maxwellyoung

The Weekly X Files Rewatch Thread

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Season Finale of Season 6, Biogenesis, is all my least favorite X-Files Mythology tropes rolled into one. Why is Mulder the only one affected by the SPACE RADIATION (tm) and why does Chris Carter love ponderous voiceover so so much? 

 

I've seen the show through season 7, but 6 is where I started to skip the mythology shows entirely.

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Season 7 opener continues the nonsense. It's all summed up via Wikipedia's production notes on the episode:

 

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Mulder's dream and decisions in "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati" heavily allude to the actions of Jesus in Nikos Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation of Christ. Duchovny, a fan of the book, found parallels between its central story and Mulder's ordeal, and incorporated many of the novel's concepts into the episode.[16][17] In The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus is torn between his higher calling as the son of God and his desire towards his own humanity. Duchovny was drawn to the fact that Christ's struggle in the novel was "not only godlike, but also profoundly human"[18] and used this template for Mulder; in the series, Mulder is destined towards greater things—in this case, stopping the oncoming alien invasion—but he also desires to have a personal life. Duchovny noted that "Mulder is a guy who's been given the same problem [as Jesus]. What I'm doing is using the very human model of Christ".[18] Duchovny cautioned that he was not trying to make Mulder into a Christ-like savior figure but rather "an everyman".

 

You know. That everyman Jesus.

 

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The dialogue in the episode proved difficult for Anderson to present believably. She was troubled that her character was arguing against the existence of extraterrestrials, when in the previous episode her character had encountered an alien shipwreck. When she talked to Carter, she said that she did not "know if [she could] do this anymore" because her character was arguing against information that had been confirmed in the first two parts of the episode.[19] Carter explained that there must be conflict between Mulder and Scully for the show's "believer versus skeptic" dynamic to work properly.

 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_Ami

 

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The episode's title, "En Ami," translates from French into English as "as a friend."[4][5] The title also functions as a pun, reading phonetically as "enemy" in English.[5]

 

 

Boo!

 

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The script went through many revisions; several scenes were cut, including one that featured The Smoking Man teaching Scully how to water-ski.

 

This is not actually a bad episode but holy shit, The X-Files could have literally had a jump the shark moment during an actual water-skiing scene and I am kinda mad this doesn't exist.

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So after a couple months of not watching any X-Files I picked it up again and man, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose is a fantastic episode. 

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Clyde Bruckman is indeed fantastic.

 

To update some other stuff from this thread: I got The Wire on DVD in all its 4:3 glory; Steven Williams was also great in The Leftovers; The X-Files season 11 will likely air early next year, and will a lot less likely make up for the godawful season 10 by being brilliant whilst wrapping up the mythology arc in a wholly satisfying way.

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I didn't make any more posts but I did end up going through the whole series and I thought season 9 left me prepared for X-Files at it's low point but holy cow Season 10 is just nonsense. I literally cannot fathom how anyone could get six episodes of X-Files greenlit and use their time so poorly. Chris Carter is a massive hack and he is lucky he stumbled into Wong and the Morgans.

 

Speaking of using time poorly, I Want To Believe is the first time audiences got to see Mulder and Scully together in action in nearly a decade and Carter decides to spend most of the movie with them split up, mad at each other, in service of a homophobic super depressing monster of the week episode. 

 

Still gonna watch Season 11 because I'm dumb.

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Just watched first episode of season 11 and it was atrocious. 40 minutes of people in rooms spouting painfully clumsy exposition at each other, David Duchovny with an increasingly unconvincing lack of a single grey hair (appropriately, given Mulder's futile hunt for greys) and an unbelievable cop-out from the previous season's cliffhangers:

 

the whole episode was a (psychic) dream!

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