The X-Files...
 

Hi,

I wanted to start a thread about this show...
My opinion about the show is this:

I watched the series when I really was a young kid (I was born in '87, the series aired around '93-'94...) and I loved it. I watched it at night, not always comprehending it, founding it to be scary sometimes, but I really loved it, because I really loved al that horror and science fiction.

When I was 11 or 12 I saw the movie in the movie theatre, found it to be very good to, but afterwards, lost a bit track of the series.

Untill 4 days ago... I suddenly remembered them, and I just ordered the 9 season dvd boxes... Don't know why.
What I remember from the show was that it gave television a higher standard. It had very intelligent writing, good acting and good characters, and filmic cinematography.
But what I liked the most, were just, the stories and how they brought it: they brought it on such a believable level, you REALLY believed all this was true.

Can't wait to watch them all next week, when the dvd's arrive...

Love to hear some other opinions about this show...

Every scene where Mulder's mother appears is great.

I have to say that because my girlfriend's mother is the actress.

I watched the first episode--then skipped the first few in the first season until i heard it described as being like the Night Stalker so I started watching it again--and watched every episode till the end of the run.
The first couple of seasons or so had good cliffhangers(the boxcar full of dead aliens). But eventually the alien storyline ran out of steam for me--as well as Mulder's missing sister plot.

I liked the movie.

I think the best episodes were the single shot ones--those that focused on some weird monster. The final episode was a let down--but I had read that they didnt really know how they were going to end the show so at least they were honest about it.

loved it
 

i really loved the x-files. the stories were always very engaging and direction-wise, the show had plenty of high moments. my favorite director of the lot was rob bowman who never failed to dazzle with his smart camerawork and well-thought out sequences. he went on to direct the film version of the show as well as the christian bale helmed "reign of fire" which i found to be quite entertaining.

perhaps the best aspect of the series was the way it married comedy into its fantastical plotlines. season three really began to see more comedy incorporated into the show and my best memories of the x-files lie in the episodes that exhibited the most humor. frequently hilarious, these episodes never seemed to be detached from the overall "uncanniness" of the show and i marvel at how they made it work. who can forget the episode about the kid vampire who was using fake fangs to tackle his prey? in the opening sequence mulder is chasing some unknown figure deep into a dark forest. convinced that his suspect is a vampire he eventually impales him in the chest. scully catches up with him an in a hilarious twist of events he turns over the body and discovers the "fangs" in the freshly desceased's mouth are fake. he utters an expletive - "fu..." - but is cut off by the famous x-files theme and beginning credits. brilliant.

there were countless other episodes that really stood out but one of my most favorite was the two-part episode where a UFO-related event interferes with space-time and causes mulder and an old-fart fellow agent to exchange bodies (actually, im not entirely sure of the plotline, correct me if im wrong with some details please!) anyways, the storytelling was inventive in that everytime the old-fart agent faced the mirror, you could see mulder as his reflection (and vice versa). we are treated to many scenes where this is so (more for the benefit of the viewer really, to remind us that mulder is actually inhabited by the personality of a different person, and again vice versa). everything from wardrobe mirrors to side mirrors, bar wall mirrors and, in one particularly side-splitting scene, the ceiling mirrors of mulder's bedroom (newly refurnished by the guy inhabiting mulder's body, in the hopes of seducing scully)... it was a riot.

the x-files was great while it lasted. it'd be nice if they did a couple of special reunion episodes, yeah?

dan

I also loved the episode with Mulder and the MIB (played by Michael McKean, I think) exchange bodies.

It's hard to sustain the tension of 'what's the alien conspiracy' over that period of time. So that's why I think the stand alone episodes worked best.

Remember Charles Nelson Reilly as Jose Chung?

Yeah the comedy was really memorable. I can still remember some lines.
When Michael McKean meets the Lone Gunman, reads their conspiracy newspaper and says: do you know how many of these ideas I came up with while sitting on the pot?" and : "There is no Saddam Hussein. We found him doing dinner theatre in Tulsa. Plays good ethnics."

And the episode where we follow "Cancer Man" through his past and at the end he is stitting on the bench with the vagrant who picks a moldy box of chocolates out of the garbage and they do a parody of Forrest Gump(except, you realize that instead of meeting famous people--CM is killing them).

I thought the Charles Nelson Reilly guest spot on Millennium was funny too--with its spoof of L Ron Hubbard--and Lance Henricksen comes into the scene of a homicide dressed in a bright blue suit and laughing: "lighten up fella! its a murder, not a funeral!"


Hardly watched the show but remember that episode.

Why, Jose Chung was nothing but a 'beep', 'beep', 'blankety blank'.

hi matt,

hopefully you purchased the season sets@good prices. it just came down to $25/season recently on amazon.com (at time of this post).

meanwhile, notice the landscape of TV before and after XF. before XF, it was easy to spot a TV show, the sets, the look of it. after XF, you had shows like Lost, Alias, Desperate Housewives, Sopranos, and so on that looked like films themselves.

coincidence? technology? that's a part of it, but i think XF revolutionized TV by making it closer to film because they utilized many of the same techniques. in fact regardless of what you thought about early vs. later seasons, each episode is shot like a 45min film.

plus, nearly every element of the show is extremely well done:
-writing
-acting
-directing/cinematography
-fx
-music
-set
-costume
-etc.

the only negative i can think of is they made the mythology on the fly from 1-5 and then dispersed it by fight the future film. if you watched the series finale, "The Truth" people didn't like it cause they finally revealed ALL of the plotlines to fans. i thought, "that's it?" yup, that's it. you can summarize the alien mythology with a few sentences.

well, regardless of that. imho, it's the best TV show ever made in history. nothing else comes close. i really can't think of another that comes to the caliber of what it achieved.

The series was very good but there was no resolution and then it was yanked, or whatever. A couple of my friends acted in it several times (small parts). Too bad "they" stopped making it (or whatever).

Hi Yi,

Yes I bought them on the internet at a fair price, 29 euros for the OLD DIGIPACKS :-D.
They are very hard to find, and now even that website is almost through their stock with those old beautiful digipacks. As a matter of fact, I'll be getting the boxes - finally - in a couple of days.

It's nice, what you say about the level of TV shows, I heard many people citing that about the XF.
Can't wait to rewatch them, and watch all the episodes I never saw.

but Frank,

the "resolution" was *all revealed*. the fans just didn't agree with it. the mythos is actually *very light* compared to somn like Lost. it's not as BIG as fans make it out to be. that's why they're all disappointed.

go watch the series finale, "The Truth" and it's all in there.

PS matthie, i'm about to do the same =). s1-9. i know i've seen every ep since s5, but s1-4 i was a bit spotty. i'm glad i'm going to enjoy some of the *best* parts of XF =).

It doesnt help when there are the rumors of another movie--so they cant end the series with an alien invasion.

Sopranos could end that way if they are planning a movie(I havent enjoyed it much in the last 3 seasons--the first 2 were great-maybe the novelty has worn off for me, but I think they are all getting soft).
I thought Babylon 5 was a show where they had planned its story arc out well from the start-unlike Star Trek-- I think the finale episode was filmed a year before the final season! And still they left threads hanging. The episode where the first season main character encounters a 2001 spacesuited figure in blue who we learn, 2 years later, is Bruce Boxleitner who then goes into the Future and there is all that stuff about his son--and that parasite creature trap--great stuff. I watched seasons 1-4 over a few months so it really felt like a consistent storyline.

that'd be another thread (B5) altogether =). but... *in short* JMS thought the shows was really going to be cancelled after s4, so he wrote in the civil wars stuff planned for 5 into 4. that's why 5 feels stretched out/made up. that's why series finale was filmed a year before.

What was the resolution? The show just ended with those new actors and that was that.

"When I was 11 or 12 I saw the movie in the movie theatre, found it to be very good to, but afterwards, lost a bit track of the series."

My roommate refused to believe me that they kept shooting the series after the movie came out in 1998. I had to show him the imdb.com details to convince him it ran until 2002.

I think a HUGE problem with the series was the lack of reveal. They just wouldn't get on with the alien conspiracy. They took so long to start showing what was going on behind the scenes that people lost interest. I watched many, many episodes and I still don't know what "Cancer Man" and "The Well-Manicured Man" and their crew were really doing. I really liked those characters, but they started to seem pointless. I know there was some sort of war between the faceless "rebels" and the black oil beings, but what was the resolution?

People lost interest not because David Duchovny reduced his appearances on the show, but because the producers wouldn't get on with it. I kept hearing the crew of Monty Python shout "Get on with it!" while I was watching the X-files.