chris carter | the m0vie blog

The X-Files – Young at Heart (Review)

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Darren

Continuing on from Lazarus, there’s something about Young at Heart that feels very rote, very paint-by-numbers. It’s as if the show has worked so hard to define itself in the first half of the season that the second half of the first season has been dedicated to settling into routine. As far as Chris Carter scripts go, Young at Heart is roughly on par with Fire, and nowhere near as bad as Space, although that’s damning with faint praise. At this rate, Carter should begin to turn out episodes worth watching at some point in the fifth season.

Featuring yet another blast from the past, more gratuitous use of Deep Throat and reckless placing of Scully in danger, Young at Heart feels more like it was assembled from a rough blueprint of what an episode of The X-Files should look like, rather than because it was a story worth telling.

Keep it handy…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: 20th Century Fox, chris carter, Dana Scully, David Petersen, Fox Mulder, HENDERSON, Lazarus, mulder, mulder and scully, Reggie, scully, The Smoking Man, X-File | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Beyond the Sea (Review)

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Darren

Ah, Beyond the Sea. My favourite episode of the first season. Maybe my favourite episode of the first two seasons, although I’ll confess that my opinion is prone to change. I’m in good company. Darin Morgan points to it as his favourite episode. Chris Carter has (again and again) singled it out as the best episode of the show’s first season – a piece of television that works “on every level.”

It’s easy to point out all the exceptional stuff in Beyond the Sea. Gillian Anderson is phenomenal, as we’ve come to suspect from spending half a season with her. David Duchovny is quite happily relegated to a supporting role, willing to allow his co-star room to breathe. Brad Dourif is sensational. Glenn Morgan and James Wong’s script is phenomenal. David Nutter’s direction is absolutely top-notch.

However, what always struck me about Beyond the Sea was just how incredibly confident and casual it was. It was bold and clever and provocative, but it was also tight and controlled. It’s brilliant, but it never feels like this isn’t a level of craft the show can’t consistently hit.

We are the dead…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Beyond the Sea, Brad Dourif, Captain (United States), chris carter, csi, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dana Scully, Darin Morgan, David Nutter, Federal Bureau of Investigation, final destination, Fox Mulder, gillian anderson, Glen Morgan, James Wong, scully, silence of the lambs, X-File, x-files | 6 Comments »

The X-Files – Fire (Review)

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Darren

Well, Fire is probably Chris Carter’s strongest script since The Pilot. I suppose we should be grateful for that, at least.

All fired up…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: 20th Century Fox, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carter, chris carter, Dana Scully, david duchovny, Fox Mulder, Lone Gunmen, Mark Sheppard, mulder, Oxford, scully, sherlock holmes, United States, Windlesham, X-File | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Fallen Angel (Review)

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Darren

Fallen Angel is a remarkable episode. It’s really the point at which the show seems to say “huh, this conspiracy stuff is really exciting.” It’s also a complete reversal from the misfire that was Space, proving that there are people working on the show who can create monsters on a tiny special effects budget and create compelling secondary characters. Following Mulder’s investigation of a downed UFO – the eponymous “fallen angel” – the episode dives headlong into the murky world of cover-ups and secrets, kicking the show’s mythology arc into gear.

Shedding some light on the matter…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: 20th Century Fox, angel, chris carter, Dana Scully, Fallen Angel, Fox Mulder, gillian anderson, Jerry Hardin, Lone Gunmen, mulder, The Smoking Man, United States, William B. Davis, X-File, x-files | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Space (Review)

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Darren

And so we go from what is possibly the strongest episode of the first season to what is definitely the worst. Space is a colossal failure of an episode, with even writer and creator Chris Carter conceding that it was “one of our most unloved episodes.” However, none of these spectacular failures occur for any particularly interesting reason. It’s the wrong idea with the wrong script with the wrong director, and a result that can’t even claim to be “so bad it’s good” like so many of the series’ other lesser hours.

At best, it’s a cautionary tale, a firm establishment of what The X-Files isn’t. Like The Jersey Devil, it’s an indicator that maybe Chris Carter should have been focused more on show-running than writing. Even factoring in the quite decent pilot, Carter is hardly batting a thousand here. However, it also offers some small measure of proof that – despite show’s fixation on extraterrestrials and UFOs – The X-Files is not really a show about space.

… and the stars look very different, today…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, Dana Scully, Ed Lauter, Fox Mulder, gillian anderson, Hubble Space Telescope, mulder, Mulder and Scully (song), NASA, scully, Space Shuttle, star trek: the next generation, Susanna Thompson, United States, X-File | 3 Comments »

The X-Files – The Jersey Devil (Review)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Darren

And with The Jersey Devil, the first season of The X-Files hits its first major snag. The first four episodes have done an efficient job laying down the character arcs and the ground rules for this new conspiratorial series. The rest of the season – like a lot of first seasons – has a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out a formula that works using those elements.

The Jersey Devil is, by all accounts, an episode that should work. It has a nice pseudo-scientific premise. It is written by the creator of the show, and who – at this early stage – could claim a better idea of how the series works than Chris Carter? It gives us some personal insight into both of our protagonists, and it sort of clarifies that Squeeze is not going to be the exception – that there will be a lot of anthology-style episodes.

And yet, despite all that, it doesn’t quite work. The premise is never as interesting as it should be. Chris Carter confirms that while he is a fantastic ideas man, he is not the strongest writer on his own staff. The best of these insights into Mulder and Scully were already made much better in Squeeze, and the rest feel somewhat trite. Despite the fact that it’s only the show’s second anthology-style episode, The Jersey Devil feels like it’s trying to hard to stick to the framework outlined by the three UFO episodes in the series’ opening quartet.

Casting light…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Bigfoot, Carter, chris carter, Devil, Diamond, Jersey Devil, jodie foster, Morgan, New Jersey Devil, Pine Barren, Rob Bowman, United States, X-File | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Conduit (Review)

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Darren

The X-Files is somewhat fascinating as a historical artifact, a prism through which the viewer might explore the United States in that gap of time between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. The show serves as something of a travelogue through the American subconscious, a vehicle for the nation’s fear and anxieties. It might be quaint now to look back on the show’s depiction of mobile phones and the internet, but The X-Files offers a snapshot of an America just on the cusp of that technological revolution, when there were still dark shadows and corners of the continent to be probed and explored.

One of the more interesting aspects of The X-Files is the way that it deals with faith in the nineties. Scully’s attempts to reconcile her religious beliefs with a rational approach to the universe are surprisingly insightful and nuanced, but Mulder’s belief system also offers a vehicle to explore the form that faith might take. “I want to believe,” Mulder confesses at the end of Conduit, with the iconic poster turning the sentiment into a motto. It doesn’t matter that Mulder chooses to invest his faith in aliens or conspiracies, The X-Files is still an exploration of what faith meant in the nineties.

Why is Mulder so driven?

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, Christian Right, Cold War, Dana Scully, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fox Mulder, gillian anderson, Gulf War, IDW Publishing, mulder, Mulder & Scully, scully, United States, world war ii, x-files | 3 Comments »

The X-Files – Squeeze (Review)

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Darren

Squeeze is the first “monster of the week” episode of The X-Files, and also the first episode that wasn’t written by creator Chris Carter. Instead, Squeeze came from the word processors of James Wong and Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan would become a hugely influential (if not always successful) writing duo during the nineties. They’d write some of the best scripts for The X-Files, but they’d also leave (briefly) to run their own short-lived science-fiction drama in Space: Above & Beyond.

After Fox cancelled that show, the pair would briefly return to The X-Files before taking over Chris Carter’s other Fox drama Millennium, for that show’s second season. I’d argue that Wong and Morgan’s Millennium was one of the most inventive and insane seasons of television produced by any network in the nineties, and it’s a shame that Carter would have to re-assume the reins for the show’s third and final season. After that, the pair found considerable success creating the Final Destination film series.

However, all of that was in the future, but you can clearly see their creative talent at work here. Squeeze isn’t just the first episode of The X-Files unrelated to the show’s alien mythology, it is also one of the most memorable episodes ever written, creating a monster so iconic that he would wind up bookending the first season when he returned in Tooms.

Eye see you…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, Dana Scully, Deep Throat, Federal Bureau of Investigation, final destination, Fox Mulder, Glen Morgan, H. H. Holmes, hannibal lecter, IDW Publishing, Jim Wong, Leonardo diCaprio, Tooms, x-files | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Pilot (Review)

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Darren

The X-Files is twenty years old this year. To celebrate, I’ll be spending Month X looking back at the first season.

There was a time, around the third season, when The X-Files became the show. It had grown from the quirky newcomer of Fox’s prime time line-up, through its status as a cult hit, into a bona fides pop culture touchstone. Looking back now, twenty years after the show first began, it is something entirely different. It’s weird to look back over a long-running television, divorced from the immediacy of broadcast, a sort of “if I knew then what I know now…” sort of thing.

However, looking back at The X-Files, it’s more than just knowing how it ends. It’s more than just knowing about the show’s slow and drawn-out two-year death. It’s more than knowing that the conspiracy plotline kinda (but not quite entirely) makes sense, if you look at it the right way and don’t over-think it. Approaching The X-Files now, twenty years later, is more like opening an old tomb, unlocking a time capsule. The musky smell of the past seems to seep out of the television screen, transporting the viewer to a time that really isn’t that far away, but feels like centuries ago.

The X-Files is, undeniably, a pop culture artefact from the nineties, a show that seems to slot almost perfectly between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. It’s an exploration of a version of America that simply doesn’t exist any longer, the long and silent pregnant pause where the United States was the world’s sole unchallenged superpower. The X-Files really embodied that period of time, much like 24 managed to channel the anger and the rage of the post-9/11 era into piece of the zeitgeist.

And, to be fair, you can sense that sort of nineties existential anxiety even as early as The Pilot.

Beam me up…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Carter, chris carter, Clarice Starling, Dana Scully, fbi, Fox Mulder, Lambs, mulder, New England, Oregon, silence of the lambs, steven spielberg, twitter, United States, x-files | 8 Comments »

Hannibal – Amuse-Bouche (Review)

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Darren

Second episodes can be tough. Pilots tend to establish the core themes and characters of a show, offering a very clear blueprint going forward and perhaps hinting at the direction that you want to take things. They are grand mission statements, couched in broad terms and delivered with a sense of novelty. Second episodes are a bit less exciting. They are about putting that plan into action, defining the edges a bit, expanding outwards where necessary and refining as needed. It’s with the second episode that you really get a sense of what a show is going to be like in a more practical week-to-week sense.

By that measure, Amuse-Bouche works quite well at giving us a sense of putting the show’s feet on the ground and helping prepare us for what lies ahead for the rest of the season.