the m0vie blog

So, for the past two years or so, I’ve been delving into the cultural history of The X-Files, doing long-form reviews of everything from the show itself to spin-offs to comic books to crossovers to pop singles. It’s been great fun, and a pleasure from beginning to end. However, that end is fast approaching, and I was thinking of a nice way to mark the occasion. So I thought it might be fun to do a poll of the show’s run, and just get a sense of the broad consensus of fandom’s opinion on the best of the show’s nine-plus year run.

So, that’s what I’m doing.

The poll is open to anybody who wants to vote. It will be open until Babylon airs on the 15th February 2016. I’ll then take a little while to tabulate results, and offer a glimpse of fandom’s favourite episode before My Struggle II airs 22nd February 2016. Submission is simple; just compile a list of up to thirty of your favourite episodes (in order) and mail them directly to email address xfilespoll@gmail.com. (Or, if you don’t want to share your email with a stranger, fill out the form here.) Please include the word “Poll” in your subject to weed out the spam, but I’ll be checking the address fairly regularly.

I’ll go through the “rules” below, but it is worth mentioning why I thought this was a good idea. The most obvious is that I’ve spent more than two years talking about The X-Files. It might be worth hearing somebody else’s opinion.  More than that, it is a nice way to acknowledge all the readers of my reviews, and to involve you guys in some way in this project. It’s been great fun for me, and I’ve greatly enjoyed engaging with fans on twitter and in the comments, so I thought this might be a great way to involve everybody.

As an aside, I am surprised at the lack of fandom polls for The X-Files compared to other popular franchises like Doctor Who or Star Trek. Fandom polls are a great way to measure popular opinion over long periods, to see how consensus has changed or solidified over long periods of time. With the revival, now seems a good moment to take  a measure. It has been over a decade since the show went off the air, but it’s very much at peak popularity. It feels like this might be useful for the next rewatch or go-round.

As an aside, please feel free to spread word of this poll. Basically, the more people take part, the more interesting the results will be and the more accurately that the results will reflect X-Files fandom at this particular moment. So share it, tweet it, facebook it. Get the word out, even if you just send out the email address and an instruction to send up to thirty ranked choices for the best X-Files episodes ever. I hope this can become something special and cool, a snapshot of where the popular opinion is on The X-Files at this moment in time.

Now for the boring stuff. Organising a poll means having rules, so the results are somewhat transparent. They should be straight-forward enough, but any questions, please sound off in the comments:

• the poll will be weighted, so it is important you rank your choices; your first choice will get 30 points, your second will get 29, your third will get 28 and so on;
• you can send up to thirty episodes; this is simply to see whether there is a strong consensus on the top ten or twenty, and because I suspect that expanding the field will lead to some intriguing results; you do not have to list thirty choices, if you have a top ten (or twelve or fifteen or twenty-two) just list those;
• two-/three-parters count as one episode for the poll; however, episodes like The Pilot, Deep Throat, Squeeze, Tooms, The Erlenmeyer Flask, Little Green Men, One Breath, Requiem and Three Words are considered separate stand-alone stories; here’s a handy list of two-/three-parters:
  • Duane Barry/Ascension
  • Colony/End Game
  • Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip
  • Nisei/731
  • Piper Maru/Apocrypha
  • Talitha Cumi/Herrenvolk
  • Tunguska/Terma
  • Tempus Fugit/Max
  • Gethsemane/Redux I/Redux II
  • Christmas Carol/Emily
  • Patient X/The Red and the Black
  • The End/The Beginning
  • Dreamland I/Dreamland II
  • Two Fathers/One Son
  • Biogenesis/The Sixth Extinction/The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati
  • Sein und Zeit/Closure
  • Within/Without
  • This is Not Happening/DeadAlive
  • Essence/Existence
  • Nothing Important Happened Today I/Nothing Important Happened Today II
  • Provenance/Providence
  • The Truth I/The Truth II
• The X-Files: Fight the Future and The X-Files: I Want to Believe are included in the poll; all other material – including comic books, video games, crossovers, etc – is excluded.
  • Yes, somehow The End and The Beginning are a two-parter, even with Fight the Future sitting in the middle of them.
• The new episodes that will have aired by the time the poll completes (My Struggle I, Founder’s Mutation, Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster and Home Again) are not eligible in the poll for the sake of fairness.
• Spelling/typos are left to the judge’s discretion.
• I will not be casting a vote in the poll; it’s all you guys.
• Poll closes 15th February 2016.
• Results (hopefully) announced 22nd February 2016.
• Send your list to xfilespoll@gmail.com with the word “Poll” in the subject; I’ll try my best to find unmarked entries, but no promises.

Thanks for reading! Have fun! Any questions or comments, sound off below!

Note: Per feedback, people might be understandably uncomfortable emailing a random address. So I’ve put up a form you can fill out using just your alias and providing your list. The form is accessible here.

Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: poll, Television, x-files | 5 Comments »