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The X-Files – Paper Clip (Review)

Posted on November 5, 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.

And now we return to your scheduled viewing.

In many respects, Paper Clip feels like the real third season premiere. It establishes a lot of the recurring themes and ideas for the mythology of the season, from Krycek-on-the-run through to collaboration in the wake of the Second World War. It builds on the successful multi-part formula established by episodes like Ascension or End Game during the show’s second season. It moves things along in a way that The Blessing Way simply refused to. (It even resolves the cliffhanger from the last episode on screen.)

The light at the end of the tunnel…

Paper Clip demonstrates the strengths of the third season of The X-Files. The third season was the point at which the show really pushed the mythology out, building on earlier implications that there was form to be found in the shadows. The third season also looked to the second season to determine what had worked and what had not worked. Paper Clip is very clearly modelled on the successful aspects of second parts like Ascension or End Game.

It moves. The power of Paper Clip comes from an incredible forward momentum that allows the show to maintain tension and excitement while refusing to allow the audience to catch their breath. Instead of resolving the bigger plot threads from the first episode, questions and hints are thrown out with reckless abandon as the script just drives through set pieces and emotional beats and suspenseful sequences. It is a very meticulously, very cleverly constructed piece of television.

Watching the skies…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: abduction, accelerated paperclip, albert hosteen, aliens, bill mulder, chris carter, cigarette-smoking man, conspiracy, hybrids, krycek, melissa scully, mulder, mythology, nazis, operation paperclip, paper clip, Samantha Mulder, scully, second world war, Skinner, the truth, the x-files, Walter Skinner, well-manicured man, world war ii, x-files | 4 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) #8-9 – Silent Cities of the Mind (Review)

Posted on November 4, 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.

Silent Cities of the Mind is a very “comic book” story – it’s a story that might easily seem outlandish or ridiculous if committed to film, but which works very well within its medium. After all, the plot centres around a bunch of ancient Aztec priests who built an elaborate underground city that could project itself above ground as a mirage. Indeed, the story seems to accept this as a given, with Scully instead spending most of the adventure questioning whether memories can be transmitted via cannibalism.

It’s a concept that could easily seem ridiculous, and it’s a testament to writer Stefan Petrucha and artist Charles Adlard that it works as well as it does. Silent Cities of the Mind is a decidedly pulpy adventure, but that lends the story an undeniable charm. It’s a story packed to the brim with clever and fascinating ideas – from ancient aliens to ritual cannibalism to hidden cities to crystal skulls. All this is crammed tightly into two issues, meaning that everything moves so fast there’s no real time to stop and nitpick it all.

It’s all in the mind…

Mulder is negotiating with survivalists! There are memories transferred through the act of ritual cannibalism! Mulder and Scully are shot down over Alaska! Mulder is trapped with a cannibal! There’s a hidden Aztec city buried underground! Mulder has discovered ancient Aztec mythology! There’s an army rescue team that isn’t a rescue team! There’s a macguffin that allows its wearer to commune with the gods! There’s a stand-off!

It’s all rather exhausting, but in a fun and exciting sort of way. Silent Cities of the Mind is perhaps the best example of how Petrucha and Adlard were writing The X-Files as a comic book, positioning the show’s tropes and iconography within the framework of comic book conventions.

Bonfire of the vanities…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: Alaska, Aztec, aztecs, barnum, cannibalism, Charles Adlard, Comics, cults, Enoch, hoaxs, mulder, mytholgoy, Phantom City of Glacier Bay, ritual cannibalism, scully, silent cities of alaska, silent cities of the mind, silent city of alaska, Stefan Petrucha, survivalists, the x-files, Topps, topps comics, x-files | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – The Blessing Way (Review)

Posted on November 3, 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 Blessing Way is the first mythology episode of The X-Files that doesn’t really work.

And it doesn’t really work for a lot of the same reasons that some of the later mythology episodes don’t really work. Its pacing is terrible. It wallows in new age mysticism, allocating characters thoughtful monologues that awkwardly state themes and render subtext as supratext. It plays into the deification of Mulder, trying to bend Mulder’s story to fit into an archetypal “chosen one” narrative. More than that, it is very clearly a holding pattern, an effort to eat up time without moving forward.

Wiping it all out…

However, despite the fact that The Blessing Way really doesn’t work, it is still a fascinating episode. It’s a wonderful demonstration of how The X-Files has developed a fleshed-out world inhabited by compelling characters. The best moments in The Blessing Way are character-focused, with Skinner caught between his duty to the government and his loyalty to his agents, the Cigarette-Smoking Man revealed to be middle-management at best, and the implication that even vast sinister government conspiracies are hostage to chaos.

The Blessing Way is an oddity, a rather strange piece of television that is almost endearing in its stubborn refusal to deliver what the audience wants and expects. That doesn’t make it good, but it does make it interesting.

The truth is up there…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: aliens, anasazi, cancer man, chris carter, cigarette-smoking man, conspiracy, Deep Throat, genocide, memory, mulder, mysticism, native americans, nazis, new age, paper clip, scully, Skinner, syndicate, teena mulder, the cigarette-smoking man, the well-manicured man, the x-files, well-manicured man, x-files | 2 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) Annual #1 – Hallow Eve (Review)

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

No matter how you cut it, the creative team of Stefan Petruscha and Charles Adlard were prolific. The duo only worked on The X-Files comics book for seventeen months between January 1995 and May 1996, but they put out a phenomenal amount of work. On top of sixteen issues of the monthly series, there were also two digests, a number of short stories and an annual. In most cases, some of this work would be outsourced to another creative team, but Petrucha and Adlard remain the creative team for Topps’ X-Files comic.

While this undoubtedly required a great deal of creative energy from Petrucha, churning out scripts on a regular basis, it is worth pausing to praise artist Charles Adlard. These days, for a variety of reasons, it seems that major comic book artists have difficulty producing twelve twenty-odd-page issues in a year. Not only was Adlard able to meet that objective, he was able to do that while drawing a large volume of supplementary material, including this feature-length annual.

All about Eve…

It’s remarkable how consistent it all is. One of the advantages of a tie-in comic book with a steady creative theme is that there’s a much clearer authorial voice. Although Chris Carter oversaw the production of The X-Files, the demand of weekly network television mean that some episodes got more attention than others, and that particular voices tend to shine through. Darin Morgan writes his own version of The X-Files, as do Glen Morgan and James Wong or Howard Gordon or Vince Gilligan. (This isn’t a bad thing, by the way.)

On a comic, with all the issues written by the same author and illustrated by the same artist, there is a bit more consistency. Even though Hallow Eve is a stand-alone one-shot story that exists quite separate to Petrucha and Adlard’s twelve-issue meta-arc, it fits quite comfortably with their themes and subtexts. It’s an episode about history and memory, and perception and reality.

Shocking…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: Charles Adlard, eve, faith, ghosts, history, memory, mitochondrial eve, mulder, rational, religion, scully, Stefan Petrucha, the x-files, Topps, x-files | 2 Comments »

The X-Files – Season 2 (Review)

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

The first few seasons of a television show are very much about defining the show – figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and what form the show will take. After all, a lot of discussion and planning takes place during development, but all of that is on paper. It’s only once you’ve worked with the cast and had a chance to gauge audience response that it is possible to truly understand a television show.

The first two seasons of The X-Files seem like an attempt to map out the show, to mark the boundaries and do some fine calibration. The show had been a sleeper hit in its first season, popular enough to secure a second season on Fox. However, the second season had seen the series become a breakout hit. It climbed rather dramatically in the ratings, and the show would continue that ascent through to the fifth season in the lead-in to the feature film. However, the second season still feels like it’s a learning curve.

There are exceptional episodes in the second season. The season provides a wealth of classic stories. Fresh Bones and Our Town stand out as two of the best monster-of-the-week stories that the show had done by this point in its life-cycle. Even outside of that, there are classics like One Breath or Humbug or The Host or F. Emasculata. However, there are also quite a few misfires like Fearful Symmetry or Excelsis Dei or 3.

There are a lot of points in the second season where it feels like The X-Files is experimenting, trying new things that would ultimately become part of the show’s unique identity. Not all of these elements worked, but that is the luxury of a second season. It allows the production team to do that sort of experimentation so they might find their groove.

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: abduction, Arc, chris carter, conspiracy, Darin Morgan, David Nutter, Glen Morgan, Government, James Wong, kim manners, mulder, Rob Bowman, scully, the x-files, vince gilligan, x-files | 2 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) #7 – Trepanning Opera (Review)

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

Trepanning Opera is something of a one-shot story, albeit the story where Stefan Petrucha begins to concede that his first year writing The X-Files tie-in comic is really one single long-form story. Initially, Trepanning Opera looks like a standard monster-of-the-week (or perhaps that should be “monster-of-the-month”) story, only to eventually reveal that the connections to the rest of Petrucha’s run are more than simply thematic in nature. “Everything is connected, Mulder,” his contact assures him. “Everything.”

Head’s up…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: Charles Adlard, conspiracy, mudler, mythology, psychic, scully, Stefan Petrucha, the x-files, third eye, trepanning, trepanning opera | 9 Comments »

The X-Files – Anasazi (Review)

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

Burn it.

– C.G.B. Spender, 16 April 1995

On alien soil…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: albert hosteen, anasazi, bill mulder, chosen one, conspiracy, disappeared, genocide, Guilt, hero's journey, holocaust, mulder, mytharc, Native American, nazis, operation paperclip, paperclip, scully, the blessing way, the x-files, trauma, vanished, x-files, you only expose your father | 6 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) #4-6 – Firebird (Review)

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

Firebird is the first multi-part story told in the pages of The X-Files. Writer Stefan Petrucha and artist Charles Adlard don’t transition from done-in-one stories to two-part adventures, instead skipping the middle step and producing a three-issue epic. While A Little Dream of Me exposed the limitations facing a creative team working on a tie-in, Firebird demonstrates the strengths of the format. Spanning from Siberia to New Mexico, Firebird has an epic scale that would not be possible on the second season of The X-Files.

(Rather interestingly – and perhaps tellingly – Petrucha takes the comics to places that the show wants to go. The American South-West would be very difficult to replicate in Vancouver, prompting the creative team to make an ambitious effort to bring Mulder and Scully to New Mexico in Anasazi, infamously painting a quarry red to achieve the desired result. The show would wait until the fourth season before it was confident enough to take Mulder to Siberia in Tunguska and Terma.)

Something out of this world?

As with Not To Be Opened Until X-Mas, Firebird is very much a comic book story. While the show was reluctant have Mulder and Scully directly encounter aliens, the story features a monster that looks like something from the Lovecraft mythos. While the stakes on the show were generally rather personal to this point, Firebird puts the entire population of New Mexico (if not the world) at stake. While the series took its time revealing its evil conspiracy, Firebird gives us a cabal headed by a monologuing skull-holding would-be supervillain.

Perhaps surprisingly, this works. It’s clear that Petrucha and Adlard are aware that they are working in a different medium with different expectations and conventions. Firebird is very much an X-Files comic book epic, a story that couldn’t be realised on film. And there’s something very endearing about that.

Alien affairs…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: aquarius, believer, Charles Adlard, Comics, conspiracy, cover-up, faith, firebird, mulder, mythology, Russia, scully, siberia, Stefan Petrucha, terma, the x-files, Topps, topps comics, tunguska, x-fiels | 2 Comments »

The X-Files (Topps) #3 – A Little Dream of Me/The Return (Review)

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

There are inevitable challenges in working on a licensed property. You are effectively playing with somebody else’s toys. Since these tie-ins cannot drive a narrative currently unfolding in another medium, it’s often a challenge to maintain the illusion of forward momentum while existing at the behest of a story that can change from week-to-week. While The X-Files was a massive coup for Topps comics, and while Stefan Petrucha and Charles Adlard did a wonderful job, the comic had to face these constraints.

A Dismembrance of Things Past had brushed up against those limitations in trying to tell a U.F.O. story without meddling in the television show’s continuity. Petrucha used some fiendishly clever sleight of hand there, suggesting that the story would be about an alien visitation and possible cover-up, only to reveal that the story was actually an intimate meditation on the ideas of truth and memory. It was a rather ingenious bait-and-switch, resulting in a wonderful little story.

Pictures in his head…

A Little Dream of Me is not quite as efficient in dealing with the external limitations imposed on a tie-in comic book. The unfortunate realities of comic book scheduling meant that A Little Dream of Me had the misfortune to hit the stands very shortly after the broadcast of Colony and End Game. Of course, the script for A Little Dream of Me would have been written long before the episodes aired (about six months), but the scheduling causes the comic to suffer.

After all, Colony and End Game had made it abundantly clear that Samantha Mulder was unlikely to be returning to her family any time soon. And that was in the television show. The third issue of the comic book teasing the return of Samantha Mulder seems like a rather cynical cheat.

The “X” file…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: abduction, aliens, Charles Adlard, conspiracy, cover-ups, lies, memory, mulder, project aquarius, samantha, Samantha Mulder, scully, Stefan Petrucha, the x-files, x-files | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Død Kälm (Review)

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Darren

This August (and a little of September), we’re taking a trip back in time to review the second season of The X-Files. In November, we’ll be looking at the third season. And maybe more.

Død Kälm is probably the most explicitly “science-fiction-y” premise that we’ve had in the show’s run to date. And by “science-fiction-y”, I don’t necessarily mean “anchored in any meaningful science.” After all, the amount of sense that Død Kälm makes is questionable at best. Instead, the term “science-fiction-y” means “most likely to pop up in a pulpy science-fiction television show.”

The past few episodes have seen the show on a bit of a science-fiction kick, with clones and colonists and invisible abducted zoo animals. However “accelerated aging” is such a science-fiction staple that it feels like The X-Files is enthusiastically embracing science-fiction conventions at this point in the second season.