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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Ex-Files

14:23 / 17.01.02

It's over.

I realize that almost nobody watches it anymore, and that it is many seasons past the point where they should have called it off, but I thought it should be pointed out that the X-Files are through.

Though I'm not sad for its demise (I haven't watched the damn show in about five years), I still think that it had its share of good episodes and definitely raised the bar for speculative television.

And I was just about to start watching it again for that Doggett guy.

15:28 / 17.01.02

I kind of lost my taste for the X-Files when they started explaining everything. One of the brilliant things about Twin Peaks was that it never had a satisfactory explanation. The first season eps. where Mulder and Scully weren't any farther ahead at the end than they were at the beginning were awesome. But explaining the conspiracy blah blah blah. No interest. At least it opened the door for some other cool shows that might not have had a market otherwise.

Zoom.

19:33 / 17.01.02

I thought the X-files started to suck after the movie..Hey look..ufos..and they're takingover the planet...so lets go back to work, buisness as usual.
utter crap.
Im just waiting for the next Bab5 series..

20:02 / 17.01.02

I may start watching it again, as they'll have 9 seasons worth of plot wrapups to cover in the next couple of months. Should be interesting.

07:12 / 18.01.02

ah well .. i did enjoy it.

but all good things yadayadayada..

19:16 / 18.01.02

What pissed me off about 'the Files' (well just one thing) was how Scully ALWAYS missed stuff like a great big fucking ship flying over her head. Another (told you there was more) was how Mulder believed that investigating cases like a man who could crawl through small holes to eat livers, shape shifteing Indians, and various funked up serial killers would lead him to finding his sister. Dumb bastard. HELLO!

That guy you keep seeing smoking all the time (get a patch dude) grab him and beat the living shit out of him and make him tell you everything. How many series did it take him to figure that one out? Uuueeerrr der.

Was he just such a tosser he didn't want to loose his job. Boo ooh motherfucker. Everyone around you gets hurt. Was he really that good a shag Scully?

You dumb bitch.

gentleman loser

23:13 / 18.01.02

Thank god. It's long overdue.

FX has finally been showing some of the episodes from the early seasons and I'm amazed how good they are by comparison. It seems to be a given that most good SF shows go from a tight one hour show to endless and tedious soap opera arc episodes (i.e. Star Trek: Voyager, etc.)

Now, if only Fox will kill off the long unfunny Simpsons. . .

[ 19-01-2002: Message edited by: gentleman loser ]

01:38 / 19.01.02

From the BBC article: "X-Files to close for last time"

"But Mr Carter, who invented the concept of the series, said that he wanted the show to finish while it still had creative vitality."

In that case it should have been cancelled years ago

[ 19-01-2002: Message edited by: rexpop ]

01:10 / 22.04.02

Heard a commercial for the X-Files while I was in the kitchen making supper, and heard that they were killing someone off. Looks like they're finally winding it all down. Spoilers, just in case.
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Decided to see who might buy it, and discovered that it was a Lone Gunmen ep. My favourite characters, they went with dignity and grace. I'm glad they're tying it all up.

04:43 / 22.04.02

Yeah, that got me a little misty-eyed as well. Man, I miss those dudes already, especially after Langley's Joey Ramone speech. :sad:

06:49 / 22.04.02

I hadn't watched it for years (thought it turned to shite pretty much after the first series), but caught it again recently. It actually seems much better with Agent Robo-Cop, and the newly credulous Scully. Seriously. Doggett is very Twin Peaks-y, somehow. I quite liked Mulder, but, jeez...

12:01 / 22.04.02

is this new actress playing scully? i haven't watched the show in years (the episodes never really end, there's never any resolution, the program just runs out of time and credits start rolling). and i'm not trying to sway the thread, i'd just like to publicly cry over the loss of futurama. weep. weep. thank you.

12:06 / 22.04.02

I think Gillian Anderson is still playing Scully...unless it's her clone?

Agent Doggett (played by the bloke from RoboCop, I think) is Mulder's replacement... not sure if that's what you're getting at.

12:35 / 22.04.02

there's a new female character,who was working with Dogget yesterday. i was just surprised by the scully-less atmosphere, but i turned the episode off half-way through,maybe the scull-ster popped up then. so who's the brunette?

12:50 / 22.04.02

You in the UK, Utopia? I was busily essay-writing last night, and did not get to see the X-Files... which I (gasp!) had been quite looking forward to, sadly enough... I think I read in the tv guide that Scully was off on some ill-defined errand though... no idea...

wembley can change in 28 days

14:43 / 22.04.02

True, last night's episode was a wank, as they've all become it seems (although I agree Doggett is worth watching), but did you see (!) the episode two weeks ago with Burt Reynolds?!?

The best episode I've EVER seen!

15:59 / 22.04.02

Utopia: The brunette is a new agent, Reyes (?), who was an acquaintance of Doggett's. She helped him investigate the disappearance of his son and is now a sort of Scully replacement. Gillian Anderson is still in the show but doesn't play as central a character anymore (or at least she didn't the last few times I watched...about two months ago).

I must say that the end of the files is way over due. For me it stopped being watchable when they started concentrating too much on the alien overthrow storyline...it was just too confusing and really not very entertaining. What really drew me to the show was the amount of silly, fringe type stories that they did...Humbug (with Jim Rose!), the episodes, the one with the guy with the tail, the vampires episode with the buck-toothed vampire guy (Luke Wilson!), the MIB episode (with Alex Trebeck and Jesse the Body), and the demon epi with Bruce Campbell were more to my liking. They seemed to lose their sense of humor sometime after the movie came out...sad really. Even the lure of Gillian Anderson (yummy) isn't enough to get me to tune in regularly now. At least you can buy previous seasons on DVD, though.

hopefully chris carter will just pack it all in and stop trying to create shows after this. he got luck with x-files and millenium...everything else that he did was crap-tacular at best.

16:03 / 22.04.02

the last episode i saw was the one about the alien/parasite thing that a rural community thought was the second coming of christ. it was good, but pretty dodgy in some respects - some real rape symbolism going on, in a quite titillatory way.

the episodes that were directed by duchovny and anderson were some of the worse, cliched stuff i've ever seen.

18:13 / 22.04.02

What really drew me to the show was the amount of silly, fringe type stories that they did...Humbug (with Jim Rose!), the episodes, the one with the guy with the tail, the vampires episode with the buck-toothed vampire guy (Luke Wilson!), the MIB episode (with Alex Trebeck and Jesse the Body), and the demon epi with Bruce Campbell were more to my liking.

Yeah, my favorites were always the joke episodes. Remember the COPS episode? Or the one where Mulder switches bodies w/ a Man In Black (played by "Lenny"/"David St. Hubbins" actor Michael McKean)? Or the M.A.S.K. spoof with about 100 Cher references? Or the "Lumpy" episode w/ the shapeshifter? Man, that was the highlight of seeing "The One", watching some hospital scene and shouting out loud "Yo, check it out ! It's Lumpy! And that guy from 'American Movie'!! No shit!!" (ahem) But I digress....

18:24 / 22.04.02

oh shit, i missed a bruce campbell episode?

and no cholister, i'm a US man. no jokes, please.

Harold Washington died for you

22:42 / 22.04.02

Yeah the Spinal Tap MIB guy was a fringe player in the sadly overlooked "The Lone Gunman" series. It is sad to see it go, but as a loyal X-Phile, I'm loving every minute of it. To see my "TLG" geeks die in heroic fashion made me almost want to snap to attention and salute true American heroes. To see them interred in Arlington National Cemetary five seconds later made me almost want to cry.

I am shackled to my TV every Sunday night till June. The Futurama/Star Trek episode was damn fine too.

15:38 / 23.04.02

Wait, the Lone Gunmen died?

15:43 / 23.04.02

Yessir.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

15:28 / 24.04.02

Going to go against the flow and say I prefered the shows about the central conspiracy and didn't likt eh 'quirky' shows like Humbug, the problem was that so often they seemed to be written by someone who didn't have a sense of humour. Often the big twists of the over-plot could be worked out by thinking to yourself 'what would they think is surprising?', the rest of the time it was stuff there was no way in hell of predicting (Krychek is suddenly Russian!), still it must have been difficult for the production crew to work around Duchovny's ego for the last few years.

19:44 / 17.05.05

ABC is doing a Kolchak the Night Stalker (the insipration for Chris Carter's X-Files series, as he's often said in interviews) revival this coming season.

From CNN.com:

>> September's schedule will also include "Hot Properties," a comedy about four women who work in a Manhattan real estate office, and a remake of the short-lived 1970s occult series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker."

12:36 / 17.11.06

Arise long dead X-thread!

Okay, I'm bringing this up because I've just started watching the series from scratch again (Ms. Wonderstarr was asking questions a while ago that reminded me that I liked the show and that I a) hadn't seen it for a while and b) never saw the conclusion).

So far what have I seen - well, series one, the first half of which has dated pretty badly, and plays out like a poor reimagining of Twilight Zone, but there is a glimmer of charm from Mulder and Scully, and once Deepthroat starts to appear and the implication that there is a greater conspiracy in play, the show improves greatly. I remembered the last episode of series one quite well, but still enjoyed the nastiness of it. Series two is a lot darker (about half way through at the moment) and, apart from filler episodes (vampire one is terrible) it's very good stuff. Krychek is an oily little bastard, and Mulder and Scully work extremely well.

I'm actually exceited about watching in more now, series three, I thought, was one of the best, but scheduling kind of went off the wall after series four I remember, so a lot of the stuff I won't have seen.

I would add here, in response to a post higher up (and quite some time ago) regarding Fox's thinking that the weird cases he looked at early on would help him find his sister being a stupid idea - the early shows and cases tended to be foistered onto Mulder and Scully - about a third of episodes featured a scene of Mulder saying 'but why contact us' to some agent/sherrif only to be told 'I've got a friend in the force/beurea that told me you know about these weird things' and ultimately, in spite of the Simpson's amusingly pointing out differently, they were government employees often assigned to these cases.

Oh, and so far - the worst episode is the ridiculous killer computer one, with the AI machine narrating in deep voice saying things like 'FILE DELETED' when it killed someone - brrrrr!