The “truth” is that on December 22, 2012, the aliens will invade.
People who run the government know this.
That episode would have been difficult to summarize. With the he said/she said, the smoking alien, Alex Trebek, Jesse Ventura, the men in black and Mulder screaming like a little girl, describing it would sound like an hallucination.
There are aliens, and everyone’s going to die, and none of the fans really give a rat’s arse anymore, so why bother anyways?
[/bitter longtime watcher]
Alll you need to know. The mythology is a contained in Mulder’s Sister. Scully transference and a tale of sleeping beauty.
I really preferred the stand alone episodes. The show lost me when they emphasized the mythology plots and I stopped watching after the 3rd season.
The Television Without Pity boards have a thread devoted to this topic – some of the posts are pretty enlightening (especially on pages 7 and 8).
The episode with the hyper-inbred family has got to be one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen. The old lady on the dolly scuttling around…brrrrr! X-Files did have its wonderfully provacative creative moments, that’s for sure. Which made it’s nosedive descent into overextended crapitude all the more irritating.
I remember that one. The infant corpse turned up in the baseball game’ “I’m hongry!” stuffing bread into the deformed maw before they went forth to kill Our Heroes. “We’ll start a new fambly. You’re a good boy to your Mother.”
Wow.
Glad I quit watching when I did.
Better suggestion: Just watch the last episode, the two-hour one. It’s nothing but a clipshow based upon some uber-geeks X-Files fanpage timeline that Chris Carter found, one that likely even cleared up a few things for him.
“Bitter much?”
Me?
NAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Home
You’re not talking about the same two hour final episode I remember, are you? The one with the cigarette smoking man sitting in a cave towards the end of the episode for some reason?
-FrL-
We picked up all 9 seasons on DVD not long ago for a very reasonable price (Local Hi-Fi/CD/DVD store was having a sale), and I’ll agree with the rest of the advice in this thread:
Just stick to the stand-alone episodes, and you’ll be fine. Anything involving the actual “Mythology” will just make your head hurt, as well as instilling a vague and unhealthy sense of general paranoia…
Best. X-Files. Epidsode. Ever.
Because it could actually happen and would be worse than aliens infecting us.
Yes, I am. The last episode was nothing but a 1/2 hour story arc wrapped around a 1.5 hour clipshow.
As one who co-moderated a monthly X-Files discussion group for 3 years, I can guarantee you that my description is quite apt. We even had a party for the last episode, everyone gathered around the 27-incher we had back then.
I’ll bring a different opinion in here.
My wife and I bought all 9 seasons of X-files for about $45 here in China(on DVD). Anyway, it took us about 1 1/2 years to get through it. We went at our own pace, both having never seen an episode before(full disclosure: I saw the Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black episode back when it aired…but it is irrelevant).
We liked it. All of it. The first 7 seasons are naturally the best since Duchovny is there and he really molded Mulder into a memorable character. But my wife and I like Dogget and Reyes and if they had ever made a spin off, those two could have done alright.
Seasons 8 and 9 are not great when it comes to the arc story, but the stand alones are for the most part quite good.
We even liked the finale. Not the best way to end it, but not the worst. We’d love to have a stand-alone, Scully and Mulder X-files movie. Don’t really want Christ Carter to write and direct it, though. We’d love to have a Joss Whedon written and directed X-files sequel.
Anyway, we agreed that if we had watched the show as it aired, we would have liked it less. It would have been torture to wait and wait for answers and to never get them. Compressed into 18 months, it was not so bad.
Sounds kind of like the story about The Big Sleep…in the course of filming, the director was confused about the plot (specifically, who killed the chauffeur). So he called the author (Raymond Chandler) and asked him; and Chandler replied that he didn’t know.
It is my opinion, which I see confirmed over and over (of course 
), that people tend to like the season in which they “get” the show the most, and compare that against all others.
You are quite right in that not having nine… friggin… years… invested in this show gave you a more enjoyable experience than those of us who watched it for all nine… frustrating… years…
Sample X-Files dialogue, guaranteed to occur once every 5 episodes:
“You don’t know how close you are!”
“You have just begun to see how vast this thing is.”
“People are watching you, possibly controlling you.”
For nine… continuous… years. And then we get a damn clipshow that does nothing to “solve” anything but does everything to “explain” it, apparently to the confused screenwriters.
The X-Files pretty much burned all fannish tendencies out of me, especially when it comes to serialized entertainment. At least when somebody f’s up a book, you know it pretty soon without wasting years to find out how bad it’s going to end.
Ugh.
Anyway:
[spoiler]Mulder’s sister was kidnapped, not taken by aliens, which meant that his original motivation, the one he had since a child and started the entire “X-Files Universe” off, was irrelevant. Scully gave up William, her and Mulder’s baby, to some defenseless, unaware farmer in Montana, (effectively destroying the character for my wife whom had just given birth 7 months before and, unlike Scully, had fallen in love with her child). I don’t know what happened to Skinner, I think he lived. I don’t remember what happened to Mulder, but he didn’t give a shit about his kid either. I think he and Scully went driving off, but who knows?
In many ways, the final season was a great betrayal of the fans that stayed around so long, and the final 10 episodes was a slap in the face. I have never been so pissed at a stupid TV show before. Oh well.[/spoiler]
I remember, when the series finale was broadcast in the UK, sitting down with a pad of paper and desperately scribbling down everything that was happening. Those ridiculous scribblings have nothing on this site. I thought I was getting somewhere before I saw the scroll bar was only about a sixth of the way down 
Wow.
I watched the series from beginning to end. But, if I’d had a chance to read that synopsis before I began, I start to think of all the books that I could have read. All those hours gone…
It really did have a lot of style before it began to take itself too seriously. By the end, it became painful to watch. Robert Patrick played an honest and likeable character, but that was balanced by Annabeth Gish, who was (paradoxically) intensely one-dimensional, an acting style that she later reprised in “The West Wing.”
I think that “Lost” fans are crossing their fingers that the same will not happen to that series. I hope that the writers have learned this lesson, but I fear that the financial siren song will always be there to extend a series to the bitter end.