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And what the gently caress was this wig?
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Sep 26, 2023 02:40
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I just watched Hollywood AD, and I think it’s pretty bad. Why does every tv show eventually go up its own rear end in a top hat about how crazy and weird the hollywood assembly line is? Do the people making the episode think they’re somehow better than everyone else churning out corporate slop? Or that they’re the first ones to notice the irrationality and hypocrisy of hollywood? Or that they’re so good at complaining about their profession that everyone not immersed in the studio machine will think it’s brilliant and interesting? The whole thing is like when someone insists on describing the dream they had last night, as if anyone else would have any interest.
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Sep 28, 2023 04:06
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I still haven't watched all of this and my plan is always to do so. My favorite thing about the show is it feels like there is this oppressive air about everything, yes Mulder and Scully may solve the case but it's not going to lead to any real change as the government holds all the cards along with the nebulous aliens. I grew up in a small town with a Baptist upbringing, I was a nerd and liked to draw. so naturally I was ostracized like a son of a bitch, and there wasn't anything to do about it, couple that with pre-2000 Jesus is coming back in 2000, X-Files had massive appeal. I'm about halfway through season 1 now, the Jersey Devil episode was hilarious and the opening roll with Mulder and Scully looking up at something terrified me as a kid as an unknowable entity, instead is just a family of hairy people. I feel like the show has the absolute best writing in the one-offs but falls apart a lot with the alien lore.
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Sep 30, 2023 20:38
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It's been litigated a lot but the mytharc stuff is genuinely engaging for the first few seasons when things are just vague enough to keep you guessing. It's not until somewhere around season 5 where it all starts to fall apart and is just extremely dire by the time the original series run comes to a close.
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Sep 30, 2023 20:46
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I agree with all of that entirely. I dearly love the show, but I simply cannot sit through any of the mytharc stuff in s8-9-10-11. And truthfully it gets wonky a long time before then.
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Sep 30, 2023 21:25
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Since I think this is the best place to ask, another show in the X Files universe I'd love to watch is Millennium, but the DVDs are outrageous in price. Is the only option sailing the high seas otherwise?
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Sep 30, 2023 23:32
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UnknownMercenary posted:It's been litigated a lot but the mytharc stuff is genuinely engaging for the first few seasons when things are just vague enough to keep you guessing. It's not until somewhere around season 5 where it all starts to fall apart and is just extremely dire by the time the original series run comes to a close. I keep saying that the minute they start babbling about Super Soldiers, just ignore the mytharc stuff. (Really, you could end the mytharc with One Son, where the Syndicate gets flambéed, and end the show itself with Closure in season 7, when Mulder finds out the ultimate truth about his sister.)
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Oct 1, 2023 00:15
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Been doing a slow watch of X-Files and the funniest thing about it is that the monster if the week stories have mostly aged fine. The influence on things like Fringe and Supernatural are overwhelming and they work. But simultaneously the thing the X-Files was most lauded for, it's convoluted myth Arc, has aged loving horribly. And not because it was a convoluted Myth Arc but that it's premises have been so thoroughly been exposed it creates a genuine dissonance. Namely the Conspiracy just feels really loving insane and it's view if conspiracy theorists as knights of valour or harmless feels straight up offensive. You end up watching it and seeing no moral complexity but that The Governments are out to kill us all and only bikers, stoner's, and militia understand the truth. Which comes to the ither 99s anachronism: extreme scientific loathing vs the purity of naturalism. It's less obvious than the conspiracy theory aspect but also the 90s was the era of New Age and X-Files has along running theme of science existing purely for evil and corrupting the natural world. This did lead to sone actual decency when it came to honouring certain spirituality aspects, especially Natuve Americans, but it comes at the cost of feeling like it was written someone with a dream catcher tattoo and with an axe to grind. It gets very uncomfortable with the way too on the nose antivaccination episodes that was mixed up with the neo-hippy neo age. So yeah I'm still watching but I can understand why the rev8vals don't work, because the backbone story of it is fundamentally flawed due to being a complete relic and archive of 90s ethos that we got to see it's complete failures play out in real time.
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Oct 24, 2023 14:00
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This thread just suddenly showed up in my bookmarks and I dunno if it is some kind of forums glitch or an Spooktober surprise but it feels very on-brand for the X-Files.
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Oct 24, 2023 14:18
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Lid posted:
You'll have to get to the final season of the revival but there's an episode that runs off this idea, with conspiracy theories being presented as relics of the past since people can just create their own subjective realities nowadays. It is definitely odd to go back and watch the show. Like, there were always anti-vax conspiracy theories, but you could watch the X-Files and separate the reality of the show from real life. But now? If they introduced that you'd have half the people watching say it's "The elite rubbing it in our faces"
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Oct 24, 2023 17:53
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The vaccine against the black oil works, though. Even the x-files believes in vaccines.
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Oct 25, 2023 01:08
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I AM GRANDO posted:The vaccine against the black oil works, though. Even the x-files believes in vaccines. The X-Files also has episodes where TVs and other appliances are putting out mind control signals
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Oct 25, 2023 07:45
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I AM GRANDO posted:The vaccine against the black oil works, though. Even the x-files believes in vaccines. Yeah it also the worldwide black oil pandemic via the Spartan virus is secretly hidden in vaccines.
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Oct 25, 2023 12:59
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Timby posted:I keep saying that the minute they start babbling about Super Soldiers, just ignore the mytharc stuff. I watched the series a couple of years ago and had to quit a few episodes into 9. I actually googled the plot of the season 8 finale (super soldier culmination) because it was so jarringly bad and nonsensical that I thought I must have missed a key scene or 6, and no, I had all of the information.
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Oct 25, 2023 23:45
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So, Eve was recently rerun on Comet. I never thought about this, but why doesn’t anyone at the special prison designed to house Eves realize that the new doctor who starts working there at the end of the episode is one of the escaped Eves? I guess they set up that the guard doesn’t look up from his newspaper when buzzing people inside.
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Oct 27, 2023 01:54
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Lid posted:So yeah I'm still watching but I can understand why the rev8vals don't work, because the backbone story of it is fundamentally flawed due to being a complete relic and archive of 90s ethos that we got to see it's complete failures play out in real time. Everybody's got a pretty good quality camera on them at all times. Do we get good videos of flying saucers making crop circles? Or bigfoot or Nessie? Nope. It was all a dream. A fun one, though.
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Oct 27, 2023 03:09
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Animal-Mother posted:Everybody's got a pretty good quality camera on them at all times. Do we get good videos of flying saucers making crop circles? Or bigfoot or Nessie? Nope. It was all a dream. A fun one, though. UFOs, Bigfoot, and Nessie scramble cameras pointed at them, duh.
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Oct 27, 2023 04:52
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Animal-Mother posted:Everybody's got a pretty good quality camera on them at all times. Do we get good videos of flying saucers making crop circles? Or bigfoot or Nessie? Nope. It was all a dream. A fun one, though. That isn't everything though, as the monster of the week stories all have mostly aged well. Its the combination of the myth arc of conspiracy government using science for horror vs the truth-seeking hippies and bikers and naturalists that just has left things go awry. Contrast with Fringe which, when it started, was all monster of the week and only got better when they actually started the myth arc in full force. Though it too ended not as great as hoped, season 4 being a whole lot of missed opportunity, you can go back and watch Frigne now, a show that ended a decade ago, and it still holds up as the ethos don't cause cognitive dissonance. Though the other cognitive dissonance that applies to X-Files is a lot of their discoveries in monster of the week are just covered up for no reason and not as in Too Dangerous, one comes to mind is an episode where inadvertantly a treatment for Alzheimers is discovered via shamanistic medication. And the episode ends with them announcing no research is being done into this and the whole thing swept under while all the Alzheimers patients regress to shells of themselves. This occurs in a hospital looking for a cure for Alzheimers to begin with. In summary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTHB8iC1C0E&t=1s Lid fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 06:53
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Lid posted:Though the other cognitive dissonance that applies to X-Files is a lot of their discoveries in monster of the week are just covered up for no reason and not as in Too Dangerous, one comes to mind is an episode where inadvertantly a treatment for Alzheimers is discovered via shamanistic medication. And the episode ends with them announcing no research is being done into this and the whole thing swept under while all the Alzheimers patients regress to shells of themselves. This occurs in a hospital looking for a cure for Alzheimers to begin with.] If it's the episode I am thinking of, didn't usage of the drug also enable a bunch of poltergeists to rape and murder people? I take your point in general though. Some of the monsters of the week just end up in a normal jail, when it seems like the existence of someone who could shapeshift at will or control the loving weather would inspire a frenzy of research or at least have some talk show interviews lined up. Avasculous fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 17:03
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Avasculous posted:If it's the episode I am thinking of, didn't usage of the drug also enable a bunch of poltergeists to rape and murder people? Yeah, but only at a high dose that even the guy growing the mushrooms knew how to avoid. The old guy manifesting the ghosts was doing it deliberately. Any of the doctors trying to cure Alzheimer’s in that episode could have figured out how to make a safe version, because what the old people were eating were just the mushrooms themselves. But I guess the guy growing them was in the US illegally, so no more miracle cure because that guy needs to be deported.
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Oct 27, 2023 17:10
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Avasculous posted:If it's the episode I am thinking of, didn't usage of the drug also enable a bunch of poltergeists to rape and murder people? That part is true but I didn't want to talk about it because hooboy a 90s depiction of rape survivorship aged horribly in an entirely different way. That part was just exploitation writing. And yeah like putting the redneck who can literally summon lightning and controls electrical fields to the point of being able to melt objects just in his vicinity was put in a mental institution. Which was weird even more than usual as he was never shown to be mentally ill. And that's actually a good episode but yeah sometimes it's "huh". But those I can take better than the Myth Arc stuff because it's meant to be a bottle story, though sometimes they try to solve the story with "it was a government conspiracy and experiment all along" even unrelated to the myth arc which always feels off. The town controlled by subliminal messaging and the prisoner pandemic both come to mind.
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Oct 27, 2023 17:34
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The Lone Gunmen spinoff is all about evil government conspiracies completely unrelated to the smoking man stuff. It’s not like the ufo conspiracy is in charge of all the conspiracy stuff—there are just overlapping and completely independent conspiracies involving all sectors and branches of government.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:45
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Lid posted:That part is true but I didn't want to talk about it because hooboy a 90s depiction of rape survivorship aged horribly in an entirely different way. That part was just exploitation writing. Yeah, fair enough. quote:But those I can take better than the Myth Arc stuff because it's meant to be a bottle story, though sometimes they try to solve the story with "it was a government conspiracy and experiment all along" even unrelated to the myth arc which always feels off. The town controlled by subliminal messaging and the prisoner pandemic both come to mind. I actually like the subliminal messaging one, because of the ambiguity at the end. Mulder's theory was that The Government was exposing people to pesticides through local agriculture that amplified their personal phobias and made them suggestible to subliminal messages urging homicide. The way we keep seeing this play out is that average joe walks into an elevator and sees a flurry of texts encouraging his worst fear (claustrophobia), and telling him to kill the other passengers. Mulder gets chemtrailed himself early on (of course) but finds no real evidence for most of the episode. He only sees a message for a second at the end, taunting him and saying "the experiment" is done, confirming his worst fears. Avasculous fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 21:10
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Lid posted:Namely the Conspiracy just feels really loving insane and it's view if conspiracy theorists as knights of valour or harmless feels straight up offensive. You end up watching it and seeing no moral complexity but that The Governments are out to kill us all and only bikers, stoner's, and militia understand the truth. X-Files isn’t really about conspiracy theorism, though. Early in the series, Cancer Guy is just like “yeah it’s me. I’m behind everything. Just try and stop me, idiot.” Then Mulder and the rest of the gang just nebulously have to obtain “answers” that will somehow make Cancer Guy not do thing. “I've heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.” [???] Crucially, there’s no element of paranoia here. 1990s conspiracy culture is the setting in which Mulder does his stuff, but he doesn’t really indulge in it himself. The conspiracy poo poo is just a thing that interests him, something he investigates with an ironic detachment because (like the poster says) he wants to believe - but doesn’t. Actual conspiracy theorists don’t have that uncertainty. They wouldn’t be asking “what happened to my sister?”, except in the Just Asking Questions rhetorical sense. They have no need for an X-Files. (Any notion that Mulder might be a conspiracy theorist goes fully out the window in the golem episode, where he bluntly denounces overt antisemitism without shifting the discussion to reptilians or whatever. When the conspiracy poo poo gets ‘too real’ Mulder shuts it down, hard.)
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Oct 29, 2023 23:41
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Finally got through this thread. My only rewatch, I watched everything in S1-S7. All remaining seasons, I only watched mytharc episodes. I think for my next rewatch I'll take a different approach. I think my favorite moment in the mytharc, if not the series, is when Mulder names Blevins as the mole in the hearing. Blevins runs to his office in a panic, and is promptly assassinated by Second Man who was sitting next to him just a minute prior. Also, the "Scully has cancer" episode aired right after a Super Bowl. I wonder if it's the episode with the highest ratings.
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Oct 30, 2023 01:13
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I wonder if you could do a first-time watch without any of the mytharc stuff and it would still make sense. I think you'd have to sit through the ones that explain cast changes at a minimum unfortunately
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Oct 30, 2023 20:42
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zer0spunk posted:I wonder if you could do a first-time watch without any of the mytharc stuff and it would still make sense. I think you'd have to sit through the ones that explain cast changes at a minimum unfortunately Just quit with the last full Duchovny season. The one where Mulder frees the genie is a better series finale than any of the 3-4 episodes that were actually intended to be finales.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:01
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Je souhaite for me is the most underrated episode of the x files. Like, everyone will list Jose Chungs or Clyve Burkmans or bad blood, but je souhaite is every bit as good as those.
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Oct 31, 2023 00:48
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It’s funny as hell. The scene when the idiot blows the house up trying to heat it with the oven always makes me LOL.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:26
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I think Bad Blood is overrated. It tries too hard and goes too broad in search of what Darin Morgan does, but it doesn’t have anything to say. Not that it doesn’t have funny bits. Vince Gilligan got better as a writer, I will say.
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Oct 31, 2023 01:54
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Hey all! I started watching X-Files for the first time with my partner in recent weeks, as we've been playing the Delta Green TTRPG with friends in recent months and wanted to watch a show in a similar vein. (Funnily enough, it turns out that DG was released first - but it definitely ended up drawing a lot of inspiration from X-Files) We're only early on in season two, but I'm always wary of typical American TV bloat, since I don't want either of us to burn out early. What's your opinion on it - is it all worth watching? Or should we skip large swathes of later seasons, or skip the movies, or something? Also, I'm glad I called Toombs' return, as he was 100% coming back - cool death scene, too! My partner (who's always been suspicious of escalators, for some reason) didn't seem too enthused by it, though.  Hopefully the werewolf thing ("see you in eight years") gets a nod later on too, seeing as the show did actually go for that long
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Oct 31, 2023 02:47
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Quit when you lose interest. The show will go through a few major changes at various times... you'll know. If you're having trouble making yourself care about the people onscreen, that's probably the time to give it a break. Luckily, that's quite a ways down the line, and you've got some great stuff ahead of you. Accept early on that the mytharc is a complete asspull, there is no masterplan aside from what you're seeing in any given episode, and even the ones with continuity from previous episodes are going to pick and choose which elements to bring back... and in whatever form the current ep requires. You'll enjoy them a lot more (and for a lot longer into the series) when you aren't trying to assemble the story into anything coherent.
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Oct 31, 2023 05:36
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After The War posted:Quit when you lose interest. The show will go through a few major changes at various times... you'll know. If you're having trouble making yourself care about the people onscreen, that's probably the time to give it a break. Luckily, that's quite a ways down the line, and you've got some great stuff ahead of you. Yeah, this. If you want a rough goal, go through to season 5 and the first movie, which mostly wraps the mytharc up. There are still some pretty great monster of the week episodes after that if you're still enjoying it, but you can easily find lists of those here and elsewhere on the net.
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Oct 31, 2023 05:56
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Right, OK cool - sounds good. Thanks for that! We'll go through to S5+movie and see how we go after that
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Oct 31, 2023 06:01
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I have taken to mostly more episodes when I do rewatches, some of the mytharc episodes do have a cool creature or whatever going on though and that's what keeps me coming back. Just love weird monsters and cryptids and magic and nonsense. Well, a certain type of nonsense.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:15
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After The War posted:Accept early on that the mytharc is a complete asspull, there is no masterplan aside from what you're seeing in any given episode, and even the ones with continuity from previous episodes are going to pick and choose which elements to bring back... and in whatever form the current ep requires. You'll enjoy them a lot more (and for a lot longer into the series) when you aren't trying to assemble the story into anything coherent. I don't think it's quite *that* incoherent, at least for the first 4-5 seasons. There's definitely little things that change (probably with the writer) and things they introduce and never follow up on, but the core conspiracy's motive, goals, and perpretrators remain pretty constant. I think it's only in 6-7 that the wheels start wobbling and 8 where things really fly off the rails, and you get lots of weird, meandering "ANOTHER double agent!!" nonsense that doesn't add up even within a single episode.
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Nov 1, 2023 08:33
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Huge parts of the original mytharc get wrapped up in season 6 but the show has to justify its continued existence.
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Nov 1, 2023 09:18
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UnknownMercenary posted:Huge parts of the original mytharc get wrapped up in season 6 but the show has to justify its continued existence. I'm not the first person to say it, but the show 100% loses something when they move the filming from Vancouver to Los Angeles. It's just not as dreary and moody, you don't get those cool shots of somebody in a forest with a huge flood light illuminating the horizon. There are definitely good episodes in season 6 and beyond (Drive is one of my all-time favorites) but I always miss the look of the first 5 seasons.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:23
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Season 6 is also when you get a lot of that clarinet music playing throughout episodes.
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Nov 2, 2023 16:47
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A Fancy Hat posted:I'm not the first person to say it, but the show 100% loses something when they move the filming from Vancouver to Los Angeles. It's just not as dreary and moody, you don't get those cool shots of somebody in a forest with a huge flood light illuminating the horizon. Plus its when you go from rando canadian being extras and minor parts to a bunch of aspiring LA actors, making the show look a lot more mainstream tv.
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Nov 2, 2023 19:00
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