So I never watched the last 2 seasons of X-files. I got to where they introduced the two Mulder-Scully wannabe-replacements and we found out the identity of the father of Scully’s baby.
But I am curious as to how things turned out. Specifically:
The fates of the principal characters, Mulder, Scully, CSM, Krycheck, Lone Gunmen, Skinner, the baby. (and I suppose the Patrick-Gish characters, though I’m not terribly interested).
Was the fate of Mulder’s sister revealed, or do we get to meet her?
How did the alien conspiracy conclude?
Any background, story, details of the Scully-Mulder romance that resulted in said baby?
The fate of the X-Files (meaning, specifically, that department of the FBI).
Do we ever find out the CSM’s real name, or if he ever turned out to be Mulder’s real father?
Scully gives up the baby for adoption, ostensibly so he’ll be safe.
The Lone Gunmen sacrifice themselves to save the world from a bioweapon.
CSM gets blowed up.
Mulder and Scully live happily ever after.
Not sure about the other stuff…the last couple seasons were such a spectacular narrative implosion that it completely stopped making any kind of sense.
The conspiracy became such a mess that not even the fanboys could follow the logic. The original colonization thread concluded with the faceless rebels making a flambe of the human co-conspirators. Colonization was taking another form, complicated by a new twist involving “human replacements” and “super soldiers” which never made much sense. Nothing was resolved in the finale, leaving the possibility for future projects (not likely IMO).
After all the abduction mystery, clone stuff, life with smoking man, etc., Mulder’s quest to find his sister ended badly. She comes to him as a spirit, roughly the same age as when she was abducted, and leads him to see a heavenly vision of her and other dead children getting on quite happily. After all the hell he has been through over this, suddenly he is fine with that resolution and decides to drop the matter entirely.:dubious:
Don’t depend on that site, tho. Just a start. The series finale wrapped up a few loose ends, but it seemed to leave open a few possibilities, too. I didn’t record it, so I’m not gonna be much help on details. Is the finale on DVD yet?
Did anybody else change the channel whenever an “alien conspiracy” episode came on?
To me, the show was about two agents who chase weird stuff: flatworm men, vampire towns, possessed ex-astronauts, and so forth. I enjoyed nearly all of those episodes.
But the stories that were part of the ongoing “conspiracy” plotline just bored the crap out of me. To this day, I have no clue who the Cigarette Smoking Man was, and I don’t even care.
Am I the only one?
Annabeth Gish remained a hot babe for the duration of the series. Her character and Patrick’s character seemed primed to get naked and fuck on a couple of occasions, but didn’t.
There’s a thread or two about the “story arc” (Aka “Oh no, what the #*$! is Christ Carter doing this week?”) of the X-Files somewhere on the SDMB, I’ll try and wrangle it up in a few hours.
Bear in mind, though, that a lot of the “alien” stuff seemed to be bound up with a religious/mythological angle, the battle of Free Will vs. Predestination, and a government conspiracy that would go to absurd lengths to accomplish weird things, the products of which they’d then either completely abandon, or summarily destroy.
And then there were the plot points that didn’t make any sense and contradicted everything else.
And all of this was produced on a typical TV show’s budget, so a lot of the vast world-altering conspiracy seems to be taking place at an abandoned rail depot outside of Fresno.
Add to this some surprisingly endearing characters, and a total lack of respect for the audience, and…well, there you have it.
I used to watch occasionally, and like Murcielago, I enjoyed the independent episodes a lot more than the ongoing “alien consipiracy” arc. Stories about vast conspiracies always become more and more implausible as they become more complex; in “The X-Files” there were so many narrative U-turns that in the end any definitive resolution would have been completely arbitrary. And, the whole thing is based on a truly sad, unimaginative modern mythology – the idea that advanced extraterrestrials cross the light years to come to Earth, then constantly crash their spaceships and abduct humans for no apparent reason, and that a giant government conspiracy has somehow managed to cover this up.
I’m mildly curious why Mulder was getting anally probed through the entire last season (well, actually, he was being dissected, but you get the point). Who was holding him and why?
I also preferred the “freak of the week” episodes over the long slow ponderous boring government conspiracy crap.
The alien conspiracy episodes were actually as good as the monster of the week ones up until around season five. After the movie they were just a complete mess and basically unwatchable. This was proved by science when Mulder was moved offstage… the show just collapsed totally. They still managed a lot of good monster of the week episodes, however.
There is a scene in an episode late in the show (possibly TrustNo1), where Scully meets up with a shadowy type who, in telling her exactly how much he knows about her, says:
The guy who tells her this is played by Terry O’Quinn, who played Agent Michaud in the movie.
I also recall an ep that began with a man in Scully’s shower. Guess that was the morning after.
Ditto. I think I managed to watch the entire series, right from the beginning, and never fully understand (or care) about “the truth.” Only the puzzle man from the freakshow and that lovely inbred family.
Do you mean not only did they leave us hanging for five years, they didn’t even tell us when it happened or show any kind of change in the relationship afterwards? Bah.
There was one episode (written by Gillian Anderson I believe) where it was very strongly implied they slept together. It started out with Scully getting dressed in a bathroom in the middle of the night. She walks out into a bedroom and past a bed where there is an apparently naked man, the camera pans up and we see it’s Mulder. After the credits, it went back to about 2 or 3 days earlier and then forward up to Mulder and Scully hanging out in his apartment, with Scully falling asleep on the couch fully clothed. As for the remaining missing time, it was up to us to fill in the blanks. This took place fairly shortly before Mulder got abducted, i.e. a couple of months before Scully announced she was pregnant, but there was no change in their relationship between that episode and the abduction.
As for the conspiracy, I was really disappointed. I enjoyed both the myth-arc episodes and the monsters of the week, but I really wanted the conspiracy to make sense in the end even though I was hopelessly confused after about season 4 or 5. I think I was deluding myself into believing that Chris Carter had some master plan and all would be explained eventually, when in fact he was just pulling it out of his ass as he went along.
Someone…Please I.D. the name and number of this episode.
As for how Scully ended up preggers, on one of the episodes during Mulder’s “missing” season, a series of flashbacks revealed that shortly before his abduction, Mulder had finally revealed to Scully that he’d managed to “liberate” some of her frozen Ova that found at Secret Evil Conspiracy Lab #448. He’d had them checked to see if they were still viable, but the first results were “negative.” Scully wanted to get a second opinion. Luckily, Mulder had kept the vial of eggs around (Behind the Ice Cream in his freezer, maybe?), so she was able to have them re-checked at a local fertility clinic, which said that they were viable. In a real tearjerker scene (er…no pun intended), Scully asks Mulder to be sperm donor, and he agrees.
Oddly enough, according to the flashbacks, the fertilization seemed to have failed at first.
Unfortunately, it was later found that said fertility clinic was actually yet another front for Evil Alien Hybrids Inc., so it’s possible that Scully’s child may be a Scully/Alien hybrid, a Scully/Mulder/Alien hybrid, an Alien/random human hybrid, or some combination of the above. Or he might be the new Messiah. It’s hard to say, because what little information or insight the characters do have, they won’t even tell each other. Much less the audience.
BTW, I’ve got that link to the previous discussion…X-Files Story Arc
The baby mystery, which Ranchoth so aptly described, epitomized the slow motion train wreck which was the last two seasons. Wrapping up the baby storyline only made it worse. OK, you have the conspirators (whoever they are at this point) with knowledge of everything and everyone, all systems are compromised, nobody can be trusted. The child is crucial to the future, it may be a saviour or it may be a tool of (whoever). Either Scully must protect the child with her own life or destroy it, there are no other options. And yet she simply gives the child to another couple and assumes it will be safe.
Oh yeah, and she has a nice little cry about her sacrifice as she explains it to Mulder in the show’s final scene. A proper last shot would have been a slow pull from the couple as Mulder shouts “You did WHAT? That makes no goddamn sense! What the hell were you thinking? Who wrote this shit?” (roll credits)