Obviously this question is spoilerific if you have not seen the show. So beware.
The X-Files got kind of muddled for me and I missed bunch of shows in the last two seasons. Re the existence of the Aliens did Mulder and Sculler ever prove their existence or what? What was the upshot?
There was no upshot, the show went completely off the rails and ended in a strange what-the-hell-was-that-all-about?! manner
Yeah, pretty much what Corcaigh said. I hated that whole alien subplot. I preferred Monster of the Week episodes.
Yeah, it went bonkers. They finally had some luck against the Alien Supersoldiers, kinda… when they discovered that some rare metal caused them to die, but then Jane, I mean Noal Rohr, faked his death to get Mulder arrested by the military. After that point there was a bizarre trial that made little sense and culminated with the psychic kid recognizing that one of the judges was an alien and… then I think Mulder escaped with Scully and ran away to some native American reservation that happened to have a bunch of the magic metal and the supersoldier who was sent after them got made dead. And someone in a helicopter launched a missile at the Smoking Man, who turned out to still be alive, but probably not after the missile.
It was ab-so-fucking-lutely awful.
Monster of the Week episodes are far, far superior in retrospect. Especially the one about the vampire pizza delivery boy.
IIRC the conspiracy on Earth that was working with (and against) the aliens was destroyed, but the invasion was still going to happen. In 2012, I believe, and I want to say it coincides with the Mayan thing in December, no doubt not by coincidence.
I got sick of the conspiracies pretty far back in the series. I’d rather they had just made it a Tales of the Unexpected type affair. When did US tv become fixed on story arcs like that?
I absolutely fucking love the X-Files (and have written the fan-fiction to prove it) but man alive I was so disappointed with how they handled the mythology aspect of the show. Basically Carter, Spotnitz and co. wrote themselves into a hole they couldn’t get out of and, rather than diligently finish off with a 2 or 3 parter that tied the loose ends together, they just decided to blag it, throwing up a bunch of bullshit in the hope that some of it would make sense. And worse, when they finally got their chance for a do-over with X-Files - I want to Believe (2008) they ignored the mythology altogether and served up some hokum about a paedo priest and organ harvesting mobsters. The stand-alone ‘Monster of the Week’ episodes were always the series’ great strength, and they are absolutely fantastic. I’m rewatching them at the moment and they haven’t aged a day.
Twin Peaks, maybe. And X-files.
I’ve always blamed Babylon 5 for a lot of it. JMS knew how he intended to end the show from episode one. Yes there were a number of major changes he needed to make due to production problems, but the overall endgame was still there. Shadows and Vorlons / Humans and Minbari / Londo and G’Kar, there were seeds to their relationships from the beginning.
By contrast a lot of other arc led shows (X-Files, 4400, that one with the wierd alien plague, Lost) just seemed to throw mystery after mystery at the page without having any coherent framework or reason. Then (if the show lasts long enough) they have to try and appease the fans by tying up all these random plot points.
Actually I’ve just checked, and X-Files premiered Sep 10 1993, and B5 Jan 26 1994. I would still say the hype over the B5 arc in it’s early years would have had an effect.
And JMS has himself admitted some benefit from classic BBC series that had similarly well defined story arcs.
One known example that influenced JMS was “The Prisoner”, despite the trippy disaster of an ending. It’s likely to also be a spiritual ancestor of the X-Files.
I still love the X-Files and also abandoned it at the end. Cred: the theme music is my ringtone.
It wasn’t just you.
I’m reminded of an incident from the old Usenet days. When “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” was broadcast, somebody posted a message: “I missed last night’s episode. Can somebody post a brief plot synopsis?” (The only possible, and literally correct, answer to that question would be “No”.)
That episode is one of my favorites, too. It was written by Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad.
I believe the correct answer would be “Bleep no.”
I will attempt to summarize to the best of my ability the myth arc of the entire show as re aliens:
The grey aliens and black oil were the original inhabitants of planet earth, at some point a disaster occured and most of them evacuated the planet and those that couldn’t do so went dorment as the black oil. It is often suggested that much of human history and evolution and life on earth in general has been influenced by the aliens or black oil.
Fast forward hundreds of millions to billions of years and the grey aliens rediscover earth and their dormant brothers in the 1940s or so, but now the greys also have slave races like the alien bounty hunters. Slowly a group of powerful people in government and industry on earth realize what is going to happen, earth is going to be conquered and recolonized and the dormant black oil inserted into human hosts to breed the reborn greys.
So a group of these people(with included Cig smoking Guy and Mulder’s “father”) from all over the world met with the aliens and made a Faustian bargain, in exchange for holding off on immediate invasion and doing a slow controlled colonization to start in 2012 the aliens would be assisted by these powerful individuals and world governments in rounding up and infecting the population. In exchange the powerful peeps and their loved ones will be saved and live as gods forever blah blah etc.
Now to their credit they are working against the aliens in reality, they are attemtping to create a vaccine to the black oil which was distributed as small pox vaccine. It doesn’t work and they begin working on alien human hybrids which will be immune, Cassandra Spender was the first successful conversion of a living person into a hybrid and William Mulder was the first successful infant hybrid.
The bees were a delivery method for the black oil, since the pact they have had to make concessions to the grey aliens and make itl look like they were holding up their part of the bargain.
I stuck with The X-files longer than any sane human being would, because no matter how ludicrously tangled and self-contradictory it got, I assumed Chris Carter must have some blueprint in mind which would tie everything together at the end. Eventually I realised that simply wasn’t true and that the writers were, in fact, just making this shit up as they went along.
On the plus side, that realisation did save me from ever being tempted to watch Lost which - from what I can gather - would have proved an equally gigantic waste of time.
You’n’me both dude.
snorts all over keyboard
ew
You are Chris Carter and I claim my £5!
This ^^^
The show was confusing but not contradictory until I think the finale of the seventh? season, in that it took a lot of thought but a sensible picture of how the plot fit together could emerge. In fact I like to pretend that was the series finale, everything after added nothing anyway and the events(the murder of the cabal) were a good ending point. The cabal is dead, their projects are likely falling apart, and the greys decide well fuck this full steam ahead.
I thought Carter more or less invented the initial arc when he realized that he’d have to work around Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy. From there it did get more and more confused, resulting in a cautionary tale for future generations of TV writers. Thus shows like “Lost” learned that lesson and tied together plots in a sensible way.
bwwwahhhhhaaaaa. had to say that.
At first, the mytharc was absolutely enthralling to me, and I would read TV Guide (or whatever) to see if tonite’s ep was a mytharc one, and would then watch it breathlessly. A large part of this was due to how Chris Carter would obtusfucate things, leaving large parts of it to the imagination, rarely actually giving the viewer anything concrete or definitive. In the days before I found places like the Dope or TV Tropes, the younger more naive me was completely suckered in. The leads were very compelling and the chemistry between them palpable. I also loved to hate the CSM and Alex Krychek (loathed the little bastard in fact), which helped as well.
Eventually it started to dawn on me that it was all a big fake-out, and I went through the five classic stages of grief (tho I was never a huge obsessive fan like some were):
“They’ll be sure to wrap up all the loose ends very soon now if I just have faith!”
“Why the F don’t we ever get any genuine substantive progress on this crap?”
“Okay, okay Mr. Carter, if I promise to stick with it to the bitter end, you’ll promise to wrap this up in nice and tidy little package, right?”
“<siggghhhhhh…>”
“Screw this infinitely infuriating deeply insulting bullshit.”
I was teetering during the pentultimate season, and watched very little of the final one (Duchovny being absent for most of it didn’t help either). Anderson and Duchovny really did deserve better.