Things Are Getting Strange

We get really hung up on the implications of Jackson Van De Kampf's life in Ghouli and how people just ignore the less than great series of events that would have lead to this episode's events. Not really helpful that Jackson clearly used to have a quite different and significant name. We get heavily into how what was clearly a monster of the week episode morphed into something else... K...

*if you want to end the series in the best possible way... Plus One is a fun episode, possibly a little overshadowed by the sterling guest-star turn and the efforts of the make-up department. Also suspect the entire point of the episode was less doppleganger hangman game and more getting Mulder and Scully into bed together... The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat is not actually the final episode of the...

We reach Season 11 and find that the chosen way to resolve the massive, massive cliffhanger season 10 left on is.... lacking. My Struggle III spends a lot of time undoing some of Season 10 but not all of it and as a result leaves some weird debris behind. We talk retcons and wave goodbye to the nominal replacement Mulder and Scully... This is one of Kim's most hated episodes, and its hard to...

Don't promise us the Lone Gunmen being back and then do... that. Babylon was quite notorious on first broadcast and the intervening years have done little to aid the fact it feels the wrong fit for The X-Files in general and specific for Mulder and Scully. We also get into what the whole point of Einstein and Miller probably was... My Struggle II uses the phrase "alien DNA" way too...

We struggle to say much about Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster , broadly because the episode is an absolute delight and revisiting it has not diminished how starkly it contrasts with the rest of season 10. It is still a fantastic episode. Home, Again on the other hand is part fantastically acted Scully drama, part serious Arcadia remake and part mystifying Candyman -a-like. One of these thi...

Welcome to season 10! And plots we could swear we saw in Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space '. And Gethesmane... Still! The X-Files is back. Skinner is back! Cancer man... is somehow back! And now we're trying to retcon seemingly 9 seasons of plot out of the backstory. We discuss how strange the apparent project to discredit Mulder is and how odd some of the choices with the reviva...

We reach the second The X-Files film and are beset by questions. Many of them "Why this?" and "Really?" While the acting is fine, we are not so taken with the plot or the any of the new characters. We also learned a fair amount from the synopsis we are not sure we even got hinted at in the film itself... Somehow we can even pick fault with the end credits... Support the show

So here we are. What once was the end of The X-Files is a bit too much like how Seinfeld ended for its own good... We end up talking about Franz Kafka for hopefully good reasons as well as continuing to observe that Mulder should never be allowed in any kind of court-room. We also get to our best and worst episodes of the season. Support the show

Release wraps Doggett's running backstory up perhaps a little too fast and a little too without warning (and that's not getting into Reyes' questionable decision re: seeing people taking bribes). But. There is an answer - its bleak and awful and does not involve whatever happened to Samantha. We are however obliged to point out that supernatural force continues to drag its feet in t...

A strange description of Jimmy Bond, but accurate nonetheless. After our hiatus, Nick is trying to be more positive about The X-Files . Each episode must have some positive points. Unfortunately, he is trying this on Jump the Shark and William of all things. Jump the Shark does have a lot of sharks and Morris Fletcher. We get into why concluding a series in a different series feels like a terrible...

At least, we're pretty sure guest star Burt Reynolds is God in Improbable at any rate. A rather stunning surprise from Chris Carter, this episode is tremendous fun, though unable to escape more questions about why Reyes isn't fired for this sequence of events. We talk about our own life-path numbers and how relevant they are; also how Mulder crazy contrasts with Reyes crazy... Scary Mons...

One of them anyway... Audrey Pauley feels more like a Twilight Zone episode, but is an interesting contrast to Steven Maeda's previous season 9 episode of 4D . And yet, somehow we end up talking about Dark Souls and Die Hard during the course of this episode. And how familiar the villain is. Underneath is an episode we really did completely forget existed. And this despite it being the most T...

...mostly about the current state of the conspiracy here in Season 9... Providence , wait, Provenance . No, Providence . Dammit, its Provenance ! Prov enance  has the Lone Gunmen for hilariously, almost futile inclusion and seems to want to hark back to one of the series more startling reveals - a half-buried ancient UFO off the coast of Africa. Except not we have one in Calgary, Canada. We compla...

Vince Gilligan has failed us! And apparently only us as the critical reception to John Doe is strikingly positive. We speculate how much of this is due to snobbishness around sci-fi/fantasy/horror and how much is because we're well acquainted with Gilligan's later productions. Also a waste of a memory vampire... Hellbound is not The X-Files take on Hellraiser , but that film inevitably c...

With Lord of the Flies , we wonder why The X-Files is now about a group of British school-children trapped on a desert island- Wait... We actually get curious as to whether the show's allusion to Jackass makes any sense anymore and the horror of body lice as a concept. At least we have an unscrupulous entomologist in the form of Rocky to provide entertainment in an episode reminiscent of Rain...

Daemonicus is Kim's most hated episode of the entire run of The X-Files . Fun times! A good start leads into an increasingly dissatisfying experience and we once again discover how different intent was to how we wound up interpreting the episode on both watch and re-watch. Inevitably we also end up talking about Hannibal and also Hannibal . Also; its clear the writers don't quite know wh...

We're not entirely sure if Scully buys Jigsaw brand mobiles for her baby or the foley-artist made a strange choice for season 9's opener, but when baby William seems to use telekinesis to make his mobile move... It does sound like something out of Saw. .. Welcome to Season 9! It all looks and sounds and feels a lot better than another series we've been struggling through. And in a p...

...it won't attract the worm! Weapon of Choice used (for no particular reason) in All About Yves is one of the high points. We get into why even with the writers throwing every trick in the bag to get a second series, even the revelatory answers were never going to be exactly great by way of Star Wars and Twin Peaks . Plus, Kim has a far better plan to capture Yves than anything Morris Fletch...

We were told these two episodes were an improvement... and that was not wrong! The Lying Game impressively avoids a gigantic pitfall that would have made the episode incredibly uncomfortable and lowered our impression of the characters still further. It also boasts a guest appearance from Mitch Pileggi who does a stellar job of impersonating Jimmy when events call for it. We'll even overlook...

It is hard to muster energy for The Lone Gunmen at this point... Diagnosis Jimmy feels stitched together from discarded parts of other episodes and continues to call into question how Jimmy is able to exist in the real world. Meanwhile the other LGM-centric plot feels so poorly justified for its inclusion. Unprofessional nurses and weirdly ineffective bear-traps abound... Tango de los Pistoleros i...

We've reached episode 100 and so... are taking a break from The Lone Gunmen for this week. Instead we have taken a trip to Springfield to witness the reasonably inexplicable crossover of The X-Files into The Simpsons . Which remains a lot of fun and is an extremely highly rated episode even now. A lot of jokes and only a little threat of fear, famine and pestilence... We also talk about the s...

...which was probably more baffling on release, but now we have to ask why the LGM don't actively use Linux for like paranoid reasons... Back off hiatus! And despite the episode title being Planet of the Frohikes, the episode is more about Jimmy and chimpanzees and not really about Frohike at all. We get into the episode tipping its hand way too early, the The Murders in the Rue Morgue infere...

Stuff happened between watching Three Men and a Smoking Diaper and when we recorded this episode and made it somehow even less fun than the first time around when we were merely severely annoyed by every little thing in it. Quite apart from the Lone Gunmen apparently getting into Gonzo Journalism rather than their normal style, the continued reliance on Jimmy as the "presentable" member...

Somehow the third episode of the series is Eine Kleine Frohike , an episode of The Lone Gunmen which feels like it should come from a hypothetical season 4 when the writers have well and truly run out of ideas. That it's also taking inspiration from The Ladykillers is just an additional bizarre twist to the whole mess. We return to wondering if this series is just supposed to be an unauthoriz...

We swap from the bureaucratic FBI to a low-circulation newspaper office run by three familiar characters. Welcome to The Lone Gunmen. The one series spin-off of the popular trio into their own show! Second time we're discussing an episode titled Pilot ... For the most part the series starts strong with a plot more Lone Gunmen like than The X-Files provided for quite a time. There's some...