusual Suspects, Detour, Bad Blood, Mind's Eye, Pine Bluff Variant, Folie a Deux

Season 6
2 of 22 Episodes
Tithonus, Monday

Season 3 is clearly a high water mark. What's more noticeable, though, is that in later seasons the show relied heavily on gimmicky or funny episodes. Yes, "Bad Blood" is a classic, but it only works because the show was so set in its formula by then. And you can only do a show like that once. "Unusual Suspects" is cute, but "Three of a Kind" presages the atrocity that was The Lone Gunman TV show. By season five, there are several episodes with little or no of one of the characters (like "Chinga" or "Unusual Suspects") and one with almost none of either Mulder or Scully ("Travelers").

Season six trotted out one ridiculous premise after another. We had bodyswaps, Mulder and Scully have to pretend to be married while undercover, romantic triangles, both cheesy and melodramatic, several they-kiss-but-not-really moments, time travel, stunt casting (Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Campbell), a pretentious, non-sensical script by David Duchovny, even Groundhog Day. I liked all these fine at the time, but now the difference between these and the meat and potatoes episodes of previous seasons is clear.

I continued to watch X-Files as it aired through season eight, but this had more to do with it being new to me than with the show itself. By the time season eight ended, I realized there was only one episode in there that I thought was good (for anyone curious, that episode is "Badlaa"), and if that episode had been in season three, I would have thought it mediocre at best. (I did watch all of season nine out of sadisctic need for completeness, but the less said about that the better.)

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.

Comments

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Sci-Fi runs X-files in some strange order-- sometimes every day will be mythos, sometimes it seems like they've been programmed as a "greatest standalone hits" sequence.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

FX used to show two reruns from the current season followed by two reruns from earlier, going chronologically from season 1, on Sundays, then show two reruns every night at midnight, chronologically from season 1. This means my tapes are things like 6.5, 6.6, 2.3, 2.4, 4.20, 4.21. Seeing all the episodes like this first time round was really confusing.

Now, they sell a boxed set of just mythology episodes. I would totally buy a boxed set of everything else (if I didn't already own the DVDs).

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

There are still a bunch of episodes from when the show was still good that I haven't seen yet. I'm saving them. I also skipped most of the last season, and have no intentions of ever seeing those. I watched the show from the beginning and it's sad that it left me so disgusted.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Were you heavily into fandom? Because I was Phile@Heart, owner of the supersite all-things X-files. It was my total obsession. I scoff at your dislike of the mythology (I loved it), but the show took a HUGE downturn by the end of Season 5. Everything has been discovered, everything was worked out. There wasn't anything left! But they kept plodding along, rehashing old plots. By Season 7 I was so depressed I stopped watching the show. I never actually saw those later episodes. I found out later what happens, of course, but having never seen it I just pretend the series ended with the movie...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I actually wasn't in the fandom at all. I only discovered fandom after college, well after X-Files had imploded. I did read the episode recaps of Autumn Tysko, awaiting them eagerly each Thursday. She's the reason I started watching Buffy, actually, since her last review said, basically, screw this, I'm going to watch something that makes sense.

Normally I love ongoing storylines in a show, but since I got this one completely out of order it never made sense. Then I heard from fans that it never would make sense and so never tried. I never had any suspense about the mytharc. All of those episodes are filler to me--they just spin their wheels and tell you nothing. I much prefer the stand alones.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

You came into it after the mythology was basically over and pretty irrelevant to the goings-on of the show. I started watching around Season 3, got totally hooked, watch through Season 5 and then saw the movie. The movie really cinched for me that the series was over. The only other "revelation" I remember later in the series was with the Season 6/ Season 7 cliffhanger, which I didn't feel added anything remotely interesting to the pre-existing arc.

And don't knock Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner. They brought back the autoerotic asphyxiation joke.

[tirtzah.livejournal.com]

I watched the show from sometime mid-season 2 onwards, but I caught up on the first two seasons fairly early on. I think I'd mostly given up on the show by 5th or 6th season. For me a big problem was that I did sort of expect the mytharc to make sense and when it started to become obvious that it never would it became deeply frustrating for me. (I love solid arcs/mytharcs more than anything else. Yay for actual storytelling!)

I like a lot of the episodes you listed. True story: When X-Files used to air on Friday nights I would tape it and watch it on Sat mornings. One Sat morning I got up, watched "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" and then promptly went back to bed. When I woke up again I was absolutely convinced I had dreamed the whole thing....

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

But they answered everything by the end of Season 5! The mytharc was explained! It was done! How on earth they continued I don't actually know...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, in season six you had the evil love triangle with Diana Fowler. (Even though--how could anything compare to the abduction and cancer and near-death experiences and covering up and faking death that these two have done for each other? Even fucking on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's grave!) Cause clearly that's just as intriguing as black oil and shapeshifting alien bounty hunters.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

"Jose Chung's From Outer Space" was the very first episode of X-Files I ever saw. I'm amazed I ever gave the show a second chance.

At the time X-Files aired, I didn't have regular access to a TV, so I took what episodes I could get. I have tapes with so much static you can't see the screen. But I never liked the mytharc. So much exposition that explains nothing and pointless posturing. Blech.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Aw, but it does explain stuff eventually. I totally agree the whole thing could've been summed up in maybe three episodes, but I felt like without Mulder's quest for his sister the show didn't have a leg to stand on. Once they revealed the truth about wtf happened to her in Seasons 4/5, that drive was gone and the show fell apart for me.