Things Are Getting Strange

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...

This week we take on episodes 4 and 5 of Season 1. That would be Conduit and Jersey Devil . We ponder how alien spacecraft can be swift, silent things that hang in the air in Deep Throat but will cook an RV in Conduit. Also Mulder is really into the not very Jersey Devil-like woman he encounters in Jersey Devil who we have dubbed 'Boobfoot'. Kim's Conspiracy Corner tries to make sen...

This week we're talking about episodes 2 and 3 of season 1 of The X-Files - Deep Throat and Squeeze . We also touch on our Halloween decorations, Kim's current headwear and her success with Muldle.app - The X-Files wordle-a-like. Kim's Conspiracy Corner can only draw on Deep Throat this week, but we'll retroactively include Squeeze if this does somehow factor into the series&ap...

Nick and Kim chat about The X-Files' origins and inspirations. We then take a dive into the various elements of the first episode - Pilot . Finally we have Kim's Conspiracy Corner where she attempts to make sense of what the aliens - or unseen force in the woods - is up to based on this episode's events. Note: we apologise for any audio issues with the start of this podcast. This wa...