Young and Full of Fluff

God, now I want to rewatch all of X-Files (there were only ever six seasons, right?).

Or not even that. I want to feel the way I did watching it the first time. There are still shows I love, but none that I feel quite the level of eager desperation about that I used to--desperation that only comes from having to spend years tracking episodes down through syndication, out of order, sometimes only having a few audio clips of dialogue from Napster and a fan site episode summary to link the missing pieces of a plot arc. I don't want to go back to that--that sucked--but it did make me love shows differently. I spent so much time imagining and constructing them in my head because I couldn't get my hands on the source material that it almost didn't matter what the source material was.

For a long time all I had of "Ascension" was a thirty-second audio clip of Mulder's interrogation of Duane Barry. Rewatching it now, I remember how intensely I felt about that episode when I finally saw it for the first time, and I don't think I've felt like that about anything in a while.

In the episode "New Day in the Old Town" of Fringe, they pan past a TV showing The X-Files. How sad is it that from that one shot, I know which episode it was? ("Dreamland," unless I miss my guess.)

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.