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Posted: |
Jan 16, 2016 - 6:15 PM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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As a kid, The X-Files was a pretty big deal to me when it aired. I don't know long I watched it -- I know I saw all of the first season and at least through the Duane Barry episodes of Season 2 during its first run, but I also know that I never made it to anything involving black oil or whatever that was all about.
Several years ago I tried to revisit the show, but the quality of the DVDs was pretty dismal and I only made it through the first disc of season 1 before giving up.
But now The X-Files has been released on Blu-ray and it really look stupendous. So much better than I ever thought it could look. So. I'm going through it. And I just finished Season 1. Here are some thoughts:
- It's amazing how addictive this show is on the basis of simple solid character dynamics and drama. It's not flashy, the special effects are dodgy, this season is mostly serial so it doesn't really reward binge-watching. It doesn't have a large ensemble cast or tons of snappy banter disguised as character. It's also amazing how much this show, rather than old police and detective shows, prefigures the popular style of modern "procedurals" shows
- It's amazing how little "mythology" there is here, given where the show what go and what TV has become since. Deep Throat shows up a few times. Cigarette Smoking Man has a handful of appearances. Skinner appears toward the very end of the season (I watched for long enough that in my memory he's basically a regular on the show). But really these episodes stand alone and don't get bogged down in mythology, or keep audiences invested with answerless questions rather than solid storytelling.
- There are some inconsistencies. For instance, in "Miracle Man" we find that while Mulder's an earnest believer in his own brand of superstition, he does not have any Christian faith. But in multiple other episodes he's quick enough to take other religious mythologies at face value, which feels a little inconsistent.
- The characters are so, so good. Mulder would be so easy to turn into a parody of himself, but Duchovny manages to balance a sharp intellect with what could easily be a farcically fanatical interest in UFOs, and still come across as an earnest, well-meaning guy. And Scully could very easily have been a one-note skeptic, a basic foil for Mulder, but Anderson convincingly respects Mulder even when she disagrees with him and brings her own background to the proceedings. Well-done all around.
For anyone who's interested in visiting this season but doesn't have time to sit through 24 hours of television, here's the line-up that I think is the backbone of the season:
-Pilot
-Deep Throat
-Squeeze
-Conduit
-Fallen Angel
-Beyond the Sea
-E.B.E.
-Tooms
-The Erlenmeyer Flask
There are other episodes that delve into the history or personality of the characters (in "Young at Heart" it's nice to see a character from Mulder's past who doesn't consider him Spooky; "Ice" is a decent episode if you don't mind that it's riffing on The Thing and it offers some nice Mulder/Scully moments) , or the history of the X-Files themselves ("Shapes" and "Darkness Falls" (one of the stronger monster of the week episodes)), but I think that line-up is the core of the season.
As for the rest of the season, "Ghost in the Machine" is awful, as is "Space," which is kind of a mis-step moment before the show has found its footing and quite figured out exactly what it wants to do with aliens. Most of the rest of the monster of the week episodes are quite watchable, but mostly nothing special. The life-after-death and transfer-of-consciousness episodes especially don't do much for me: Shadows, Lazarus, and then two in a row right at the end of the season with Born Again and Roland.
See you in a couple months, I hope, after I finish Season 2!
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Great series. Instant classic... but I must admit that I bailed around season 4 or 5. It didn't exactly jump the shark then, but it began to feel "spun".
Too bad. Season 6 is one the best seasons!
check it out
bruce
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One reason I WANT TO BELIEVE sucked (and there were many) is that they pretended Scully was still a sceptic. Over the many seasons of the show it was carefully established that Scully, from personal
experience, now knew the truth of the alien presence and other paranormal phenomena.
But, all though IWTB she constantly wines at Mulder how he is imagining things etc.
From the trailer for the revival it looks as if they are planning on ignoring her years of experience and making her the skeptical Scully os season one. I hope I am wrong
bruce
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Posted: |
Jan 30, 2016 - 7:55 AM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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Made it through Season 2 faster than expected, but I think I will take a short break before delving too deeply into Season 3 to avoid burnout.
It's interesting to me now watching these again. The first episode, most of the episodes were very familiar to me: I had clearly seen them multiple times during their first run and also in syndication, plus a number of them on DVD. The second season, I got déjà vu a number of times but didn't remember most of the episodes practically verbatim, so I've probably only seen most of them twice and some of them only once. I don't know how much if any of the third season I've seen: I know sometime around the time it aired, I switched schools and moved away from the childhood friend I'd obsessed over the early seasons with, and I don't remember now if I kept watching the show or not. So we're about to enter terra incognita as far as this show goes for me, I think.
As for this season:
The first eight episodes are basically a mini-season on their own, dealing with the fallout from the season finale of the first season (which could also have been a series finale if the series was not renewed) as well as with Gillian Anderson's pregnancy (she only missed one episode!).
One thing almost immediately evident in this season is a little experimentation with the format: while in the first season monster of the week episodes were almost entirely separate from conspiracy episodes, this season we start seeing conspiracy characters and themes popping up in monster of the week episodes. On the one hand this integration is fun, but on the other it makes it less easy to provide a trimmed-down "core episode" watchlist.
From those first eight episodes, the most obviously skippable is episode 7, the episode with the vampires, which has one really nice moment with Mulder re-opening the X-Files office and which could have been a good Mulder character study episode, but it never really comes together and aside from that one scene is mostly just a filler episode breaking up a powerful three-parter. With or without that episode, this is a really powerful stretch of episodes, half monster and half mythology, and if the early monster episodes aren't great, they aren't among the series' embarrassments, either, making this a really good stretch of episodes.
The second act of the series, episodes 9 through 17, is a series of monster episodes concluded by a mythology two-parter. "Firewalker" is a decent episode, recalling season 1's "Ice" (and also predicting the recent fascination with the Cordyceps fungus as a horror trope), and is followed by a couple interesting failures. "Red Museum" was originally written as a crossover with the TV show Picket Fences (which my mother loved) -- that show's "Away in the Manger" was the other part of the crossover -- but the project fell apart and we're left with a decent core of a plot bogged down with a laughable cult story. "Excelsis Dei" is an almost-solid ghost story which is rendered almost unwatchable by its racism and sexism. So out of this stretch of the series I would probably cut "Red Museum" and "Excelsis Dei" (if you're watching mythology episodes only, you can skip everything except the two-part "Colony" and "End Game".) But then we get "Aubrey," which is good despite my antipathy for soul-transfer stories (and which also stars Terry O'Quinn, who would go on to star in Millennium before being on Lost), and "Irresistible," a very creepy episode that has the benefit of having no supernatural element whatsoever.
The third act of the season has more of a mix of good and bad episodes. "Fearful Symmetry" was kind of an ambitious failure involving aliens abducting zoo animals, which you'd think would be a lot more interesting than what we get. "Død Kalm" is just a waste of time. "Humbug" is a lot of fun, but then "The Calusari" is a boring creepy child story. "F. Emasculata" is pretty awesome, one of the few really successful episodes this far when it comes to bringing the show's conspiracy themes to a monster episode, and "Soft Light" is much better than it could have been, with Tony Shalhoub making a not-so-interesting character very human, helping the episode transcend its problems. The script (an early script by Vince Gilligan) once again manages to capture the paranoia and pathos of the series. Then we have the shitty "Our Town" before the series closes with the cliffhanger "Anasazi".
Overall a compulsively watchable season, building on the strengths of the first season. The stretches of monster episodes include enough very good ones to keep the viewer from burning out, and the mythology episodes move the story forward enough to maintain interest.
Looking forward to checking back in with thoughts on season 3 in a month or so.
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