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Sep 10
It’s been ten years since THE X-FILES premiered now, and Sci-Fi is airing a marathon today to celebrate the fact.
I watched the show starting about midway through the second season and quickly became hooked. The show had two major failings. The first was the overall story arc. Those so-called mythology episodes rarely paid off like they should have.
The second mistake was keeping Scully around. When Doggett and Reyes came in post-Mulder, they should have dumped 95% of everything that had gone on before — especially Scully — and paved new ground. Focus on those two characters trying to come out from under the shadow of Scully and Mulder. Start a new season-long smaller mythology story arc that had a definite ending in mind. Work from there. Doggett could have saved the show, but they couldn’t let go of Mulder and Scully. The show suffered greatly from that.
X-FILES was a true trailblazer in television, spawning a number of wannabes. It had a quirky charm all its own. And it even had a goofy spinoff that died before its time. (I know that’s a bit of a controversial statement, but I thought THE LONE GUNMEN was a lot of fun.)
Viva la X-Files.
Sep 10, 2003 @ 18:15:47
Definitely agree with you re the Lone Gunmen. That show was a lot of fun, and should have been given more of a chance. But that’s FOX for you. :)
However, I disagree with your assessment of Scully needing to go.
What I feel they should have done was introduce alternate agents/teams of agents EARLIER in the show’s mythology – the show could have rotated around between two or three teams of agents. That way, the M&S dynamic, which was incredible, wouldn’t have had the burden of carrying the show so much for so long.
That’s where it started to crack at the seams, when they had been doing the same thing for so long that there was nothing left in the characters, plots, or even the actors that could continue to sustain. Also, the addition of agents like Reyes and Doggett earlier on would have made their actual entrance alot less forced, something more natural and flowing.
Sep 11, 2003 @ 11:19:45
I came in just when you did — midway through Season 2, and I loved every stinking second of the show. But I agree with you about the mythology episodes. The X-Files lost me totally with the movie, which I thought was a whole lot of noise and not much of anything. I ended up tuning out about 3 years before the show ended. :(
Sep 12, 2003 @ 10:30:03
THE LONE GUNMEN also gets the award for the Most Creepy Pilot Episode In Retrospect, in which they prevented a plane from crashing into the WTC. Still, I’d love to see a DVD set of it, perhaps after the X-FILES is done being collected.
-Augie