Writing Blind: The X-Files S7

Welcome to a feature called "Writing Blind."  In this series, I will be writing about seasons of television that I watched in the past year or so, but failed to write about at the time.  I call it writing blind, because I will be sharing my thoughts months after I have already finished the season.  This is both because I want to write about these seasons, but don't have the time to re-watch them and because it is a challenge to hopefully improve my writing.

I rarely noticed it, but this is the season most commonly referenced as to when David Duchovny stopped giving a shit.  I didn't notice it most of the time, not because I'm not particularly enamored of his acting ability, but because he's always been kind of a sleepy, low-key performer.  With that said, after having watched season eight, I do appreciate Duchovny a lot more than I did because his absence is felt in the first part of the season so he's clearly doing something right.

The seventh season of The X-Files is a weird season.  It's a really weird season.  There are episodes of creativity, doing things that somehow hadn't been done before.  There are signs that the writers have run out of ideas, lacking enough good ideas to fill a 22-episode season.  To be fair, maybe one or two seasons have sustained 22 good ideas as most seasons will have a clunker or two.

Unfortunately, it's a sign of The X-Files exiting their golden age.  There's not a single episode in this season that is a classic.  If you want to quibble with that, I'll amend it a little: I don't think any of these episodes would make a top ten X-Files list.  I'm not saying there aren't good episodes.  "En Ami" pairs together Cigarette Smoking Man and Scully for a solo episode of sorts.  It works very well.  "Hollywood A.D." goes meta and I always enjoy a good meta episode that constantly pokes fun at itself.  "The Amazing Maleeni" is elevated by a strong guest performance by Ricky Jay (Deadwood alum).  I'm just saying none of these are your all-time greats.

In addition, season seven has some of the worst episodes of the entire series (Season 9 possibly excluded as I have not seen it and I plan to skip most of that season so I'll probably never really know).  These are episode titles I knew were bad before I even got to season seven.  "First Person Shooter" and "Fight Club" are legitimate competing candidates for worst episode of the series, or at the very least worst episode of the series when it was still good.  Duchovny has proved surprisingly adept at both writing and directing (He wrote and directed one of my favorites from this season "Hollywood A.D.")  Gillian Anderson... well let's just say there's a reason her only writing and directing credit on IMDB is her writer-director effort "all things."

It's pretty clear, at least until season eight comes along, that they are simply out of ideas.  They gave both Anderson and Duchovny their own episodes, they have an admittedly entertaining gimmick episode in "X-Cops," they have what I think is an afterword to the cancelled Millennium show, and they have the most clunkers since season one.  While I admitted that Duchovny's absence is felt in season eight, they did need a change and his lessened involvement provided the necessary excuse.

Plus, at this point, the mythology had been well past the point of being interesting.  I don't remember much about these mythology episodes except I remember them being a slog to get through.  I've always kind of had an issue with the mythology episodes though.  Part of it was knowing that it was going nowhere: the heroes almost discover something new, only for it be taken away at the last minute, probably because somebody gets killed.  In the back of my mind, I just can't really be invested in those episodes unfortunately.

As always though - for the most part, The X-Files remained mediocre to good for the whole season on the strength of its directing.  The directors never let down the script at this point in the show's run.  Kim Manners, Rob Bowman, and whoever copied them in the other episodes, had effectively nailed the show's tone.  There's a few episodes purposefully straying from that tone, but they tended to at the least direct it as well as it is written on the page and frequently elevating the story.  (I wonder if a more experienced director could have improved Anderson's episode; hard not to think so).

So season seven is a victim of a show being in its seventh season.  Nearly all shows either don't even make it to its seventh season or they no longer can be called a good show.  The X-Files could still be called a good show, it just probably wasn't a great show by this point.  Sometimes, making lots of consistently good episodes is enough though.  Despite the bad episodes, most of these episodes were solid.  That's how I would describe this season: solid.

Grade - B

Rewind: The X-Files S6

When I started this series, I expected to immediately like it.  I had high expectations for the show and I thought I would have no trouble getting into the show.  I also weirdly expected a small peak that the show would only reach for a couple seasons, and gradually declining years until it became unwatchable.  As you've probably gathered, this is not at all what happened to me.  The high expectations made the first season a disappointment - it has one of the better season-long storylines and a few good episodes, but that's pretty much it.  That initial disappointment kept me at arm's length from loving the show for longer than it otherwise would have - although I'm only now seeing this in hindsight.

Anyway, my other "problem" with truly getting into The X-Files is that I was fully aware of the mythology before I started.  By that I mean, I knew it wasn't really going anywhere and would ultimately stop making sense or just start getting stupid.  While this did lead to not being frustrated at all when the mythology got that way, it also meant I pretty much never got invested in any early season mythology.  Welcome to the only show where I infinitely prefer the standalone episodes to their serialization.

So here I am in season six and the show's been mostly churning out 20 or so quality episodes each year for the past five years (with the exception of the fifth season, which had less episodes due to the movie).  So I didn't really expect to gain an appreciation for the show in its supposed decline years.  But my opinion of the show is much higher than it was in the second season or third season, perhaps because there are very few shows that remain good in its sixth season.  It's clear the show is starting to run out of ideas, but they are responding to this by being creative and experimenting with ideas.

The mythology is never less important than the sixth season, which I certainly am not going to complain about.  The show also took some backlash for two developments and I'm not sure how related they are to each other: season six tries to be funny for like six episodes in a row (it seems that long at least) and the production moved to California because David Duchovny didn't like Vancouver (this is at least what I've read so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

Despite the brighter colors and the shift in tone at points, you can't really say the show is that much worse than before.  It's probably not better than the 2-4 seasons, but during the fifth season, they were so clearly focused on the movie that it led to an inconsistent season with some rather high points.  The sixth season, whatever flaws you may give it, is a fairly consistent season at the very least.  "Milagro" is about the only really bad episode in the season, but to be fair wow did I hate that episode.  Thanks for wasting John Hawkes guys!

However, the best episodes of the sixth season tend to have one or two flaws preventing it from really matching the best episodes of the previous years.  "Triangle" is a lot of fun, but it makes no damn sense.  "Tithonus" is basically Vince Gilligan's attempt at writing Darin Morgan, and while he's a great writer, it's no "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."  Not many things are, but it kind of invites the comparison and can't help but pale in comparison.  "Arcadia" is another fun episode, but the monster is fairly bland, dragging it down a bit.  "The Unnatural" is mostly a great episode because Jesse L. Martin is fantastic and it's kind of pointless to write down the flaws since those are also what makes it kind of endearing.

There's also "Drive," the episode that brought Bryan Cranston to Vince Gilligan.  Cranston is pretty much as good as advertised and you can definitely see how he convinced Gilligan to cast him in Breaking Bad.  "Monday" is the X-Files Groundhog Day episode (does every long-running genre series eventually have this type of episode?  I saw a Star Trek: Next Generation episode like this, but it aired before Groundhog Day.  It's basically the perfect format for TV).  I don't think I have ever not liked a Groundhog Day episode before, but I'm sure a bad one exists somewhere.

"Field Trip" is maybe my favorite episode of the season (oh look Vince Gilligan had a hand in that.  Shocker).  "Three of Kind" is a perhaps unexpected an dunnecessary sequel to the Lone Gunmen episode from the fifth season and probably falls apart if you think about it, but I had a lot of fun watching it.  Lastly, "Dreamland" has no business being a two-parter, but its got Michael McKean and he's always great.  I keep naming episodes I liked, but there's a lot of them.  (Last one: "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" is great if nothing else for the performances by Lily Tomlin and Edward Asner.)

Are there X-Files fans who are mythology-driven and those who only want the standalone episodes?  The mythology probably sheds more light on the character of the two leads than the other episodes so they had their use in the beginning seasons.  But still...  I think I can count on one hand the number of mythology episodes that seemed useful.  (My impression is that I didn't really love those episodes even in the early seasons, but that could be just because I don't remember them at all.  Seriously these episodes do not stick in my brain like other episodes do for some reason.)

The sixth season was much better than I ever expected.  Besides season three, it might even feature the most good to great episodes.  (Though looking at my past grades, season four might have something to say about that.)  If I decide to rewatch the series and limit it to my most enjoyable or favorite episodes, this very well might have the most episodes on that list.  You'd think five seasons and a movie would diminish the writers' capacity for new ideas, but you can't really tell by the quality of these episodes.

Grade - A-

Rewind: The X-Files S5

Season five is a weird season and it's one that's weird almost by necessity.  In the summer after the fifth season, The X-Files movie came out in theaters, which means that either before or concurrent with the shooting of the fifth season, they shot the movie.  So Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, and the writers weren't exactly available for your regular full TV schedule.

Hamstrung by time constraints, the show was forced to get creative with how to make a season of television while also making a movie for theaters.  This led to inventive and exciting new episodes while also having the most duds of any season since the first season.  Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny are both either missing or barely present in multiple episodes.  One of the show's two primary directors, Rob Bowman, only directed two episodes in this season because he was also directing the movie.  He had directed 23 episodes in the first four seasons.  (I find it interesting he was chosen for the movie.  Kim Manners directed more episodes of the show and also directed the finale.  Despite his obvious talent, he didn't seem all that interested in movies so maybe that was the reason?)

So the fifth season ends up becoming uneven and unfocused (especially contrasted with the extremely cohesive fourth season.)  But that's not a huge problem with a show as creative as this one got.  In "Unusual Suspects," The X-Files had a spotlight episode on its tertiary characters, the lone gunmen.  These weren't exactly characters I would have guessed could carry an episode on their own, even knowing they eventually got their own (failed) TV show.  But by focusing on the most normal one of the group, John Fitzgerald Byers, it ended up being similar to a typical noir story where the everyman is duped by a woman.  Predictable maybe, but still entertaining.

"Post-Modern Prometheus" evokes an old-fashioned type of horror by being shot in black-and-white where we are dropped into a small town.  The X-Files episodes that focus on small towns are at the very least always interesting and tend to seem like real places.  But this is definitely considerably different than most X-Files episodes.  "Bad Blood" is one of the best episodes they've ever done with a "Rashomon" like story where we get two skewed perspectives and no sense of the truth.  "The Pine Bluff Variant" puts Mulder in a position where he robs a bank!  "Foile a Deux" is one of the creepier monster of the weeks they've ever done.  Just the idea that you can see a huge insect-looking thing coming towards you and nobody else can is one of the most terrifying things imaginable.

With the excellent come the very bad episodes as well though.  "Schizogeny" is confusing, not scary, and doesn't have a compelling monster of the week.  It's a slog to actually watch.  "Chinga," the Stephen King-penned episode, is quite awful.  Those two at least have good reasons for being bad.  Stephen King works haven't really tended to work that well either on television or in movies unless someone takes his idea and goes in a different direction.  The other one was a spec script that they accepted because they needed another episode.  "The End" has no such excuses with a child prodigy who can read minds and a forced love triangle from a completely new character.  That was the last episode of the series so even if the movie was on your minds, you'd think you'd actually put your best foot forward.

The fifth season, as I look at all the episodes I talked about, wasn't quite as uneven as I thought.  It has a rough middle stretch and the mythology episode at the end is probably the worst one thus far, but most of these episodes are good.  In fact, I'm not sure there've been so many off-the-wall ideas in any season thus far and nearly all of those ideas work.  The fifth season is rarely in its typical format which lends an unpredictability to the season.  While previous seasons have been better, when you click on the next episode, you usually know what you're getting.  That is definitely not the case in this season, for better and for worse.

So I'm pretty intrigued going forward to say the least.  I have seen from a number of people that Duchovny at some point stops giving a shit.  I can't help but speculate that the heavy workload this season could have been a factor, if true of course.  But this season, while somewhat of a letdown from previous seasons, in no way indicates a drop in the show's quality.  The top episodes are as good as the show has ever been and the weaknesses can simply be explained by the tough schedule they put themselves in.

Grade - B+

As an added note, I plan to watch The X-Files movie and the sixth season before the special six episode season coming out in January.  Since most people have recommended I stop after seven seasons, I'll probably end up recording the newest season, watching the seventh season and then finally watching the new episodes.  So it might be fair to say I won't get to the new episodes until March.

Writing Blind: The X-Files S4

Welcome to a feature called "Writing Blind."  In this series, I will be writing about seasons of television that I watched in the past year or so, but failed to write about at the time.  I call it writing blind, because I will be sharing my thoughts months after I have already finished the season.  This is both because I want to write about these seasons, but don't have the time to re-watch them and because it is a challenge to hopefully improve my writing.

I'm about to finish season five of The X-Files and I really hope I can write a review soon after finishing it, because I am tired of trying to recollect episodes I haven't seen in months.  There is however one thing I am certain about with the fourth season of The X-Files: it's the best season.  I guess a better way to put it is that it's the most cohesive one.  Season four is the first season to really feel like continuity matters.  

I appreciate that in the first three seasons, the show would have enough continuity to make it worth watching in order, but it's not really vital to watch it in order.  (Except for mythology episodes I guess, but I've never been that invested in them, mostly due to the incredibly widespread reputation the show has for shitting the bed with the mythology.  It's kind of hard to care when you know it's leading you nowhere.  And really here's every mythology episode: you learn something, but nothing actually changes.)

That changes in this season, starting with the last five minutes of "Leonard Betts," when we find out Scully has cancer.  It's a pretty bold move, a move the show would need to back out of one way or the other.  The rest of the season either addresses it directly or knowing she has cancer changes how you might perceive certain scenes.

There's also the fact that Gillian Anderson is a fantastic actor and nailed every emotional beat.  David Duchovny has grown on me the more I've watched the show, but I have zero doubt he would not be able to do what Anderson did in this season.  In fact, I don't think I've praised her enough in these reviews.  She makes this show.  This is pretty impressive considering the writers frequently write her as a wet blanket who gets in they way of Mulder's theories or simply don't give her anything to do at all.  So keep that in mind when I say that the smartest thing the writers ever did, besides maybe picking Vince Gilligan's spec script in season two, was giving Scully cancer so Anderson could finally play something up to her talent.

Duchovny isn't left hanging as this is the first time he's confronted with the possibility that the government is behind everything.  The writers wrote themselves into a corner here.  There are two possible scenarios on how to deal with the government conspiracy. One is that the aliens are real and the government is hiding it.  It's implied that the world of The X-Files is essentially the same as our world where most people don't believe in aliens or supernatural things.  Of course, presenting it as this version makes it hard to believe people aren't more accepting of things like aliens when there's been at least 100 or more instances (in other words, the episodes) where the impossible is real.  You'd think that bleed into everyday life.  But suspension of disbelief and what have you.  

The other scenario is that the government wants you to believe in aliens so that you ignore the other shit they do.  That's not what this season comes to because the show is far from being over so they can't make any conclusions yet.  But it certainly makes it seem like that's a possibility.  Which makes no sense in a world where we've seen so much evidence of crazy, impossible ghost shit happening.  You can't really say aliens aren't real and then have an episode on this ancient demon who is totally real.  (Relating to a previous point, it's frustrating to have Scully constantly reject Mulder's theories with common sense and science and then he's nearly always right.  Seriously it's not hard to imagine someone not named Gillian Anderson playing Scully and Scully being TERRIBLE to watch.)

Anyway, the fourth season still has good mythology episodes, though much like last time, I couldn't recite to you any plot points.  I read the episode descriptions and synopsis and still barely remember them.  Mythology episodes are exciting at the time (well some of them), but they leave nearly no lasting impression on me.  Am I alone on this?

This season has a ton of great episodes.  There's a lot of episodes that I knew were great before I even watched a minute of it.  "Home" is creepy and maybe one of the most fucked up things the show ever presented on screen, especially when you stop and think about it.  "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" has CSM killing John F. Kennedy, which is awesome.  "Paper Hearts" presents an alternative explanation for the disappearance of Samantha, Fox's long-missing sister.  "Leonard Betts" through "Memento Mori" are great as we discover Scully has cancer (though it came at the end of Leonard Betts and is a great episode before that), she has her own adventure (where cancer isn't mentioned, but certainly colors his actions), and then "Memento Mori" has both Scully and Mulder deal with the news that Scully has cancer.  There's also the awesome "Small Potatoes," meant by Vince Gilligan in the vein of Darin Morgan script, and "Zero Sum" where Walter Skinner gets framed for murder.

Combined, this season is a combination of long-form storytelling, season-long storytelling, and simply standalones.  It succeeds at all three.  Only the first season really has as clear of a season-long arc in my mind before this fourth season came along.  I feel confident in saying that the fourth season of The X-Files will be my favorite and my pick for the best season.

Grade - A