The X-Files at 30: How the show created a new model for TV storytelling
After striking the perfect balance between monster of the week and mythology, the groundbreaking series unfortunately buckled under its own weight
TV Features The X-Files
It’s been 30 years since The X-Files premiered on Fox, and for true fans that can only mean one thing: Eugene Tooms is due to come out of hibernation and start collecting livers again. Time to seal up those windows, chimneys, and vents, people. Now that we’ve got your attention, it’s also a good time to reflect on the show’s long shadow and decades-spanning legacy. After nine consecutive seasons, two movies, two revival seasons, books, comics, games, countless fan works, and many imitators, it’s not an overstatement to say that The X-Files not only fundamentally changed television but the ways in which we watch and interact with it too. The show also set up expectations it couldn’t possibly live up to and left many viewers feeling trapped in a sprawling maze of mysteries with no satisfying conclusions. We’ll get to that later, but let’s not skip too far ahead.
To appreciate where The X-Files ended up, we need to go back to the start. When the show began on September 10, 1993, the TV landscape looked a lot different than it does today, and we’re not just talking about the outdated fashions and clunky technology. There were no streaming services, cable wasn’t a threat to the big broadcast networks, and Fox had only just expanded to seven nights of programming per week. Primetime shows tended to follow either a serialized format (nighttime soaps and melodramas) or an episodic one (mainly sitcoms and procedurals). Plot-lines were either self-contained and resolved in a single episode or they continued on from week to week. But when The X-Files came along, it refused to limit itself to one or the other. Creator Chris Carter set out to prove that a series could do both things equally well. And he did—for a while.
From ratings disappointment to appointment viewing
Carter wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea of a show that could be both serialized and episodic, but he popularized the model that a new generation of showrunners would eventually adopt. Now we’ve become used to season-long continuity arcs broken up by one-off episodes with little or no connection to the larger story, especially in genre shows and franchises like the Whedonverse and the Arrowverse. But there was a time when that seemed like a novel approach. It was certainly effective: The X-Files went from scraping the bottom of the TV ratings to appointment television in just a few seasons and turned Friday nights, formerly a ratings dead zone, into a viable time slot.
Did some of that have to do with the charisma and undeniable chemistry of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in the lead roles? Sure. Could it also have been a matter of coinciding with the rise of internet culture? Undoubtedly. But at least some of it had to do with the way the show was built. It kept its audience rapt with self-contained “monster of the week” (or MOTW) episodes that could vary wildly in tone, from bone-chilling horror to lighthearted comedy. Then it rewarded their patience with epic, multi-part “myth-arc” storylines. There were far more of the former produced each season, but the latter took on greater importance because the major milestone episodes (premieres, finales, mid-season cliffhangers) were devoted to them.
It was a tricky balancing act that had to be constantly calibrated. The paranormal cases had to be solved, or at least resolved, within a single episode, and they had to have an interesting hook. Otherwise, they could feel like filler and risk the audience losing interest before the next major development brought the alien conspiracy back to the forefront. Plenty of them missed the mark (with 218 episodes across 11 seasons, there’s bound to be some clunkers), but on the whole, these standalone stories proved to be some of the best, most beloved, and most talked-about episodes of the series. Episodes like “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” “Bad Blood,” “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” and the infamous “Home” all hold up today. Even when the show was revived in 2016, and again in 2018, the highlights were the MOTW episodes “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster” and “The Lost Art Of Forehead Sweat” (both penned by Emmy-winner Darin Morgan, a longtime writer for the show). You could sit down and still enjoy any of these tonight without having seen a single minute of The X-Files. The MOTW episodes were never the problem. It was the convoluted mythology that eventually disrupted the balance and wound up turning viewers off.
The original victim of The Chris Carter Effect
Carter became so notorious for losing the thread of The X-Files’ vast conspiracy plot that this common narrative trap is now named after him. Carter himself has admitted that he didn’t completely plan out the main story arc at the beginning of the series. Once it progressed beyond what he had initially sketched out, he and the writers had to make it up as they went along. This led to complex side plots, changing motivations, and dangling threads without any satisfactory resolution. Other factors, like Anderson’s pregnancy while filming season one, took the story in directions the writers hadn’t previously imagined. They got away with it for a while, but by the time they started working on a feature film with plans to release it in theaters between seasons five and six, the mythology had become unwieldy.
The MOTW episodes were originally meant to tide viewers over until the next big event brought the threat of alien invasion closer. In those early seasons, we would tune in hoping to get a glimpse of the Cigarette Smoking Man, or the infectious black oil, or a shape-shifting alien, or a peek inside the world of the shadowy Syndicate. We longed for satisfactory explanations of Mulder’s sister’s disappearance, Scully’s abduction, and all the weird medical experiments. Instead of answers, though, we just had more questions and the sneaking suspicion that even the writers didn’t know where it was all going (a suspicion that turned out to be correct). It should have been the first sign that the story had gone on for too long. Other signs would follow, like Duchovny leaving the show and Anderson stepping back to let new agents, played by Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish, take over. The show never quite managed to regain its equilibrium after that. Eventually, it was the standalone episodes that became the meat and potatoes (or sometimes just “Small Potatoes”) bringing viewers back week after week, until a lot of them stopped coming back altogether.
Whatever happened with The X-Files in its later seasons, its influence on everything that came after can’t be denied. Before it got weighed down with too much plot, it perfected the cocktail that so many other shows now regularly serve up. If The X-Files hadn’t become a surprise hit we might not have gotten hybrid series like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Lost, Fringe, Supernatural, or even Breaking Bad (from X-Files alum Vince Gilligan). Like the urban myths that inspired many of its episodes, the show has become a part of pop-culture lore.
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The most embarrassing part was how Season 9 kept teasing us about Mulder’s return, when by then the Internet was in full swing and the fans were all well aware that Duchovny was gone for good. I also got a big chuckle of how Krycek’s death was shot with a slow motion bullet to the forehead, since they were clearly aware that anything less would have the fans insisting he wasn’t dead.
Huh, I always assumed that was fanservice, since Krycek was such a douche.
I agree. It was seeing CSM’s flesh burned from his face by a rocket that I felt was meant to convey Final Death. Not that it stuck…
I remember hanging around with my cousin in an AOL chatroom circa 1995 where all anyone talked about was Krycek. Or, in that context: RAT BOY.
Speaking of Krycek, maybe it’s because the larger conspiracy plot was so damn boring that I barely paid attention to it, but I always thought it was weird how he’d be trotted out every other season like I was supposed to recognize him despite the long stretches between appearances.
For me, his first reappearance was mind-blowing. I was all-in on the mythology episodes through at least season six.
I definitely did. I had a weird thing for him. Too much to call it a “crush,” but I was always excited when he showed up.
I always have a soft spot for the absolute shitheel character who just won’t die. Call it the “this fucking guy again” effect.
I love me a good monster-of-the-week show. But mostly I miss when shows had 24 episodes a season. I know it could be tough. I know some episodes fluctuated in quality, like The X-Files, but damn it, the number gave the crews so much room to breathe. It let them get weird & mess with the format…and yeah, lose the threads sometimes, like you say, but what a format. When it worked, nothing better as a TV fan.
Monster of the Week episodes are significantly more rewatchable especially knowing now (as many already knew or suspected back then) that there was really no predesigned wrap to or destination for the mythology stuff. When you rewatch mythology episodes, you just basically think “these just don’t really matter” even if they make it sound like they do. The Monster of the Week episodes are open about being, well, episodic.
So, the down side of the 8-12 episode season is that if a show does want an ongoing narrative, they do have to mostly abandon their motw eps. At the same time, I suspect that the longer seasons back then made the ongoing narrative almost MORE necessary because they had more to fill, and eventually you run out of monsters.Personally, I’d like to see seasons more in the 12-18 episode range. Enough to spend some time with real character and overarching plot but with enough breathing space for some fun, experimental episodes that don’t have to much advance a greater plot.
Aye. Sometimes you just want something that can be one and done in 30-60 minutes, with no external stakes. And can be rewatched years later without going “Who’s- who’s that guy?”Most TV shows are…trying to be slightly longer movies. It pissed me off when the final season of The Expanse was only 6 eps (and half of it was pure fan service that was never resolved with the TV show, nor added anything to it).
Yes. Producing 22-24 episodes meant a serious committment on the series’ part and I do believe that those shows were over all more successful. Even Fringe usually had 23 episodes. The density of the material is priceless. The showrunners could do infinitely more. I can’t stand these 10 episode bits of fluff.
Honestly, I think by and large most people would prefer 22-24 episode seasons over 10. The reason as to why we don’t get that is hidden in the arcane bullshitmath the networks invented to justify scraping the maximum profit out of the bare minimum amount of television produced.
I think the MOTW-Mytharc split is the ideal way to handle long-running shows with arcs – it breaks up the monotony, and, more importantly, adds depth to the show’s universe. It allows for some great low-stakes (in the narrative sense) entertainment that enriches the show, and acts as a palate cleanser.They also, importantly, allow the writers and producers and showrunners and directors and actors to have some fun.If you ask someone what the X-Files was about, they might say it was about an FBI Agent who’s obsessed with the paranormal and uncovering a vast conspiracy that’s covering up alien contact and the abduction of his sister when he was a child. But if you asked “Well, what are you favourite moments/episodes?”…I can almost guarantee none of the answers will contain reference mytharc episode. They’ll cite the monster of the week eps. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose”. “Squeeze”, “Tooms”. “Dreamland”. “The Post-Modern Prometheus”. The infamous “Home”. “Bad Blood”. “The Host”. “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” (featuring the late, great…well, if you haven’t seen the ep, go and watch it). “Small Potatoes”, “Ice”, “Darkness Falls”…I could go on. And that’s what made it not only great, but accessible. I think that’s lost in a lot of modern, soap opera-format shows that are endless serialisation. There’s nothing that builds on the world, let’s the show and those making it breathe and have fun – and, perhaps, give new and possibly unknown actors a chance to shine. There’s still episode, high-level TV being done today…at first. The Blacklist is a great example, a show that occupied, more or less, the same sort of space as the X-Files did. No one watched it because they desperately wanted to find out who Megan Boone’s daddy was; we watched it because we wanted to see James Spader chew the hell out of the scenery and nab some bizarre, often macabre, crooks. But, of course, because you Have To Do Serialised TV, the show got bogged down in the Daddy Issues, and people simply ceased to give a shit. I know I did, and so did Kate Rife when she was reviewing it for this site – I believe she simply said was done after one of the “Red is/is not your father” BS twists. (I believe they got rid of Boone after a while, but it was long after I, or most anyone else, stopped caring.) It was a bait-and-switch. The mytharc consumed it.The X-Files did something similar too, of course, but it was more because the mythology became so convoluted there was no way it was going to resolve – although at least that kinda fits the theme – conspiracies, like ogres, have myriad layers, and one man could never hope to get to the bottom. I tried watching a few random Justified eps, to relive some of the great moments, but I was disappointed to rediscover that the a lot of it was taken up with that season’s mytharc, instead of Raylan chasing down random hillbillies.I like the fact that the mytharc-MOTW stuff rarely crossed over in the X-Files. I like that you can pick up an MOTW ep, and not have it referring to other eps. That’s what makes it great to go back to – because you can, free of any obligations.
I got fed up with The Blacklist for basically being Jobber: The Series, meaning that literally every single person in the show besides Red is a complete idiot so that he looks like a genius just for having basic competence.
Hey, in Ressler’s defence, he got like forty concussions a season.I don’t mind Red being the smartest, since he’s basically pulling all the strings. What got me was the Elizabeth angle. She is, quite literally, a MacGuffin with a pulse. Actually, that might be generous, since there is no reason for her to be in the show. She brought nothing – remember, she’s recruited literally about an hour after she graduates the academy (IIRC, she’s sitting around on some steps with her diploma or whatever it is when Cooper approaches her). Yeah, yeah, Red says he won’t work without Liz, but there was a strong enough reason for him to work with the FBI (take out the Blacklist, and manipulate things for his own ends). Throwing in a daughter (or IS SHE!??!!) added nothing. Worse, Liz being the most boring character, and Megan Boone being a charisma vortex, they kept trying to make her more interesting by killing off the actual interesting characters around her to make her look better. Dunno why the they kept her around as long as they did. I can only assume Bokenkamp wanted to get his grandmother into The Villages, or Boone’s got photos of him fucking a goat.I assume in Season 8 his grandma carked it, or he finally got ahold of the negatives.
I feel like this argument can be applied to the Netflix Marvel shows. They were serialized to a fault, with many episodes that didn’t do much more than spin wheels in the larger plot — while not providing a “_____ of the week.” Jessica Jones had a great overarching plot and villain, but she does so little detective work. That’s literally the conceit of the show, she’s a private eye. DD is a lawyer. All of those shows would have benefited from each episode having a strong beginning/middle/and end, with some just being case of the week.
And you’d think that the MCU would be a rich vein to tap for such small stories. One of the things that shits me about the MCU et al is the lack of stuff on how superheroes/villains affect ordinary people. Mostly they just seem to exist to be rescued to show the hero’s nobility, or harmed to show the villains evilness. What about a guy who, say, owns a disused warehouse who’s convinced it’s being used by some superpowered villain for nefarious deeds at night? Or a guy who’s convinced Stark Industries is reading his thoughts via some new tech? Some guy who’s convinced his brother in law is a supervillain?Would add so much to the world.
Or stories about how people try to deal with all the new things that have happened….. No superheroes needed….Provo, UT: A congregation of the Church of the LDS discusses sending missionaries to the Skrull / New Valhalla / whatever other alien races there might be. After all, FTL travel exists, now…..Muncie, IN: A local school board revamps its curriculum to include all the new physics that’s been revealed.Pittsfield, MA: Frustrated by Stark Industries’ monopoly on all the advanced alien tech, a small tech firm uses publicly available information to try to reverse engineer some of the gadgets.
And here’s the thing:None of that would cost a motza to shoot. I think part of the problem with the Marvel TV shows is that they have to run with the movies that have $200 million to spend on 2.5 hours of content…when an entire season that runs for maybe 6 hours total might have half that – if they’re lucky. There’s no bigly CGI set pieces, no stunts, not intricately-choreographed fights, no need to hire 400 extras plus three guest stars, no need to shut down half of Vancouver, no need to hire a bunch of rain machines if it’s stubbornly dry, no helicopter/drone/crane/dolly shots. (I remember watching a fight scene in Agents Of Shield, and, man, you could tell both the budget they had for it…and the exact moment that budget ran out.)Hell, this is why the X-Files had episodes like “Ice” – bottle episodes, a classic TV show production move to save budget…yet actually resulted in some of the most creative, memorable episodes. Here’s the thing that those with from a more STEM- or Business-oriented background don’t understand: for creatives, limitations breed creativity. If you give an engineer or an MBA a huge budget to make something, they might make something but then say “Yeah, but I coulda done even better if you gave me more.” A creative’ll go “OHSHITFUCKOHFUCKSHIT, WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY WANT FROM ME FOR ALL THIS MONEY? THE FUCK AM I GONNA DO WITH THIS?!?!” Partly because, heh, no one ever trusts creatives with money (hello, Duck Phillips), and partly because creatives know if they only spend, say, $9 million outta $10, some exec will come along, point out a flaw in it, and say “Well, what the fuck did you do with that spare million? We gave you ten!”“Pine Barrens” on the Sopranos. “The Chinese Restaurant” for Seinfeld. Mad Men’s “The Suitcase”. And the top tier one from Frasier: “The Dinner Party” (“We could…accessorise!” “With what? A lamp post and a public defender?”)And you could neatly excise them from the rest of mytharc episodes, if you’re of the bent that you only want to watch serials. Hell, I believe the X-Files sold box sets that were mytharc-only and MOTW-only. On streaming? Super easy. You could simply put a symbol or letter or heading or different-coloured box around the icon. And this’d be great if you just want to go back and watch some of the show again, but not have to sit there and pause it and think “Wait, why is Bob talking nicely to Jane in this ep? I thought the whole thing about this show was that they hated each other? And who’s this Steve guy they mention like we’re supposed to know him?”
Uh, I’m from Muncie, IN and I can tell you that no one in local government believes in science. All them superheroes were probably sent by Satan.
for sure. Using Matt and/or Jessica to explore some of those ideas, or bring in some super low-level metahumans, etc. Matt defending a VILLAIN who he knows is innocent is RIGHT THERE. and so forth. Jessica investigating for a guy convinced Stark has bugged him? Awesome.
Series also no longer have the space for standalones. X Files’ seasons mostly had 20+ episodes.Now we get maybe twelve, more often six or eight. And those have enough plot for a 2.5 hour movie, so you get the wheel-spinning you’re talking about.
That’s the thing. A six episode series, sure. But EVERY 12 episode marvel netflix show could lose 4-5 episodes and lose nothing of value. It’s even inherent to the nature of comics; individual stories while the larger plot is playing out in the background. Jessica and Matt explicitly have jobs that work to this conceit. But yeah, when you have 8-10 episode seasons, you don’t have time to play. It’s a tricky balance.
She-Hulk thankfully broke that mold. While Jennifer had a season-long story of coping with her new powers and the insecure manbabies who were out to get her, the show also had great self-contained stories like Wonger’s lawsuit against that lousy magician, the wedding episode, and her team-up with Daredevil.
good example. Funny part is, I think some of the people who didn’t like the show criticized for “not being super serial.” But you had those great episodes!
“I tried watching a few random Justified eps, to relive some of the great moments, but I was disappointed to rediscover that the a lot of it was taken up with that season’s mytharc”
It’s unfortunate that the random episodes you watched ended up being the mythology episodes, because there are plenty of great standalones in Justified.
“I tried watching a few random Justified eps, to relive some of the great moments, but I was disappointed to rediscover that the a lot of it was taken up with that season’s mytharc, instead of Raylan chasing down random hillbillies.”
It’s harder to do standalone episodes with a cast the size of Justified’s. You have have the main plot be Raylan chasing down a random hillbilly, but then you also have to have storylines with Art/Tim/Rachel and storylines with Boyd/Ava and storylines with Dewey and/or the other henchmen, plus you have to give the season’s big bad some screen time and if you NONE of those storylines relate in some way to the season arc, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
The X-Files had a great concept that easily accepted the standalones. While the background mythology is the big conspiracy, their day-to-day jobs aren’t directly connected to that, and they can’t very well tell the government (whom they don’t trust and are investigating) that they can’t investigate those strange deaths in Boise, Idaho because they need to find out why their’ boss’s boss is lying.
One thing I love about Fringe, a show I think is even better than The X-Files, was its ability to do standalone stories in the midst of long-term arcs that could’ve derailed any potential for episodic storytelling.
I was a die hard fan until the original series concluded, warts and all. (I have had less enthusiasm for the return seasons.) There are VERY few episodes I can think of from the original run that I love that were part of the alien mythology. Some were extremely good, but the ones I love are all one-offs. (You mention many above, but I’d also have to include “Humbug” and “Syzygy” amongst my top ranking.)
Humbug!“Musta been something I ate…”Also “War Of The Coprophrages”! There’s another poster who said they coulda rolled the Mytharc into the MOTW eps, but that’s entirely the problem; as with the Blacklist, the serious tone and convoluted Mytharc would taint the loveable, standalone episodes.
I always thought you could have made the central mythology of the ‘X-Files’ tie into the monsters of the week. The world of the show is terrifying; basically the USA (if not the whole world) is just packed coast-to-coast with supernatural monsters that we have only the barest hope of understanding. If the government knew about that, surely they’d want to keep it a secret to stop the populace descending into full existential panic.
Yeah, but then we get that bleed-over problem, where the lacklustre mytharcery taints the excellent MOTW episodes (and will eventually take it over, as it did with, say, the Blacklist). Or you turn it into some sort of Saturday Morning cartoon where it’s “X-TREEM FBI MONSTER SQUAD!”The conspiracy only cares about the Aliens because it affects them and they’ve made a pact with ‘em; they don’t really care about a bored genie or a HOA prick with a tulpa.
I thought we had all memory-holed the revival seasons.
Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster is a lot of fun and one of my favorite X Files episodes flat-out. The hoedown episode? Not so much.Didn’t realize they did a second revival series.
The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat is even better than Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster and very much worth watching if you were a big X-Files fan back in the day.
Count yourself lucky. They did the supporting cast VERY dirty.
Great article! You definitely got me at Eugene Combs. Caught that episode again a few weeks ago. He is due back and it would make for an excellent short run episode arc.
Did you ever see the sequel episode, “Tooms”? (His last name isn’t Combs.)
As it is, I was miffed that they didn’t return to the first season werewolves in season eight. It was supposed to be a seven year cycle.
Except Eugene is played by Doug Hutchison, the creepy old man who married Courtney Stodden at 17.
same thing happened with “twin peaks” which aired 3 years before “x files.” i recall reading that frost & lynch didn’t know who killed laura palmer when the show started & just kept vamping until they decided her dad did it. the whole thing was a pretty package with nothing inside. i know many writers hate fully outlining a project before they start, they enjoy working organically to see where the story goes & that works if you’re just interested in atmosphere & character development…but if you’re going to have a decent plot, you’d better know where you’re going when you start.
That “leap of faith” writing style is great when it works, but it deflates like a balloon really fast when it doesn’t. But it kind of puts fans and writers on the same team in that we’re all wondering what comes next.
I wonder if Vince Gilligan learned from that when he started working on Breaking Bad.
BTW: I recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time and when David Duchovny turned up it, at first I thought it was fan service for X-Files fans. Only after looking up the dates I discovered Twin Peaks is older than X-Files.
Not older than The X-Files, Space: Above & Beyond, an episdoe of which featured Duchovny as a pool-hustling android named Handsome Alvin on a casino space station. So it was fan service, but it almost seemed like it’s not.
“I wonder if Vince Gilligan learned from that when he started working on Breaking Bad.”
He didn’t.He’s mentioned in interviews that he never had any overarching plan or conclusion in mind. He also mentioned that they would occasionally develop a storyline for a character but then completely change it partway through because someone had a different direction to go.
They also had people on staff who would comb through older episodes to figure out ways they could tie an old story or character with a newer storyline/character retroactively so that it looked seemed like they had a long-term plan.
Iirc, Vince Gilligan said something like his best writing for Breaking Bad came when he and the writers were backed into a creative corner and had to find their way out.Discovery writing can be an amazing thing.
I sort of remember reading some interview somewhere that that’s basically what they did, intentionally, with each season finale— write themselves into a corner and then take the break to figure out how the heck to get out.
i know many writers hate fully outlining a project before they start, they enjoy working organically to see where the story goes & that works if you’re just interested in atmosphere & character development…but if you’re going to have a decent plot, you’d better know where you’re going when you start.to be fair it was the network that forced Lynch/Frost’s hands on revealing Laura’s murder. That said, I am skeptical just how far along they could’ve left it unresolved.
Lynch wanted to never reveal the killer. Laura’s murder was supposed to just be place-setting. The network made them.I have no complaints about where the story went from there.
“the whole thing was a pretty package with nothing inside.”
It absolutely was not.
Lynch and Frost planned to have the murder investigation fade into the background and have the show be about the entire town, not just the people involved in the investigation. They were going to occasionally have something to do with the mystery, but it was going to be background, not foreground.
They didn’t know who killed Laura Palmer because they didn’t care who killed Laura Palmer because it didn’t matter who killed Laura Palmer because they never intended to resolve the mystery because resolving the mystery would be the end of the show. ABC forced them to resolve it, and it ended the show.
“but if you’re going to have a decent plot, you’d better know where you’re going when you start.”
You could’ve written this first, so I’d have known that you entirely missed the point of Twin Peaks and I wouldn’t have wasted my time on a reply.
Twin Peaks was never, ever about the “plot”. Not ever.
But anyways, yeah, pretty package with nothing inside. *sigh*
In Twin Peaks, it was arguably a feature rather than a bug. Lynch has expressed that the Laura Palmer murder was really just pretext for exploring this weird little town.
If your premise is based on an amorphous mystery that you haven’t thought of a solution to yet, you better be damn sure your show is a character piece about how not knowing is affecting your protagonists’ lives and emotions. Something like The Leftovers works because while the question of what happened to the missing people hangs over the series and haunts the main characters, almost all the individual episodes are about people trying to cope with that loss and uncertainty, not finding clues that implicitly promise the audience we’re getting closer to an answer.
If you’re doing a classic plot-driven detective story where learning more about the mystery and getting closer to solving it is the main takeaway from each installment, you need to have a general idea of what that solution is. Otherwise, I guarantee you that whereever you’re headed is not going to be interesting enough to justify the trip. The X-Files was a particularly bad offender here because every mythology episode for like five years would reveal something horrific and fascinating and then the whole series ends on the revelation that aliens are invading in a couple years, which is just the first thing everyone thinks of when you say “aliens.”
Oh man, the more recent seasons from a few years ago…pure garbage. Really disappointing.
Has any TV show matched the X-Files for the number of times the lead characters say each other’s names in conversation with each other? I loved the show in its first run, but watching re-runs is an exercise in tedium. Lots of screen time showing Mulder & Scully pointing guns & flashlights in the darkness shouting “Scully!” and “Mulder!”. I guess it was a perfect match of lifeless dialogue with drone-like acting.
I remember watching X-Files with no lights on, as the Barenaked Ladies said. Once upon a time (roughly ‘95 – ‘96) this show was on a scorching-hot roll, just cranking out killer episode after killer episode, on both the MOTW and Mythology fronts. Within the last few years I’ve revisited the Duane Barry eps (Scully’s disappearance), the two-parter that introduced the shape-shifters (Colony / End Game) and arguably my favorite, Die Hand Die Verletzt, where a school board was made up of a Satanic Cult. All held up remarkably well, technology / fashions aside.
But it was too good to last. It ultimately was like a kid building a big Lego tower, just adding on pieces (shape shifters! Bees! Oil! Aliens with eyes and mouths sewn shut!) until it all got top heavy and collapsed under its own weight. The end of the X-Files scared me away from Lost in its first season because I saw the same thing coming – a cool set up with no payoff – but I later went back because of Lost’s mid-series pivot and commitment to wrap up at the end of S5…which turned out to be an empty promise.
But anyway…got a lot of enjoyment out of this show back in the day. When in stride…undoubtedly one of the greatest shows of all time.
Personally, I would add Person of Interest to the list of shows that are inheritors to the X-Files mantle. Like X-Files, it has a fluid premise that allows for a pretty broad range of tones from one week to the next, it has a largely unprecedented mash-up of genres (scifi, procedural, crime drama, superhero), it shifts between larger story arcs and episodic, and it tapped into the cultural paranoia about the government relative to its own time period.
Person of Interest has a great scifi mythology buried inside the network-mandated MOTW episodes. Really good show for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
“Eugene Tooms is due to come out of hibernation and start collecting livers again.”If I recall correctly, Tooms died in “Tooms.” The escalator. So…we’re good, don’t worry.
Monster though he is, I always felt a tinge of sadness about Tooms. What kind of life is he meant to have anyway? He has to basically reset his whole existence from scratch every time he wakes up, which includes adjusting to 30 years of societal change that’s happened without him. It must be pretty hard to hang onto any humanity living like that.
Certainly unfortunate for him! But kid me certainly slept better knowing he was dead. But yes he’s a tragic figure, which was the good storytelling about it.
One of the few shows you can watch all over again…
That’s funny because I’ve always thought of the show as one of the more formulaic offerings of the post-“Twin Peaks” wave of ripoffs ala “Eerie, Indiana, “Wild Palms” and even “Picket Fences” especially because it was centered around F.B.I. agents and even dragged Duchovny along with it. I don’t think it reshaped TV so much as was part of a fad.
I’m 100% fine with there not being any ‘satisfactory ending’ to The X-Files. It’s not the kind of show – in my opinion – where all the t:s should end up crossed, all the i:s dotted and all the loose threads neatly bundled up and tied into a pretty bow by the end of the series.You’re meant to feel dissatisfied. You’re meant to hunger for more. What really happened? How did everything turn out? We don’t fucking know! And that’s the whole point!The best shows and films are those who leave a mystery remaining after it all ends for the viewers to gnaw on and endlessly speculate over. Like, who was The Joker, really, in Nolan’s second Batman interpretation? What was his true origin, where did he come from and how did he become what he is when we first meet him?Same thing with John Doe from 1990s classic “Se7en” – who is he, truly? What made him? Knowing that would just lessen the impact of what we see on the screen, so it’s actually good we don’t.There’s a bunch more such example from cinema/TV history.I know teh millennials crave constant mental stimulation and endorphin highs from big reveals, but sometimes the lack of such revelations mean a longer lasting emotional response. After all, once you’ve been told the truth about how things are, the world instantly shrinks, and becomes duller from all the possibilities that COULD have been but now never are, because someone told you the correct answer.This is as true about pop culture media as it is about the monsters living in the dark outside the glow of our windows when we were children.
The only satisfying way to end the series is with Mulder and Scully getting it on atop a pile of dead aliens on live TV
Makes you wonder how good the series would be if you removed all the MOTW episodes and planned on it just being the “alien stuff.” It did go on a few seasons too long. Maybe if it were 5, 6 seasons max it would have been interesting for longer.
What, no mention of The Scully Effect?https://www.bustle.com/articles/136922-why-the-x-files-dana-scully-still-stands-out-as-one-of-tvs-greatest-feminist-role-models
She may not have influenced my career path, but at the same time, she was my first girl-crush on a show. Scully was the first TV character that I truly loved. To this day, I adore Gillian Anderson, and it’s all because of The X-Files. (Okay, the work she’s done since hasn’t hurt.) I remember the year she and Duchovny were both nominated for acting Emmys for the show. I had VERY strong feelings about that – specifically that he was only allowed to win if she did because she was the one that really deserved it. (She won. He didn’t.)
I found my adoration was still there when she appeared in American Gods – she picked up nominations for Critics Choice & Gold Derby awards for her portayal of Marilyn Monroe, David Bowie & others. Absolutely deserved.Speaking of girl crushes, I was going to reference the … other ‘Scully effect’:https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=sociology_theses
Ehhhh, she did play…In the immortal words of the late, great Sean Lock: “That’s a challenging wank.”
I actually think this is a great performance. It’s a hard task to make a character human and STILL absolutely reprehensible.
Agreed. She Bruno Ganz’d it. Dammit, all this talk of X-Files has got me revisiting it! (Bless SBS On Demand for having it on stream.)Started off with War Of The Coprophages.
I still love the show. But continuing it after Duchovny left was heresy. They’ve should stop.They could remake those last seasons, or re-edit them…
A TV show that was episodic WITH a story arc? Deep Space Nine (Jan, 1993) appreciates the note of respect.
The mythology episodes never quite worked for me because they were meant to evoke this feeling of dread (trust no one! You’re being watched!), but they were so much less scary than the implications of the MOTW episodes. Those stories suggested that everything you’ve ever been afraid of – ghosts, vampires, demons, shape-shifting mutants – is real. All of it. There is not a nightmare you can imagine that isn’t also actually a living thing in a small town somewhere that might kill you for reasons you’ll never fully understand. That’s terrifying.
Plot-lines were either self-contained and resolved in a single episode or they continued on from week to week. But when The X-Files came along, it refused to limit itself to one or the other. Creator Chris Carter set out to prove that a series could do both things equally well. The X-Files premiered on September 10th, 1993. By that point, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had already run its entire first season, proving that a show could be both self-contained and serialized.
The best episode was clearly The Springfield Files.
“We were discussing Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon!”
Ha! You just made me look up the scene on YouTube – I’d forgotten the follow up “We were sat in Barney’s car eating packets of mustard. You happy?” And then YouTube decided to follow up with an auto-played clip of a highly philosophical discussion from Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein.
“Look at this, Scully: there’s been another unsubstantiated UFO sighting in the heartland of America. We’ve got to get there right away.”“Well, gee, Mulder, there’s also this report of drugs and illegal weapons coming into New Jersey tonight.”“Ugh- I hardly think the FBI’s concerned with matters like that.”Look, I like The Critic but this was the far superior crossover episode. Moe arguing with the killer whale. The mustard packs. The Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia. And the beautiful Springfield community spirit where the townspeople came together meet to a glowing, peaceful entity that was bringing love and break its legs.