Oddly enough, that is my vote for one of the worst episodes in the entire series.
You know, I’ve never really understood why “Space” takes so much heat from fans. I am not going to vote it as a series high point, obviously, but it worked well enough for me.
Two episodes in? Then next you get to learn why… …when Doug Hutchison married the 16-year-old Courtney Stodden–WITH HER MOTHER’S BLESSING–you heard X-Files fans across the country ask, “What kind of mother would let her daughter marry Eugene Victor Tooms?” Twenty years after his two episodes he still creeped us out enough to remember his character’s name in full. When you get to Season 3 you’ll find that Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ and Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose are two of the finest hours of American TV. And when snobs brag about how great Sherlock is, remind them that Moffitt and Gattis take a year or two to put out three episodes while Chris Carter pumped out two dozen eps of The X-Files every year for nine years.
My problem with Space is that it looks so cheap. It reminded me of a budget saving episode of the 1960s science fiction series The Invaders more so than a show set in the 1990s. Maybe if there had been a few more dollars available, things would gone better.
Apparently there weren’t and they didn’t.
It’s amusing that you should bring up cost. According to the episode’s Wikipedia entry, it was indeed designed to be a money-saving episode to compensate for earlier episodes that had been too expensive. But building the command center cost so much that it wound up being the priciest episode of the whole season. So, to sum up, there WERE a few more dollars available, and it still didn’t do a hell of a lot of good.
Did you catch Kaylee from Firefly and Crowley from Supernatural yet ?
Single funniest word spoken in the entire run of the show:
“Mostly?!?”
I never knew there was a backlash, but it bothers me because:
There are aliens that are messing with our spacecraft, but they aren’t the same aliens in the mytharc (black oil, alien hybrid,fight the future). Nor are they the same aliens that Genderbend. How many alien species are visiting, and don’t they know about each other?
After Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ first aired, I saw somebody post a request on the stone-knives-and-bearskins newsgroups of the era: “I missed last night’s episode. Can somebody post a brief plot synopsis?”
The consensus was that the only answer to this question was “No”.
My problem with space is that it was boring, plain and simple.
Apparently, we are throwing an intergalactic kegger down here.
Idle Thoughts you’ve made a great decision here. Comparisons to Lost (in that the writers are much better at coming up with interesting questions than satisfying answers) are justified. Except that The X-Files at its best is ten times better.
You also mentioned The Wire. Do watch that too, when you get a chance.
Gonna bump this one cause I just watched “Eve” which is about halfway through season one
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The HD remastered eps look GREAT. It just makes it much more rewatchable.
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People who said MotW eps are better then Mythology ones are dead on. This ep was near-perfect, and I see they never followed up on its events? Good for them!!
Tiny tiny nit-pick. I would have liked to have seen Mulder piece it together near the end without the dead giveaway they show him. He is an FBI agent after all and they may be little Hannibal Lecters/boys from Brazil, but they lack…'three-dimensional thinking."
- Another reason the MotW eps are better…when Im watching Mythology eps, I find myself questioning why I’m bothering. Knowing that its just gonna go in circles and barely ever resolve anything.
Good luck. It’s a slog. I never made it. The early episodes are great, Scully’s home computer has a green-screen and she uses dial-up.
I really didn’t like the smoking man alien stuff. Love the episodic stuff.
Ditto!
Though in a funny bit, between this thread’s origin and now, I picked a random first season episode to watch, and it turned out I’d never seen it! Must have missed it, or forgot to check the recorder when football ran long or something. Wonder if there are any more I missed.
Sculder and Mulley, I called them.
As usual, they flogged the show into the ground by making it go on too long.
I enjoyed the show quite a bit for the first few seasons, but stopped watching when I figured out they didn’t really have any idea what they were doing with their mythic arc. When I caught it again a few seasons later, I saw that Scully and Mulder had been replaced by two new agents and I never finished the series. I wouldn’t doubt it if there were some good episodes with those two though.
I haven’t seen any episodes of the X-Files since the 1990s. I remember “Home” was a pretty good and very creepy episode, and I think it was unavailable to watch in reruns for a number of years after it originally aired so I only saw it once. Has it aged poorly? I can’t say, but I do try to judge things by the context they were created in, and for 1996, it wasn’t something we were used to seeing on network television. According to Wiki, it was the only episode of the series to carry a TV-MA rating.
At this point, the only episodes of the series I remember are the monster of the week episodes. But when X-Files was firing on all cylinders it was a great show. When I see pictures of Gillian Anderson and Agent Scully, I can’t help but think she was unrealistically young for the role. But she did a great time, and teenage me thought anyone over 20 was an adult so I didn’t notice it at the time.
I liked the early seasons too.The conspiracy arc got so complicated that I lost interest.
If you make it as far as season 4, you might also be interested in watching Millennium, its sister series that ran for three seasons. It stars Lance Henriksen as a police consultant in Seattle who investigates unusual crimes on behalf of a secret society that believes that societal catastrophe is imminent with the turn of the century. It has a slightly darker and more nihilistic tone than the X-Files but leaves out most of the paranormal elements, and it has an amazing cast and some truly compelling storylines. Jose Chung from X-Files gets his own episode in the second season, and there’s a season 7 X-Files episode that serves as the finale to the series, since it got cancelled before it actually made it to the year 2000.
Also, the theme song and opening credits are legitimately one of the most haunting intros I’ve ever seen to any show ever.
I loved this show in the beginning. I really lost interest when they complicated it with the Smoking Man, etc. I like the stand-alone episodes much better. I don’t think I finished the series.