In the mid-00s, they started releasing X-FILES DVD box sets that contained only the core mythology episodes. Four of them total. I remember buying them in college—in part because it was so much cheaper to just buy the “necessary” episodes than all 9 DVD box sets.
But then as I made my way through those DVDs…I realized that I was really missing all of the other ‘greatest hits’-type episodes, the gems that had nothing to do with the convoluted Syndicate bullshit mythology, but made the show so memorable in the first place.
(It also made it sorta confusing in the later seasons, as Doggett and Reyes become the primary protagonists. They would keep saying things about how Mulder or Scully had been missing for so long … but because of the curation of the boxed sets, you would have just seen them one episode prior, without all the other filler episodes in between to pass the time.)
Oof, that seems like a bad idea for multiple reasons, but I wonder if the person who came up with the idea had ever seen the show - having a collection of the weakest episodes seems self-defeating. I can’t remember any of the core mythology episodes - elements of them, yes, but not episodes - whereas there were a lot of highly memorable stand-alones. Also I wonder how they decided which were part of the core mythology. There were non-alien episodes that impacted the central mysteries (e.g. what happened to Mulder’s sister), which would be confusing if they left them out… but probably also confusing if they left them in (because they were contradicted by other episodes).
Right? I remember some of the core story threads and characters, but the episodes that really stuck with me were the MOTW episodes, or the Josie Chung ones. X-Files could do comedy surprisingly well.
And what I remember of the “core” stories is that they frequently contradicted each other in ways that weren’t fully reconciled, had dangling plot threads and ultimately had no satisfactory resolution. I remember the last few episodes of the show that were advertised as resolving the big mysteries practically turned into clip show episodes where they largely just recapped the most basic, obvious plot points of previous episodes (not the contradictions, ambiguities or actual unresolved mysteries). In other words, what I mostly remember about the core episodes is how annoyed I was with them overall.
Having so much time where I’m forced to sit on the couch as an Alzheimer’s caretaker, I’ve been doing this, along with the Monsters of the Week book that summarizes and critiques each episode. I haven’t been binging it to the degree that I watch more than an average of an episode a day, but it’s still gone by pretty quickly. I just finished the final episode of the first “new” season (season 10), so only 10 episodes remain in the whole series for me.
I’d actually seen all of it before a long time ago, so this feels like a bit of a milestone, as those final 10 will be the only truly new content for me (other than Lone Gunmen, which I did sort of for completion’s sake). It was definitely interesting to watch the series evolve over the years, relive the highlights and lowlights, and try to make sense of the conspiracy (which actually makes more sense than I remembered, now that I’m deliberately trying to keep track of it, but is still a mess). Definitely worth the time to cross off your list, even if it really falls apart in the later seasons.
IIRC, the conspiracy basically boiled down to: aliens want to colonize the Earth. A bunch of rich old white guys form a Syndicate to try and negotiate with them, ultimately settling on using their black oil blood to create human-alien hybrids that will be more suited to live on the planet, and gradually bring the rest of the humans under heel.
The Super-Soldiers were then basically just the black oil hybrids, except created by (and thus totally loyal to) the aliens without collaboration from the Syndicate.
I think that’s about right, but that’s trimming off a lot of frayed edges. Like, they’re using bees to spread a black oil virus for some reason, which Mulder and Scully shut down, but then it just gets moved somewhere else, but then it also never comes up again, and there’s all the stuff with alien bounty hunters, which are apparently a different species since black oil can infect them, but some of them are on board with the plan and some aren’t, and for some reason that psychic kid is important to everything, and then Scully’s baby is super important and everyone is trying to get to him before he’s born but then when he is born they just watch and then walk away, so apparently he’s a normal human baby, but then next season he’s not, but apparently just giving him up for adoption is good enough to make them give up again even though they run the government and spy on everyone everywhere… stuff like that.
And then of course season 10 says that aliens are real but they just crashed here once and everything after that was a cabal of evil men using reverse-engineered alien technology, and anything that appeared to be actual alien involvement was just staged that way purely to fool Mulder and Scully, even stuff that happened before they worked at the FBI, or literal aliens doing literal alien things that would serve no purpose beside colonization, or stuff that happened when they weren’t there to see it but the audience was. Also the Cigarette Man is mostly fine now even though the last time we saw him there was a fancy CGI shot where we literally saw all the flesh burned off to reveal his bare, charred skull as he was blown up by a missile.
I was an avid fan until season 6. I lived in Vancouver at the time. In addition to the engaging stories and characters, I loved that my city’s dreary grey ambiance was being shown back to me, and I thought it suited the show so well. I didn’t realize how much until the filming moved to LA. Watching the show didn’t touch as many of my happy “familiarity” places anymore, and my viewing tapered off quickly.
I didn’t watch it again after that. Reading this, I think I might like it.
Twin Peaks is most definitely worth the time (and is a lot smaller time investment). Even though executive meddling kind of screwed up the intended plot, it was worth watching all the way to the end. The revival of that series is… different, but certainly weird and memorable. I never saw Lost, but got the general impression through cultural osmosis that the “making it up as we go along” nature didn’t work out as well as it did for The X-Files and it ended up being a colossal waste of time and invested emotion for most viewers once the end was finally reached. But I could be entirely mistaken.
