I wasn’t crazy about this last episode. Don’t like the big bad conspiracy stuff. It’s the end of the world, only it isn’t, thanks to Scully and her nifty alien DNA. I dunno wot they were thinkin’…
That finale felt like it was an episode from a completely different series.
It’s official: Chris Carter is Lucy, the X-Files is the football and we’re Charlie Brown.
Ron Moore called. He says he’s tried the magic-hybrid baby thing, and his series finale sucked, too.
Then John Grisham buzzed in to say writing endings is hard. He can’t do it, either.
That may have been the most ineptly crafted hour of television I’ve ever watched. Everything about it was awful – the wall-of-text voice overs, the dragging in of superfluous characters for mysterious exposition, the separation of the two leads whose chemistry is the only thing tenuously holding the show together, the incredibly stilted dialog, the whole “so that’s their evil plan!” revelation – it all was bad and nothing was good.
Scully’s dialog was so bad that it actually gave me a headache. And how many times do you have to call someone “Agent Einstein” before you finally learn their damned first name? Or at least take it for granted that they know your talking to them?
I particularly ‘liked’ the scene where Mulder-lite looked at the “find my phone” app on the computer and headed out to some random location in, I guess, Virginia, as though there was no possibility that Mulder would ever move again.
Let’s not even mention the whole “We didn’t use a large enough sample size” technobabble, the Star Trek-like synthesis of a gene-based therapy in less time than it takes most people to make breakfast, or the way that Scully immediately diagnoses Mulder as needing a stem cell infusion as if that were an actual possibility given that he is apparently approximately five minutes away from death.
I’ll grant that he could have use the app several times as he was following Mulder. What I loved was that
A - Mulder’s FBI computer apparently doesn’t have an auto-lock on screensaver function
B - Mulder keeps a phone tracker on his desktop… you know, super paranoid Mulder wants people to track his phone
C - Scully didn’t try that out when looking at his computer
D - Mulder-lite drove to freaking South Carolina and back in the time it takes me to get to the QuikTrip (alright, there were a lot of time skips, but it felt like he popped out and made the 8 hour drive there and back in the middle of civilization collapsing in an evening.)
Chris Carter is easily the worst X-files writer.
Correct. He is a Roddenberry. If they really want to continue this, then someone at Fox needs to have the balls to require that Chris make better use of competent writers.
The were-man episode was the only competent episode of the six, which is not surprising given the author.
Nah, the second episode was competent as well. Not an amazing episode, but well done. I don’t detest the garbage man episode, either, though the script made no sense.
It’s mainly episodes 1 and 6 that were atrocious.
That was a big mess but I still enjoyed it.
Are they trying to get a series going again? Cliffhanger ending seems to cry out for more.
What a wasted opportunity…
Unlike many, I’m actually a fan of the mythology, especially the pre-season six stuff. But good lord, if you are going to continue that arc, you can’t do it in two episodes. There was probably an opportunity here to tack it back toward a better angle, but instead Carter took the worst of post-season six, shot it full of steriods and crammed it into two episodes. Compbined with weak new characters, misuse of quality standbys like Skinner and CSM…it was waste. The arc needed to slow drip, or should have been spent on a later ‘mini-series’ and this one left to MOTW.
I’m right, right? Fanfic? Omnipotent brat? Threat of cornfield?
What other explanation could there be?
Scully keeps talking about making a vaccine.
Me: A vaccine is not a cure. It just keeps you from getting the disease.
My husband: That’s your only problem with this show?
Me: Touché.
While the other episodes weren’t super fantastic, I felt reasonably entertained by even the weaker ones – and in a time slot where I’d normally be watching either Law & Order reruns or nothing at all. But the finale mostly just reminded me why I’d stopped watching the original run of The X-Files well before it ended.
Well, William would have adult stem cells, but so would Scully. When Scully mentioned stem cells I immediately thought this was going to involve the alien/human baby program from the second episode, like maybe they had a stash of hybrid embryonic or amniotic stem cells, but nope.
I think this stem cell thing was actually even worse dramatically than it was scientifically. They spent an awful lot of time during this miniseries reminding us about William and how much Mulder and Scully thought about him, so I was expecting the finale to involve William in some way. I assumed it would be either a reunion or at least a clue about where he is and how he’s doing, though. Having William merely mentioned as a sort of wonder drug that might save the life of the biodad he had never known seemed really cold and offputting to me.
I hope they get 6 more episodes, all monster-of-the-week, none written by Carter.
Eps. 2-5 were not all amazing, but I felt like X-files was back. Eps 1 and 6 were pathetic.
About three quarters of the way through the last episode, I turned to my husband and said, "If I wrote a review of this episode, I’m pretty sure it would start with ‘What the fuck did I just watch?’
Come here, and the very first comment about the ep is…
I agree with most of the responses here about this last episode. Just awful. Chris Carter really is the worst X-Files writer.
As for the season overall? I felt like only the 2nd and 3rd episodes were worthwhile. It was great to see Mulder and Scully again, but it was sad to see the potential of the characters wasted on this. If there is another season, I hope they’ll get some better stories to work with.
Oh well, at least I still have the old episodes to watch.
But I think I hear my Fringe series set calling to me…
This reboot has inspired me to start re-watching the old episodes on Netflix. (They have everything up to season 9 now.)
I feel compelled, in light of my above rants, to point out that Chris Carter wrote and directed Duane Barry, widely hailed as a classic episode. And I watched it last night and it is every bit as good as they say.
So, like, do more of that, Chris, and we’ll be cool. Otherwise let the real writers do their jobs.
What a waste of time.
Either stuff didn’t make sense, or if it did, I didn’t care.
There were two clever things that were mildly enjoyable: Mulder’s placebo trip and the wereman concept. But the former happened in an episode that was just too preposterous and even within that I couldn’t really follow the logic of what was supposed to be gong on. The latter is a classic example of a clever idea that just doesn’t make for a compelling story.
The alien and/or conspiracy stuff just makes me want to shout at the TV. But apparently there are actually people out there that like this kind of nonsense.
Oh, very agreed with ya there.
What the hell happened in the end, anyway? Are we supposed to think the ship floats above, the green beam reads Scully’s altered DNA and blows them up like the young girl in episode 1? Or is just like, “Oh, it’s the agent Scully we’ve heard about. Return to space?”