I had basically the same reason for avoiding Lost, a show that I never watched once even though a lot of my friends were into it. I had an evening class for the first part of the first season so I couldn’t have watched it then even if I’d wanted to, but I kept hearing about how this great new show had a complicated, mysterious plot and that people couldn’t wait to find out how things would work out because they were sure it would be really cool…and I just thought “Yeah, that’s what they said about The X-Files.”
And it’s still better than any of the aliens arc bullshit later on.
I, for one, would have watched a X-files spinoff starring Dogget and Reyes. However, I feel bad for them having to come in this mess of a show when they did.
Me too! Won’t get fooled again!
I too gave up on the X files before the last season.
Did they ever finish the story on Mulder’s alien abducted sister? Was she ever found? Is she dead? Why she was taken? etc.
She was given up by her father because all of the conspirators had to surrender a loved one as, uh, collateral for the aliens they were working with. She was taken for experimentation by the Cigarette Smoking Man. She was able to escape from the facility and reached a hospital. The bad guys went to retrieve her, but good spirits called “walk-ins,” who find and rescue people who are about to suffer a horrible fate, got to her first.
I’m just getting started with this show. For obvious reasons,I’m avoiding reading too many responses that actually spoil the entire mythology and not just the final episode (which I knew from word of mouth was poor). So could someone quote me and tell me a good place to actually stop watching? Or, better yet, is there a point that makes for a satisfying finale?
It doesn’t mean I won’t watch the rest, just that I’ll take my time and go in with decreased expectations.
In terms of the mythology stuff, it really goes downhill after the first movie (which takes place after season five, IIRC.) But there are many meritorious episodes after that, just not in the mythology arc.
The seventh season finale makes a satisfying series finale, the primary villains are replaced after this point with an entirely new group that never makes a lick of sense(Mulder offers a theory on who they are in the finale but it is still debated on fan boards).
So without spoiling too much if you are interested only in the myth arc season seven is a good place to stop at.
Me too, I liked Reyes and Doggett!
Didn’t she get turned into stardust or something equally bizarre and inexplicable?
I remember thinking that they should have held back “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” until the end of the next season, and used that as the finale. It’s perfect. Silly and profound. If they could have done a one-two with “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” the show would be more fondly remembered nowadays. People would talk about that ending instead of trying to forget. Imagine if Blake’s 7 had carried on for another two years and ended with Ewoks. Imagine that.*
See, I watched it when it was new, and it had a buzz, and for a brief moment it seemed that we had won. Quality sci-fi programming without budget problems, with engaging performances, well-written scripts, a grown-up sensibility. The first few episodes were standalone mysteries, a kind of sci-fi Twin Peaks, and although the pacing was slow the whole show reeked of quality.
And the arc plot was a bonus. But I remembered what happened with Twin Peaks, where they ran out of story. And if your story is a grand, massive alien apocalypse, you can’t very well finish it and then start up another arc, because it would be a huge anticlimax. So they needed to wrap things up before they went off the boil, which meant that the show couldn’t go on forever. But unfortunately it did; long after normal, everyday people had ceased to care about it.
Arc plots were the in thing at the time. Babylon 5 was never a ratings hit, but it was influential; the mystery shows that were greenlit after The X-Files (American Gothic, Dark Skies and so on) all had arc plots, although most of them didn’t last long enough to complete the arc. The X-Files was in the unusual position of being too successful for its own good. Also, on a tangent, has there been a Millennium reappraisal yet? I remember it being almost parodically dark and edgy, and the title and general pre-millennium angst has dated. Is the millennium going to be this generation’s equivalent of my generation’s mid-80s nuclear paranoia? Or did it just waft away?
And now Gillian Anderson does British period dramas! She’s in a new film called The Curse of The Buxom Strumpet, which seems to be a cash-in on the Pride & Prejudice & Zombies fad from a while back. Presumably she doesn’t play the buxom strumpet. If they do a sequel about a man, it could be called The Hex of the Well-Hung Hooker, and I would like to trademark that title.
- You could have a “shows that were extended beyond their prime” thread, with Blake’s 7 as a good example. It was supposed to end with series three, but the BBC hurriedly commissioned a fourth series. They couldn’t commission a fifth, though, because
ICARUS HAS FOUND YOU!!!
RUN WHILE YOU CAN!!!
Oh, even better … starlight! But I try not to dwell on which star-related thing she was transformed into. I was always really happy about the fact that the show, once it had established that this was her ultimate fate, didn’t keep pulling the rug out from under us with new revelations. Wouldn’t that have been a completely tiresome slog?
LOL
I wrote a fan-fic where Samantha turned up in Mulder’s life completely by accident with no memory of her life pre-abduction.
Wacky adventures ensued.
(was better than the twaddle “they” came up with - even if I do say so myself)