Writing this near the end of Season 8, after “Alone”. I think that they’ve actually got it–I am seriously starting to sympathize with Dogett, and M & S seem like a retired couple. Doggett has this quintessential frailty about him — you see it earlier where he’s walking next to both his old friend at the CIA/army(?) and Mulder - he’s shorter than both, and he appears frail and the other two buff… almost like the other two could hurt him too easily. But, he’s an outsider in knowledge (can’t compare with Mulder, Oxford ed) and belief, and the fact that he both suffers and appears frail… I guess those are the two key elements in creating a new character to replace old beloved cult megaseries characters. Ah, actually there’s also the way Scully and the other characters treat him. In “Medusa”, Scully basically let him go off by himself almost treating him as a casualty - she would have totally risked her life and gone down the tunnels with the excavation team - and there’s his naive willingness to help, when she says she needs him to be her “hands and eyes,” he doesn’t question her further. Skinner’s take on Kersch wishing to thwart his advancement by assigning him to the X-Files doesn’t help either.
…
Season 9 started out weak even with the extra funding. It felt like a soap opera at times, and it really didn’t help that the new agents were not on the same par in education and experience as the former - but you do get to sympathize with them by the end of the series. Series finale was interesting alluding to the geomagnetic shift imminent on 12/22/2012 as Doomsday.The movie “I Want to Believe” was a total disappointment in that it alluded to no mythos at all! Whatever happened to the driving fount of governmental conspiracy that drove the series forward? Why resort to something as hackneyed as illegal organ transplantation, something that an earlier episode with Lucy Liu had already sufficiently summarized?!
Why is that the standard surprise plot of all of my fave story lines - i.e., your worst enemy turns out to be your secret father? X-Files Season 4 is starting to point that (note that I stopped watching after Season 4 - 9th grade started and I barely had time for TV) out — and the denoument is almost funny… you have this woman who’s impregnated by a man with anomalous striated muscles that could explain for how he can take on the shape of any man (and he took on Luke Skywalker’s form to rape her) … and then the episode before the finale has Mulder suspecting his mother having a relationship with Cigarette Smoking Man… and then you’re forced to see the similarity between Mulder’s face and CSM’s face o.O.
Watching TV series w/o the commercial is really getting addictive. I might finish Angel or start on Smallville next.
This is really exciting. For some odd reason I felt compelled to post to twitter after seeing my fave ep in my xfiles catchup project (4×07 - it’s a corny 45-minute antiheroic Forest Gump wannabe so I guess I’m easily amused) and found timeless’ post on touch coord’s to be implemented in LSL!
X-Files … currently just finished 4×07… it’s interesting how Mulder & Scully have changed through the seasons (Season 1 - Mulder was the more compassionate one, and now it’s the other way around), and how the past few episodes have grown to be more profligate and wild than well-edited like the first season. The first few season’s had finale’s where the X-Files were on the verge of being closed, which, I guess is the storyline allusion to the show being canceled. The interesting thing in “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” is that had the publisher accepted the guy’s work, he would have resigned… and probably get killed by another gov mafia though. It’s funny to see his character in awkward mode.
“Success in this project is imperative. Re-instation of the X-Files must be undeniable.” Interesting that the human fluke hybrid looks like the main villain Buffy Season 1. In other news, I finally finished Season 2 today (and finished the Anasazi trilogy) as the wireless totally self-nuked my relay participation in the daytime for. Season 2 has lots of interseting episodes, including some interesting ones on holy ash (non-metallic ash — sci data pending) and also an episode where Scully and Mulder drink contaminated water and grow old (and are somehow brought back to age again) and also an episode about the hazards of stepping in the shadows of a giant (i wonder if something similar might have created a Midas, naturally through some freakish occurance via ex vitro bombardment of cosmic rays). The season finale was disappointing though in its loose plot and cheap suspense, but there’s some interesting character development - you see the naive weakness of the Cigarette Smoking Man’s methods in blind killing and you discover that the global powers in this paradigm seem iconified by mafia head’s from the Godfather (that guy with the raspy voice).
Overall it is really quite impressive how strong the plot and execution of the first season so far is - I guess when you’re dealing with some unlikely phenomena as visually manifested by tech from the early 90’s, that’s a necessity!
The elevator problem is seen in Episode 7 in the “ghost in the machine.” When Mulder’s old partner is killed by a falling elevator… would it make more sense if the guy is floating rather than pushed down? Even if the elevator were being *pushed* greater than gravity in downwards acceleration, he would feel lighter rather than heavier as shown in the pic where he sort of cowers squooshed in a pile.
13 could almost have been a rip from Green Mile. Psychic touched-by-mysterious-force deathrow inmate can see things and channel with the dead. Political forces prevent Scully from successfully preventing his execution, even though Scully believes he has some sort of mysterious link. 12 has the interesting twist where we see a bit of Mulder’s past and a glimpse of his romantic life; was the other way around. (Interesting foreshadowing in 11, when Mulder gets a call from Deep Throat, and Scully asks jocularly if he’s going on a date.) When Scully went on a date with divorced guy, Mulder didn’t seem jealous, just focused on the case… unlike Scully, later, with M&P. 13 is also the switch where Scully started believing, and Mulder didn’t. (He used something that Randi would have done - and yet shouldn’t he understand that psychic phenomenon isn’t as clear-cut as being able to see the answers on a multiple choice exam? The crux of the problem is that it’s extremely unlikely to occur under a controlled environment, unless the subject grows acclimated to it and the right time strikes… In a way, it is almost like how some people cannot get any work done if they aren’t in their work environment.) The acting has been rather great. The alleged psychic man’s testimonial ranged from “fake tone” to “real” - to even “realer”, as the flashbacks started.
