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Open Source Idiom posted:It's okay, he only preys on underaged girls. SA is safe. The monster is a SA mod???!?!
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Jun 1, 2023 05:45
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The actor who played Tooms hit on me when I was 18 but I looked younger so checks out.
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Jun 1, 2023 13:12
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I’ve watched seasons 1-9 I don’t even know how many times, and I was very aware of how far up its own rear end the Mytharc became after a point. It’s why for the past few times I just watch the MOTW episodes and skip the mytharc stuff, except for a few very favorite ones. But seeing it all summarized in one article like this really drives home how ape-poo poo crazy it all was. It’s difficult to believe all this happened, writing-wise. What in the hell were they thinking? Seeing it all laid out like this is like reading something written by a person suffering from severe mental illness. https://x-files.fandom.com/wiki/Mythology
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Jun 1, 2023 14:08
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MrMojok posted:I’ve watched seasons 1-9 I don’t even know how many times, and I was very aware of how far up its own rear end the Mytharc became after a point. It’s why for the past few times I just watch the MOTW episodes and skip the mytharc stuff, except for a few very favorite ones. I mean, what they were truly thinking is to create a perpetuating shadowy conspiracy thriller where part of the appeal is that you'd never truly see the whole scope of the thing, so you're always left wondering or making it up for yourself. It's incredibly hard to payoff that kind of story, even if you know where you're going. The mytharc really is one of the great experiments of TV fiction. Re-watching Two Fathers / One Son, the two-parter that tries to explain it all: you really see the pitfalls of their MO: once you explain plainly what's happening, it simply doesn't seem as cool anymore. I still have a lot of love for the earlier parts of it though.
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Jun 1, 2023 14:17
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Yannick_B posted:I still have a lot of love for the earlier parts of it though. Yeah, the earlier stuff was alright. I guess my problem is I cannot watch those now without thinking of what comes later.
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Jun 1, 2023 14:57
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Like a lot of multi-season story arcs, I think the alien conspiracy stuff complete collapsed when they realized the show was insanely popular and they needed to continue building on what they'd already written, and they felt like EVERYTHING had to tie together. Jose Chung's From Outer Space is probably the best episode of the show, but nobody's wondering how Lord Kinbote fits into the mytharc stuff.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:10
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Haven't watched the early seasons in years but I remember thinking the alien stuff working pretty well up until the 5th season/first movie. I liked all the shadowy conspiracy stuff. But then all the colonization stuff gets wrapped up and ???
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Jun 1, 2023 15:20
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The first-season conspiracy stuff is great. There’s not a clear division between the alien poo poo and other cases, in that Deep Throat helps them with both, and it’s just a bunch of wild ideas thrown together with very hazy borders. It would be perfect if the show just lasted three low-budget seasons and remained a cult classic, although the height of the show’s popularity and budget was pretty good too, for different reasons. Darin Morgan is the most fascinating figure to rise out of The X-Files. Just an extremely lazy genius with zero drive to do any art other than what his brother asks for. He could have been a great artist, but instead we just have six of the best X-Files episodes, three of which are some of the best television ever written, plus the two best episodes of Millennium and some episodes of Wizards of Waverley Place or wherever his brother worked after X-Files. I wish Space Above and Beyond had lasted, so we could have seen some Darin scripts for it.
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Jun 1, 2023 15:31
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I heavily prefer the MOTW to the mytharc and pretty much only rewatch my favorite MOTW episodes, but F. Emasculata stands out as one that kind of straddles a line pretty well. It doesn’t really advance central mytharc story but mytharc and conspiracy elements contribute heavily to the vibe of the episode. Any other MOTW episodes that utilize the mytharc either for story or vibe like this?
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Jun 1, 2023 16:32
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I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I'm a big fan of the Emily two parter from season 5, which technically occupies a myth arc slot but is mostly about Scully thinking about the various losses in her life: her sister, her dad, the loss of her reproductive capacity, etc.
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Jun 1, 2023 17:22
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I AM GRANDO posted:Darin Morgan is the most fascinating figure to rise out of The X-Files. Just an extremely lazy genius with zero drive to do any art other than what his brother asks for. He could have been a great artist, but instead we just have six of the best X-Files episodes, three of which are some of the best television ever written, plus the two best episodes of Millennium and some episodes of Wizards of Waverley Place or wherever his brother worked after X-Files. I wish the Kolchak reboot had been worth watching and had stuck around, because that feels like exactly the sort of show Morgan would have gone crazy with. I know that Were-monster was originally a script for that show.
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Jun 1, 2023 17:29
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Zwabu posted:I heavily prefer the MOTW to the mytharc and pretty much only rewatch my favorite MOTW episodes, but F. Emasculata stands out as one that kind of straddles a line pretty well. Would Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man count? As I recall, it's pretty much a stand-alone story.
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Jun 1, 2023 18:54
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The first season also has some alien episodes that don't really fit into the Mytharc aliens. The Face on Mars ghost, for example.
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Jun 1, 2023 19:10
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Zwabu posted:I heavily prefer the MOTW to the mytharc and pretty much only rewatch my favorite MOTW episodes, but F. Emasculata stands out as one that kind of straddles a line pretty well. The Pine Bluff Variant is another episode like this.
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Jun 1, 2023 19:13
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The mytharc sort of works if you take that season 7 episode with the eyeless rebels as the series finale. Ignore even the season 7 finale and it's fine.
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Jun 1, 2023 19:14
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I mean this was the 90s where Netflix gives you five seasons and you can carefully write out plot points. You never knew if the show was coming back and Chris Carter totally made it up as he went along. He also obviously ran out of ideas after season seven.
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Jun 2, 2023 01:55
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I’ve been fighting the urge on and off to start buying this show on physical media for a couple of years now. Reading this thread now, I feel the urge returning. I don’t want the whole season 1-11 box set, but definitely 1-5 and maybe 6 and 7 as well. It looks like buying them individually that way is a lot easier on DVD, rather than Blu? Maybe I need to just buy them individually on Prime Video.
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Jun 2, 2023 02:22
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Gravitee posted:I mean this was the 90s where Netflix gives you five seasons and you can carefully write out plot points. I think you probably meant to say "wasn't" instead of "was", but Netflix has never given any show that privilege.
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Jun 2, 2023 02:27
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Not X-Files per se but going through Millennium for the first time and I am enjoying this a lot. I thought it started a little slow in season 1 but midway through it started to get really good. There's the occasional stinker but when it hits it's great. It is a strange show in that it's basically like the X-Files if there were no levity ever lol. It's grim as gently caress. There's a lot of recognizable faces from the X-Files that guest star on it. Seeing Terry O'Quinn is always a mark out moment for me. One of the great staches of TV.
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Jun 20, 2023 00:37
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I enjoyed Millennium to an extent, but as you say, the nonstop grimdark vibe wore on me after a while. I could be wrong, it’s been years since I watched any of it, but today I can’t remember a single moment of levity in any episode, ever.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:03
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There are two Darin Morgan Millennium episodes, and they are both excellent. There are also a few... attempts after that, which are less successful. I love Millennium so much that I have a tattoo of the logo, but it had X-Files' "shifting showrunner" problem in overdrive. Each season is wildly different, with the second being some of my all time-favorite television and third clumsily walking back almost every single thing that made it interesting. EDIT - Even the non-Darin Morgan ones had some humor (Lance Henriksen can do some great dry humor), but the first half of the first season is particularly grimdark. After The War fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Jun 20, 2023 01:11
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MrMojok posted:I enjoyed Millennium to an extent, but as you say, the nonstop grimdark vibe wore on me after a while. I'm most of the way through season 1 and I can't remember a single moment of levity yet lol.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:22
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The fact that X-Files has entire episodes that are humorous and light hearted makes it SOOO much better IMO and those episodes are among my favorites. That the main characters are generally so super serious and earnest and the mytharc stuff takes itself so seriously just makes the indulgence in deadpan humor in Bad Blood, Humbug etc. so welcome. Then you get an episode like Clyde Bruckman that has a perfect balance of darkness and funny.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:28
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Even the regular episodes have some jokey dialogue and quips between the regulars. Frank Black is just dead inside and 100% professional at work. X-Files really benefits from how much of a weird maniac Fox Mulder is.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:40
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I agree the X-Files is the better show, but I am enjoying Millenium as its own thing, and I do appreciate the total commitment to never giving even the slightest moment of levity.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:47
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After The War posted:There are two Darin Morgan Millennium episodes, and they are both excellent. There are also a few... attempts after that, which are less successful. Hmm, okay. Sounds like maybe I got turned off by the grimness in early S1 and then just quit watching, or watched only sporadically after that. It has been so long, I’m not sure.
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Jun 20, 2023 01:47
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The later 90s definitely had this nonspecific sense of doom, like everything that felt so solid was precarious and a out to be swept away. X-Files feels like this too, and like Metal Gear Solid II. Millennium was like nonstop dread built out of that feeling.
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Jun 20, 2023 02:11
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All three seasons were pretty different, with season one being almost exclusively serial killer-focused and season three conspiracy-centered. Season two had both of these things, but also... I guess the best way to think of it would be that it did with religion what X-Files did with urban legends. There's a sense that everything is true all at once, and that the doom approaching is filtered through the beliefs of the person experiencing it. It also gives Frank a chance to actually reflect on who his and where he's going. And it has Jose freaking Chung! Everything basically clicked in season two, which, as is often the case with TV, more a series of lucky accidents than a specific plan. There's a ton of variety, almost like they were mocking the serious monotony of the earlier episodes, as well as some pretty major rearrangement of the characters and their situation. At the start of the series, you wouldn't think that there would be Halloween or Christmas (!) episodes coming, but then season two not only brings them, but makes them genuinely affecting and reflective in a way that (in my opinion) even X-Files had trouble achieving. It doesn't always work, of course - neither did X-FIles, even at its peak. But it's almost always interesting and unique. "Force Majeure " is the first hint in season one, but the show I love really starts with "Walkabout" and goes from there. It's a hell of a ride, how much things change, and I'm a little jealous of anyone getting to experience it for the first time. Wong and Morgan basically end it on the mother of all cliffhangers as if to challenge their replacements "write your way out of this, motherfuckers." And season three... really drops the ball on that, and even actively rolls back a lot of the more interesting elements. They (mostly) get their poo poo together just in time for the series to end, but it's really not the same show, then you get the X-Files crossover episode which feels like such an ugly slap in to face for what the show had been capable of.
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Jun 20, 2023 04:03
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There are a bunch of good episodes in the back half of the third season -- basically from around The Sound of Snow onwards -- but IMO the dumbest thing about Millennium is the opening credits. They're so bad.
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Jun 20, 2023 04:12
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Open Source Idiom posted:There are a bunch of good episodes in the back half of the third season -- basically from around The Sound of Snow onwards -- but IMO the dumbest thing about Millennium is the opening credits. They're so bad. The only show brave enough to say “who cares?” right there at the start of every episode. I discovered Nick Cave and The Dirty Three right around the time Millennium started, and I remember thinking it was like The Dirty Three did the Van Halen Right Now music video.
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Jun 20, 2023 04:22
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It's 'funny' in retrospect how a lot of 90s media had an "end of the millennium equals end of times" vibe, considering that, all things told, in the West at least things were about as good as they'd ever been. Then we entered the 21st century and welp, downhill from there. (The Matrix, released in 1999, had that line from Smith about how the 1999 world in the Matrix was "the peak of your civilisation". Little did they know...)
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Jun 20, 2023 08:31
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Payndz posted:The idea to use zombies for "Millennium" arose from a separate aborted project. Reportedly, Stephen King, who had co-penned the fifth-season episode "Chinga", wished to write an episode based on George A. Romero's cult zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968).Romero was also slated to direct the episode. According to "Millennium" co-writer and executive producer Frank Spotnitz, the staff of The X-Files met with both King and Romero, and the two showed an interest in producing the episode. While the episode was slated for the seventh season, it never came to fruition. I found this while reading up on Millenium. Holy poo poo, that would have been amazing. Chinga isn't great, and the Millenium episode of X-Files isn't great (except for the ending, which I love), but I'm already imagining Mulder trapped in a farmhouse making Molotov cocktails.
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Jun 20, 2023 14:59
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Payndz posted:It's 'funny' in retrospect how a lot of 90s media had an "end of the millennium equals end of times" vibe, considering that, all things told, in the West at least things were about as good as they'd ever been. Then we entered the 21st century and welp, downhill from there. I think for a lot of people there was a sense that something was very wrong with the world but they couldn’t put a name to it because of the limits to their frame of reference. They were all being told that the end of history had arrived and neoliberal orthodoxy had made the best of all possible worlds. But of course things were going wrong and neoliberalism was eating out the foundations—they were right that they were teetering on the precipice of a terrible collapse. There’s actually some ok scholarship that attributes the ufo abduction culture of the period to this same anxiety, that it is a manifestation of the anxiety people felt about living in an era where everything seemed carefully managed but felt utterly beyond an individual’s control or understanding, and not necessarily benign.
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Jun 20, 2023 16:57
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I'm up to season 1 episode 16, re-watch from when it originally aired. I guess I must have missed most of season 1 because I don't remember any of these shows. Its more crime-procedural than I remember. Maybe I'm remembering the later seasons that seemed to go off the rails and was more sci-fi, which is what I remember enjoying more. Could also be after 30 years my memory isn't the best 
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Jun 21, 2023 03:46
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Fozzy The Bear posted:I'm up to season 1 episode 16, re-watch from when it originally aired. I guess I must have missed most of season 1 because I don't remember any of these shows. Its more crime-procedural than I remember. Maybe I'm remembering the later seasons that seemed to go off the rails and was more sci-fi, which is what I remember enjoying more. Could also be after 30 years my memory isn't the best X-Files is a wild amalgam of poo poo. Every show that's ripped if off over the years -- Supernatural, Evil, Fringe -- has taken one or two parts of the show and blown it out into a series, but the show itself was always playing in several different genres. Serial killer stories, urban myths, creature feature and supernatural horror stories, religious narratives, technoparanoia and mad science, alien poo poo. I don't think the show ever stops using crime procedural trappings to underly most of its stories, but it will just randomly tell stories without them (e.g. Emily, Never Again), and the myth arc episodes tend to go for bigger, bolder nonsense that quickly breaks out of the route investigatory beats.
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Jun 21, 2023 03:55
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It was also a perfect time for the show, technology wise. Cell phones still very rare, so most people don't have them. Computers and the internet were just starting to become something usable. I feel like it was a time when if you built a radio to pick up the correct frequency with the right satellite dish or antenna, you could overhear what the government was communicating. Or at least it was believable that could someone with advanced knowledge could do that. Looking back the 90's were a magical time.
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Jun 21, 2023 04:36
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I think you can absolutely tell stories like this now, but they'd have to be in an adapted form for the current year. Evil is all about technoparanoia, religious horror, corporate abuse, horror in the woods, and has at least two random serial killer plots. There's an oncoming apocalypse narrative at one point, which ends up being a weird, slightly tasteless allusion to... covid? I think? But mostly the show seems to be riffing on post-truth anxiety and the tenuous nature of certainty (and sanity). So the existence of phones, computers, high speed highly connected internet isn't an issue to the horror being presented. (In this sense, the entire show is basically combining Scully's religious horror episodes with that final Darren Morgan script from Season 11). Far more obscure (than an already fairly obscure streaming procedural): there's a series of radio plays based on Torchwood -- yes, the Doctor Who spinoff -- that tackle alien invasion, bureaucratic satire, serial killers, government conspiracy narratives, 70's espionage thrillers(!?), urban horror, internet/backrooms horror etc. The series also features an oncoming apocalypse narrative, based around the collapse of Earth into a soulless bureaucracy in an attempt to increase the human race's resale value. Again, the highly connected nature of the characters doesn't actually hurt the stories being told, since the access to information and tech doesn't actually overcome the problems being presented, and often only serves to exacerbate the isolation various characters experience. Basically, I reckon you can still tell stories like this that embrace current trends in technological modernity.
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Jun 21, 2023 05:03
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Fozzy The Bear posted:Looking back the 90's were a magical time. It absolutely was.
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Jun 21, 2023 07:18
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The tough part about doing any kind of government conspiracy theory stuff nowadays is just WHO believes these things and the kind of message you're trying to convey. Back in the 90s you could say "the government is hiding the truth about aliens from us!" and that was that. Nowadays a message like that gets combined with 30 other conspiracy theories and pretty soon you're hearing about how January 6th was a psy-op. I think that was the failing of trying to do any sort of overarching conspiracy theory stuff in those 2 revival seasons. It just felt weird. Joel McHale's character was basically Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones mixed together and we were supposed to root for the guy and think he had the inside scoop on things. That's not to say you didn't have cranks talking about conspiracy theories in the 90s. I listened to a lotta Art Bell and some of the callers were just as racist and crazy as anyone today. But I don't think a show can pull off "there's a vast government conspiracy theory" as a story beat any more, not without it feeling toothless and saying stuff like "oh, don't worry, the politicians you like aren't involved" or without it just feeling like some right-wing apocalypse fantasy. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" is my favorite revival episode, maybe my favorite episode period, because it realized this and wasn't afraid to poke fun at the central concept of the show.
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Jun 21, 2023 12:47
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I’m in the middle of season 4 and I can already feel the fatigue setting in. Season 3 was a blast, but this season is either bogged down in lore eps or just flat out boring. The flashback ep of the cigarette smoking man is the one highlight so far.
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Jun 26, 2023 06:30
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