X-Files

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My buddy said X-Files was always a bad show he hated. How quickly do I need to end the friendship?
CEO of Pickles said:
The show will sometimes have Scully witness/experience a paranormal event, and they will either try to brush it off with either another character providing information (which very well could be false whether the writers intended it to be or not) or Scully flat out doubts herself on whether it happened
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This is because X-Files is a situation procedural/drama. You know, like a situation comedy (like Friends)? There's an overarching plot, kind of, but at the end of every episode, the conceit of the show resets.

That used to bug me a lot, but then I learned to stop worrying and love the format. Now I'm just sad shows like this don't get made anymore (outside of dreadful network TV).
 
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XYZpdq Jr. said:
Yeah it gets pretty grating after the third or fourth time she's been knocked up by saucermen and then she's like "wait, Mulder, this is clearly swamp gas"
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But she became a believer during the first half of S5, simply because Mulder lost his faith in extraterrestrials after all what he saw in Redux.
She's just a contrarian to whatever Mulder believes.
 
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𒀭Δημιουργός χάος said:
My favourite X-files episode wasn't even aired.
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Is that from the game?

I was going to make a whole new thread, but fuck it. I'll post most of it below.

I rewatched seasons 1–9 a few years ago, and I agree with the most common sentiments: the first five seasons were the best, and the show lost a lot of its charm after moving production from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Seasons 8 and 9 are by far the worst, and the finale is just shockingly bad. It was basically a glorified clip show with characters acting completely out of character (the black FBI chief comes to their rescue? Really?), and it introduced things that felt pulled straight out of nowhere - like the ghost who gives Mulder the note.

I always see the same eight or so episodes mentioned whenever the show is discussed: Clyde Bruckman, Jose Chung, Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, Tooms...

Here are a few of my favorites from the later seasons:

S06E10 - Tithonus: The one where the old guy takes pictures of people dying, hoping Death will finally notice him and take him as well.

S06E18 - Milagro: In my opinion, this is probably the weirdest episode (in a show about UFOs and mutants!). I remember liking it a lot because it had a strange tone and was more up for interpretation than any other episode. I couldn’t tell you what it was actually about, though. I need to rewatch it someday. I can definitely understand why someone might hate it.

S06E21 - Field Trip: I thought the plot twist worked really well, and I was amused by the overall weirdness and creepiness of Mulder and Scully’s hallucinations in the mushroom pit.

S07E03 - Hungry: I couldn’t help but laugh at the villain’s stupidity. On one hand, he’s a dangerous, bloodthirsty monster. On the other, he talks to the cops. Mulder actually acts like a proper agent in this episode, so the guy never stood a chance.

As for the worst episodes - other than Død Kalm (dyinf old age on a rusty ghost ship), Teso Dos Bichos (the one with the aggressive animals), and All Things (directed by Gillian Anderson, has annoying song by Moby) - I always think of The Field Where I Died. Some excerpts from the Wikipedia summary:

Scully believes Melissa is exhibiting multiple personality disorder, but Mulder thinks she is recalling a past life. The agents take her back to the temple, where she takes on the personality of a woman from the Civil War period (...) She also states that Mulder, in a past life, was a Confederate soldier in the field with her, was her beloved, and that she watched him die.

Mulder has himself hypnotized and recalls a time when he was a Jewish woman with a son, who had the same soul as his sister Samantha; his deceased father, who was Scully, is dead. Melissa was his husband in this life and had been taken to a Nazi concentration camp by a Gestapo officer who was The Smoking Man (...) Scully, Mulder claims, was his sergeant.
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I like how the Blu-rays look, especially because I only remember watching the show on TV when it aired. There’s a whole article somwhere on the net about the transfer process. It took a loooong time, and a single episode - before editing and compression - was something ridiculous, like several terabytes. My only issue is with the director of photography in seasons 6–9. His favorite kind of lighting seemed to be a couple of weak wall lamps or shaded desk lamps on the floor. Everything was underlit, especially in season 9. See: attachments.

The first movie was good. The second one was completely unnecessary - more like a two-parter episode and not very engaging.

I only watched the first of the revival seasons, and it was so bad I never gave the other one a chance. The episode with the reptilian was funny, I guess. I think I read somewhere that they resurrect the Smoking Man AGAIN in the last one. What the fuck, man?
 

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𒀭Δημιουργός χάος said:
Correct answer.

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Unfortunately the cutscenes were never released outside of the game.
The series DVD and Bluray boxes utterly omitted this from special features.
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I saw a Youtube review of this some time ago and it sounded like the game wasn't great. Are you an X-Files fan? Is there anything interesting in the cutscenes?

I'd rather play the other one (the Resident Evil knockoff) because it at least has real gameplay. I remember Spoony's review where he mentions the part where Mulder is hallucinating a boss fight with Skinner and his female secretary. NAZI SUBDIREKTOR SKINNER!!!
 
Hentai-Semitism said:
I saw a Youtube review of this some time ago and it sounded like the game wasn't great. Are you an X-Files fan? Is there anything interesting in the cutscenes?
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The 1998 game was an old-school point-and-click vidya on multiple discs so you must take this into the account of those mixed reviews.
Otherwise I already dumped here the whole "episode"...you should definitely check it out.

Hentai-Semitism said:
Are you an X-Files fan?
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Well, I do own some of the US and European Laserdiscs of the show ....also the original (German) DVD boxes, VHS and some of the literature...
...Perhaps? :jacewow:
Hentai-Semitism said:
I'd rather play the other one (the Resident Evil knockoff) because it at least has real gameplay
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Resist or Serve is only fun to play with a multiple cheats (especially the bosses) otherwise the plot and gameplay are abhorrent.
As you already mentioned the whole thing is a terrible RE2 clone.
Not worthy to be included into actual X files canon.
 
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Everyone will remember him for Materia Primoris, even if hardly anyone has heard the long version and no one knows its name. But here are some other notable cues:

Carmen Amatorium Ex Arcanum
I think this was from the opening scene in 3. He reused it in--or recycled it from, they came out pretty close to each other--Caroline at Midnight:

Closure
This is from the end of Jose Chung's From Outer Space. The bit starting around 2:00 is really beautiful, but I can't find an isolated version of it. It's also included in the X-files suite on The Snow Files.

Doggett's Theme
For some reason I always associated this with Scully. I think it plays when she reads a letter she wrote to William, and that's how I formed the connection. I like it better than Scully's actual theme.

This Is Not Happening
Yeah, the show was insane by this point. But I really like this one, the buildup from sentimental and gentle, into mystery, then grit and desperate effort, and finally loss. I think it was a leitmotif around this period in the show.

And the movie (are we calling it Fight the Future?) is just a great action score. So many wonderful cues, you can listen to the whole album and never get bored. I'll just post the first one:

Threnody in X
Listen to it with good headphones and a good bitrate (or buy the original CD), the stereo imaging is amazing.
 
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frozen_runner said:
My buddy said X-Files was always a bad show he hated. How quickly do I need to end the friendship?
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If you have standards, try "never."

...........

Yeah, personally wasn't big on X-Files back in the day, despite (or in fact, partially because) I was into UFO and paranormal stuff.

It just.... commits all the sins.

Mulder is a whiny bitch. It's no wonder he has trouble convincing people because his method is to just have an emotional breakdown whenever you don't immediately buy his story.

X-Files is one of those shows that has to always have a downer ending, even if it comes out of nowhere and the show bent over backwards to make it happen. I've never understood why people like these things, and its especially bad when the episode could've instead been bittersweet or ambiguous but instead just has to throw in a last minute twist.

Everyone will be either super-smart or else a complete tard as the story demands.

And to wrap back around to what I was saying... it has the most boring takes on all these phenomenon. It's always a killer monster, the government is basically omniscient and omnipotent (which even when the show was new and I was like, twelve at the time, I thought that was pretty stupid), aliens are implied to be in cahoots with the government (why would advanced beings need our help?).... and oh, their end game is conquering the Earth. Strip away the show's atmosphere and it really is your standard B-Movie plot.

This is one of those cases where I found myself preferring Spoony's ideas about how the show should go. It wouldn't fix the "everyone is a massive idiot unless the plot demands then suddenly the writers magically grant them all the resources to have things go their way" issue, but at least the underlying idea would be kinda interesting, not reducing an interesting concept to just a standard alien overlords plot.
 
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frozen_runner said:
Unfortunately, the official DVD set sold so poorly, they're no chance we'll ever get a Bluray. A true cult hit.
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I own the DVD set, but I haven't watched it. I last saw the show when it was on UPN, maybe it ran once after that on Sci-Fi or something. The were a lot of one-season wonders like that in the 90s, a creative but brutal decade.
 
Standardized Profile said:
I own the DVD set, but I haven't watched it. I last saw the show when it was on UPN, maybe it ran once after that on Sci-Fi or something. The were a lot of one-season wonders like that in the 90s, a creative but brutal decade.
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I watched it about a decade ago when the DVDs came out. It's a 90s network TV show, of course, but it held up far, far better than I had feared. (There are a couple of weak episodes, but the season was like 24 of then back then, so that's to be expected.)

There's also the "Disenfranchised Edition" fan made DVD set that has crazy extras, like BTS footage some fan rescued from a studio dumpster and interviews with the creator.
 
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I tried getting into the show a few weeks ago and I'm not sure why but it didn't work for me. I love conspiracy stuff, glowie cover ups, UFO's and all that jazz, but I just really couldn't get into it after watching a few MOTW episodes that I saw were highly rated. It's not the age of the show or the cheesy effects, those don't bother me at all, if anything it has a great charm to it.
 
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Korpon said:
I tried getting into the show a few weeks ago and I'm not sure why but it didn't work for me. I love conspiracy stuff, glowie cover ups, UFO's and all that jazz, but I just really couldn't get into it after watching a few MOTW episodes that I saw were highly rated. It's not the age of the show or the cheesy effects, those don't bother me at all, if anything it has a great charm to it.
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Where were you watching it? Streaming site? Pirated rips?
 
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