Things Are Getting Strange

The X-Files takes a hard left turn back to monster of the week goodness! Somehow we wound up discussing the sadly never arranged Fire vs D.P.O. face-off which would pit a recovered Cecil L'Ively against the still seemingly still-powered Darin Peter Oswald. As far as we know no one's tried this in any official release... Kim is pleased with unexpectedly accurate defibrillator depiction bu...

Look, we like Samantha here. Doesn't feel like Bill Mulder was exactly hugely invested in his daughter based on the implications Paper Clip sets up. But that's after The Blessing Way which has some great stuff for Scully, and some... screentime for Mulder. Questions about of how Mulder got out of a (for want of a better term) hermetically sealed room, for which Camoflauge Man (no, really...

The end of season 2! Anasazi seems to make clear that CSM is just in a perpetual state of lying. Not entirely sure you could even find out what he wants for breakfast. We're not completely convinced by the encryption on the Thinker's downloads - nor where this guy has been for most of the season after getting name-checked in One Breath . We also get to find out what our Twitter/Mastodon...

We're pretty sure people aren't too fond of Soft Light , but really it's a good episode with a great guest star in Tony Shaloub and exposes a whole other depth to the character of X otherwise not even hinted at. Sure, the science makes no sense, but this hasn't ever really stopped any other episode of The X-Files . Plus, this is the first episode written by Vince Gilligan who&a...

The Calusari is absolutely the nastiest episode to date but loses points because real life Calusari dance a lot more than the store-bought exorcists in this episode. Outside of Samantha, has The X-Files managed to cast a child actor who does not have the (oft-quoted) "cold, dead eyes of a killer"? Not so far. Then again, the child actor here is the same one from Conduit . The genesis of...

Død Kalm cannot really escape how it feels - an episode written to make use of a set. The set in question being the ship the production crew hired for Colony and End Game . Also it feels very much like another entrant of an Ice -style episode (see also: Darkness Falls and Fire Walker ) and associated in-fighting but less exciting than any of them. The other problem is it has a great knack in sugge...

Turns out you just can't trust aliens. Whether its multiple clones of your sister or the bounty hunter who can look like anyone. Everyone likes to insist Samantha is fine but they either have a vested interest in getting Mulder to do something or just don't care. End Game is a great follow-up to Colony though suffers a similar weakness of not being quite as energetic or thrilling as its...

While just blurting out "He's a ghost" at the start of The Sixth Sense would have somewhat undermined the final twist, its not at all clear why one character in Fresh Bones is unable to make a fairly fundamental quirk of Chester Bonaparte's existence clear to Mulder and Scully. Still, its nice to have X back even if his presence here is something of a surprise. We also find out...

Content warning for Irresistible - implied necrophilia Content warning for Die Hand, Die Verletzt - mentions of rape, child abuse, death of infants Aside from some odd depictions in the cold open, Irresistible is a tremendously creepy yet mundane (in the sense of not being supernatural) episode of Season 2. A creepy and unsettling monster of the week. We make the case of this being a far better fo...

Content warning for Excelsis Dei and Aubrey - mentions of sexual assault. We weren't looking forward to revisiting Excelsis Dei and were not surprised by the experience of re-watching it. The base subject matter is off-putting; Mulder and Scully seem to have traded personality traits (since when was Mulder adamant about the most absolutely mundane solution?); and the episode seems decidedly c...

Content warning for Red Museum - mentions of sexual assault. Scully's going back into the field in the next two episodes of The X-Files season 2. It is... not easy to talk about Firewalker without frequent allusions to Ice back in season 1. So we didn't even try to avoid it. Weirdly it also has an opening which doesn't match how it ends, but Ice does it so much better (and doesn&apo...

Season 2 of The X-Files continues... Content warning - 3 involves descriptions of abuse and this comes up in our discussion. We've had werewolves so far, how about some vampires? Assuming you don't subscribe to Kim's theory that most of the monster of the week entities are some form of vampire (needing to feed on livers, infect their host to continue and so on), 3 offers our first v...

Season 2 of The X-Files reaches the first two part episode! Duane Barry is an excellently tense, hostage negotiation episode with a guest star who's trustworthiness wanes as the episode goes on only for the final moments to call any doubts into question. We however find time to talk about Mulder's speedos and poke at just how relevant the whole Phineas Gage thing is to Scully's insi...

Season 2 of The X-Files continues! Blood sees the welcome return of the Lone Gunmen and the first writing credit for Darin Morgan. We discuss how the novelisation makes a lot of aspects clearer and call into question guest-star William Sanderson's choices towards the climax. Sleepless introduces a new partner for Mulder: Alex Krycek (returning and recast guest star Nicholas Lea). Bit of a sha...

Season 2 of The X-Files begins a whole new era for the series. Little Green Men is perhaps the series's third pilot - a great jumping on point and a great episode all round. Just why do the aliens dance during abductions and how much of this episode really happened? Just how bad at their jobs are the Blue Beret Crash Retrieval Team? It is perhaps a bit of a shame the episode prevented us from...

Episodes 24 of The X-Files season 1 asks a lot of questions - and while Fox might once have worried audiences would conclude the series was  over - for season 2 to pick up. The Erlenmeyer Flask finally, finally has Scully seeing something with no wriggle room and very little other interpretation. And she'll be hard pressed to argue the object she decides to pickle doesn't have some super...

Episodes 22 & 23 of The X-Files season 1 really do show the variances of the series. Born Again 's major revelation is that Scully gets a front-row seat to some supernatural happenings. Which... she probably writes off as something mundane. Oddly, we don't get to hear her version of events in what feels like a re-do of Shadows . Roland features perhaps the most cold and vicious of th...

Episodes 20 & 21 of The X-Files season 1 are both excellent! Darkness Falls is a wholesale tribute to Ice (or possibly Chris Carter deciding he could also do a bottle episode with paranoia and in-fighting) just set out in the wilderness with bugs for enemies and an apparent inadvertent environmental theme. Tooms is the unexpected sequel to near universal favourite episode Squeeze . Eugene Vict...

Episodes 18 & 19 of The X-Files season 1 seem to continue the series's struggle to find its own identity. Miracle Man has been described elsewhere as something you'd expect in Murder She Wrote - which is not wholly unfair. Scully continues her proud tradition of inadequate or non-existent first aid skills, while Mulder unexpectedly gets some weirdness regarding Samantha. Shapes is an...

Episodes 16 & 17 of The X-Files season 1 continue an uneven run. Young At Heart should be a good monster of the week episode with a man with a salamander hand! But somehow that never really factors into anything, least of all the villain's new career as a piano tuner. We're pretty sure Scully's losing another one of her friends after the events of this episode. E.B.E . is a glor...

Episodes 14 & 15 of The X-Files season 1 could not be more different! Gender Bender has us discussing how aliens don't appear to have previously had any anthropological interest in humanity. What the Kindred actually are up to is open to serious debate as is how often does Brother Martin - Marty to friends and lovers - actually shower if they still have white clay under their fingernails...

Episodes 12 & 13 of The X-Files season 1 offer quite the contrast of tones for the series. Fire was for some reason once seen as particularly frightening, but we both had a grand time re-watching this episode. Not sure it was supposed to be quite as funny as we found it. Among the weird revelations on this rewatch was the easily overlooked detail that the villain is literally using cans of roc...

We both enjoyed episodes 10 & 11 of The X-Files season 1. Not that we don't have a few observations. Questions. Criticisms... Fallen Angel offers some sort of Predator -like thrills (just be glad you can't see what it actually looks like... Not in a Bird Box sense, more in a 'You might die laughing' sense ), hints at much vaster conspiracies but also has us asking awkward q...

Episodes 8 & 9 of Season 1; Ice and Space . For Ice we take a trip to Alaska for the X-Files' version of The Thing complete with paranoia and probable alien life. As Kim notes this is the first time we've seen alien life on-screen in the series. Then of course, we get ghost aliens, some confusing special effects and the apparent reveal that the FBI are essential help in space crisis&...

This week we're discussing  episodes 6 & 7 of Season 1; Shadows and Ghost in the Machine . The former is the tale of the kindly boss of a weapons manufacturer and apparent nepotism for one of the secretaries. Will seat-belts plague Scully forever more and prevent her from ever directly seeing anything supernatural? The latter episode has Nick going off on numerous computing tangents and K...