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The X-Files – Herrenvolk (Review)

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

After Talitha Cumi, Herrenvolk cannot help but seem like a little bit of a disappointment.

Towards the end of the episode, the Alien Bounty Hunter hunts down Jeremiah Smith. Mulder begs for mercy, but the Bounty Hunter will hear nothing of it. “He shows you pieces, but tells you nothing of the whole,” the Bounty Hunter remarks to Mulder. It feels like that sentiment encapsulates Herrenvolk in a nutshell. Mulder goes on the run with Jeremiah Smith and sees a collection of vague but compelling things that may or may not tie into colonisation.

“Now you’re thinking, ‘I hope that’s shepherd’s pie in my knickers!'”

Like a lot of the mythology in the fourth and fifth seasons, it feels like a holding pattern. Talitha Cumi was surprisingly candid in its revelations. The aliens were plotting to colonise Earth in collaboration with the human conspirators. The date had been set, the plot was in motion. That was a pretty big bombshell, confirmed in unequivocal terms. It was arguably the clearest and most transparent that the conspiracy arc would ever be. There was a clear goal, a deadline, and a sense of purpose.

Almost immediately, Herrenvolk works to muddy the water. It stalls, it procrastinates, it delays, it evades. It is a plot structured around a collection of ominous conspiracy buzz words (DNA, smallpox, colonies, clones) without a clear purpose or objective.

A bloody mess…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: alien bounty hunter, aliens, bees, chris carter, cigarette-smoking man, colonisation, colony collapse disorder, conspiracy, DNA, fight the future, hegemony, herrenvolk, honey, humanity, inner space, invasion, jeremiah smith, marita covarrubias, misdirection, mr. x, mulder, mytharc, mythology, outer space, Smith, the x-files, the x-files: fight the future, x-files, x-files: fight the future | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Season 3 (Review)

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

The second season of The X-Files was quite experimental in nature. Not all of that experimentation was intentional or planned, but the second season worked quite hard to demonstrate what the show could do. Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy forced the show to plot a relatively long-form arc, with Scully getting abducted and the X-files remaining closed for the first six episodes of the season. In essence, Anderson’s absence forced the show to embrace serialisation.

Other second-season experiments seemed more relaxed. The show discovered that big two-part mythology episodes did well during sweeps. Die Hand Die Verletzt and Humbug proved that the series could do comedy. David Nutter, Rob Bowman and Kim Manners became the show’s go-to directors. The show’s alien conspiracy arc became a recurring thread rather than a subset of the monsters of the week. There was a lot learnt during that second season.

The third season of The X-Files feels a lot more relaxed, and a lot more comfortable. The third season seems to be largely about reinforcing the lessons learned during the second season. The third season gives more work to writers, directors and actors who made an impression during the second season. It works hard to solidify the concept of The X-Files. It seems like Chris Carter and his collaborators have finally figured out exactly what The X-Files should be, and are delivering it consistently.

The result is one of the most impressive seasons of television produced in the nineties, beginning a hot streak for the show. Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen would manage to produce three consistently fantastic seasons of television between September 1995 and May 1998. The third season of The X-Files really gets that ball rolling in a very profound and meaningful sense.

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, conspiracy, Darin Morgan, mulder, mythology, scully, Television, the x-files, third season | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Talitha Cumi (Review)

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Talitha Cumi is a staggeringly confident piece of television, the kind of episode casually produced by a show at (or approaching) the top of its game.

It is interesting just how much this season finalé seems to promise business as usual. It is perhaps the least radical of the show’s season-ending cliffhangers, with the third season closing on an immediate rather than a conceptual threat to our leads and to The X-Files as a show. The Erlenmeyer Flask ended with the death of Deep Throat and the closing of the X-files. Anasazi ended with Mulder being burnt alive in a boxcar filled with alien bodies. Gethsemane ups the ante further.

A stab in the dark…

In contrast, Talitha Cumi ends with the Alien Bounty Hunter walking towards Mulder and Scully in a rather menacing fashion. It is very effective television – and a solidly suspenseful cliffhanger – but it also feels rather low-key when compared to other season-ending episodes. Talitha Cumi feels like a pretty effective hook, rather than a game-changer. There’s an immediacy to the cliffhanger, but nothing that threatens to upend the show as a whole.

Then again, one suspects that is entirely the point. The third season has been largely about consolidation of The X-Files. It makes sense that it wouldn’t throw everything up into the air at the end of the season.

It’s been a long year…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: alien bounty hunter, aliens, cancer man, chris carter, cigarette-smoking man, clones, colonisation, conspiracy, csm, david duchovny, jeremiah smith, mr. x, mulder, mystery, mytholgoy, the x-files, x-files | Leave a comment »

Stefan Petrucha and Charles Adlard’s Run on The X-Files (Topps) (Review)

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Topps’ X-Files comic was a massive success in the nineties.

The monthly series ran for forty-one issues between January 1995 and September 1998. In that time, Topps also produced an X-Files graphic novel, three digests, two annuals, a spin-off line of Season One comics and a miniseries adaptation of a Kevin Anderson novel. They also reprinted the series in quite a few formats, indicating that the comic sold well even outside the monthly schedule. The only reason that the series came to an end was because Topps eventually decided to retire from comic book publishing.

After Topps withdrew from the comic book market following the Great Comic Crash of the mid-to-late nineties, the X-Files license lay fallow. Barring two Lone Gunman comics published by Dark Horse in 2001, there would be no new officially licensed X-Files comics written between September 1998 and September 2008, when Frank Spotnitz scripted a miniseries for Wildstorm. It is incredible to look back on the success of the Topps line for those three-and-a-half years when it held the license.

A lot of the credit for that success is owed to writer Stefan Petrucha, cover artist Miran Kim and interior artist Charles Adlard.

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: Charles Adlard, Comics, miran kim, mulder, scully, Stefan Petrucha, Television, ten thirteen, the x-files, tie-in, x-files | 6 Comments »

The X-Files – Wetwired (Review)

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Wetwired is an oddity.

It is the penultimate episode of the third season, written by special effects supervisor Matt Beck. It is very much a conspiracy episode, albeit one lacking any real sense of forward moment and with only the loosest thematic ties to the rest of the show’s mythology. Unlike – say – Soft Light, this is not simply a “monster of the week” story with elements of the mythology grafted in. The show has largely move past those, which is why Avatar felt so weird.

More like “terror vision”, am I right?

Instead, Wetwired is that strangest of government conspiracy stories. It is an episode dedicated almost exclusively to shady goings-on at the highest levels of government, but with no mention or inference of aliens or other sinister long-term plots. Wetwired stands out as something strange and hard to place; perhaps its closest analogue is The Pine Bluff Variant from towards the end of the fifth season.

The result is an oddity that is a little uneven and disjointed, an episode packed with clever ideas and concepts, but difficulty connecting them to each other.

Scully has had it with Mulder’s quips about her driving…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: conspiracy, Control, Government, l.a. heat, matt beck, media, middle management, morality, mr. x, mulder, paranoia, politics of fear, scully, Television, the x-files, v-chip, violence, x, x-files | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Quagmire (Review)

Posted on December 8, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Quagmire is a delightful little episode, one of third season episodes that most effectively embodies what casual fans (or even those who have never seen the show) think of when they hear the words “The X-Files.” In Wanting to Believe, author Robert Shearman describes Quagmire as something akin to a “live action Scooby Doo“, and he’s not far wrong. This is Mulder and Scully searching together in the darkness, looking for a monster that may or may not be there. You don’t get more archetypical X-Files than that.

One of the defining features of the third season of The X-Files has been a sense of consolidation. It feels like the show experimented a great deal in its first two years, but the third season is very much about cementing and solidifying its identity. It is no wonder, then, that the third season has such a high concentration of archetypal episode – episodes you can show an interested viewer and say “this is The X-Files in a forty-five minute nutshell.” In that respect, Quagmire ranks with D.P.O. or Pusher or Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose as a great introduction to the show.

There’s something in the water!

Of course, Quagmire is a very good introduction to The X-Files for new viewers, but it is also something of a farewell. It is Kim Newton’s last script for the show. Newton had joined the writing staff at the start of the third season. Her other major credit was Revelations. Like Revelations, there is a sense that Quagmire was heavily re-written before it made it in front of the cameras. In this case, it is something of an open secret that Quagmire received a fairly significant polish from departing story editor Darin Morgan, whose fingerprints are all over the finished draft.

If Darin Morgan bid farewell to The X-Files with Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”, then Quagmire serves as something of a coda to his time on the show. If that is the case, it makes for an uncharacteristically upbeat postscript to Morgan’s work on the show.

They really collared the bad guy…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: big blue, conversation on the rock, cotr, Darin Morgan, extinction, fear, hope, kim newton, monster, monster of the week, monsters, mulder, scully, the x-files, x-files | 4 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) #13 – One Player Only (Review)

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

After a twelve-issue opening mega-arc of interconnected stories about conspiracies-within-conspiracies and wheels-within-wheels, author Stefan Petrucha and artist Charles Adlard step back a little bit to close out their run with a series of standalone stories. The four issues (and three stories) that make up the rest of their run on Topps’ X-Files comic stand alone. They are connected by themes and subtext, but very clearly stand apart from what came before. Indeed, they play out almost like a postscript to the main body of work, a series of smaller bite-sized chunks.

In that light, it is interesting that One Player Only feels – superficially, at least – a lot more in step with the television show. The early issues of the comic had seen Petrucha and Adlard creating their own supporting cast and their own conspiracy, so as to avoid stepping on the toes of the production company. The Cigarette-Smoking Man was largely reduced to a number of cameos, with Skinner popping up once or twice along the way.

Ghosts in the machines?

Not only does One Player Only feature a guest appearance from supporting characters like Mr. X or yhe Lone Gunmen, it also harks back to the structure and format of the first season of the show. On the most basic of levels, One Player Only feels like a more cyberpunk take on Ghost in the Machine, right down to the fact that Mulder is drawn into a murder at a tech company by an acquaintance from his days in the Violent Crimes Division. At one point, Mulder and Scully stumble on a ransacked house, for Mulder to deadpan, “Hm. Nothing new.”

However, if one peels back the layers, One Player Only is a fascinating piece that sets the tone for Petrucha and Adlard’s last three issues on the series, while infusing the comic with a host of fascinating cyberpunk stylings and body horror that seem to call forward to William Gibson’s future writing for the show.

Coding out…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: Artificial Intelligence, Charles Adlard, cyberpunk, cynicism, dave mckean, evil, mulder, murder, neil gaiman, sandman, scully, spree killing, Stefan Petrucha, transhumanism, video games, violence | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Pusher (Review)

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Pusher is perhaps one of the most effective stand-alone “monster of the week” stories that the show ever did.

It is no wonder that the episode is frequently cited among the best episodes of The X-Files ever produced, but it is telling that it was identified by Slate as the perfect “gateway” episode of the show. If you want to give someone a taste of The X-Files without burdening them with continuity or back story, this is a good choice. It may not be the best episode that Vince Gilligan ever wrote, and it may not even be the best episode of the third season, but it is one the strongest demonstrations of what the show does on a weekly basis.

Mano a mano…

Pusher is the first episode that Vince Gilligan wrote after joining The X-Files writing staff. It is the only episode credited to Gilligan in the show’s third season. He had been offered a position on staff after turning in Soft Light at the end of the second season, but had hesitated before accepting the job. When he did accept the job, he came down with a dose of infectious mononucleosis. As a result, Gilligan only wrote one script for the third season, despite becoming one of the show’s most prolific writers.

Pusher is a pulpy delight, a spectacularly constructed standalone that perhaps points the way to Gilligan’s later work.

Gift of the gab…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Anti-hero, Breaking Bad, chris carter, Darin Morgan, mulder, mythmaking, pulp, pusher, Rob Bowman, robert patrick modell, robert wisden, romance, scully, superhero, supervillain, vince gilligan, walter white, western, x-files | 6 Comments »

The X-Files – Apocrypha (Review)

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Eyes are a major recurring motif in Apocrypha.

To be fair, eyes were a frequently recurring motif throughout The X-Files. Rob Bowman managed a couple of beautiful shots of reflections and peeping in 731, for example. It makes sense that The X-Files should place such emphasis on eyes – it is a saga about truth and belief and faith, all of which must be explored through perception. “I want to believe,” Mulder’s iconic poster proclaims. As the cliché goes, seeing is believing.

Iconic Mulder/Scully pose!

That is definitely the case here, with Apocrypha built to a climax where both the audience and the characters are explicitly refused the opportunity to see key moments. Mulder and Scully are escorted out of the North Dakota silo before they can see anything incriminating. The audience doesn’t even get to see the space ship taking off. Even the death of Luis Cardinal takes place off-screen, with Mulder revealing it in a throwaway line in the show’s penultimate scene.

With all of this going on, it makes sense that so much of the imagery in Apocrypha should be built around eyes – with the black oil infection manifesting in its hosts’ eyes, the shooting of the silo as a giant eye staring into space, and even the design of the alien space ship evoking the Eye of Providence.

Up in the sky!

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: apocrypha, black oil, John Neville, justice, krycek, Lone Gunmen, luis cardinal, mulder, mythology, piper maru, scully, Skinner, the x-files, turth, well-manicured man, x-files | 1 Comment »

The X-Files – Grotesque (Review)

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Darren

This November (and a little of December), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the third season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of Space: Above and Beyond.

Grotesque is probably Howard Gordon’s strongest script for The X-Files.

F. Emasculata had demonstrated that Howard Gordon and Chris Carter worked very well together as a writing team. Carter was very good at big philosophical concepts, while Gordon was very adept at structuring a plot. Gordon knows how to build momentum and suspense, and his best scripts benefit from that particular talent. It helps that Gordon and Carter are probably the writers with the best understanding of Mulder as a character at this point in the show’s run.

Here there be monsters…

Grotesque is an intriguing episode, particularly when examined in the context of the third season. The first and second season of The X-Files had been rather experimental in nature – the show tried to figure out what worked and what didn’t. The third season built off the successes of those earlier seasons. The idea seemed to be that the show would do more of what had worked, only better. So there were more two-part mythology episodes, more grounded stories, more comedy.

Grotesque is fascinating because it draws as much from earlier stories that didn’t work, using the lessons that the show had learned in the years since in order to make them work this time around.