“Stoners”? WTF? 
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
It was.
Awesome episode! Great seeing Tucker, (or was it Dale?) vs. Evil. I think David Duchovny is a better actor then he ever was.
This one certainly was a lot of fun, but I felt a bit let down in the end—I’d expected some twist undermining the reality of what we appear to have seen, but in the end, they just played it straight: there’s really a kind of human-like lizard running around, which, apparently, when bit by a human, occasionally change into one. There’s always been a fair share of silliness to the X-Files universe, but I’m having a hard time integrating this with the spirit of the show—here, the truth wasn’t out there, it was (again) right there, and moreover, was disappointingly silly. I feel like the old show did a much better job at keeping things a bit more ambiguous and open to interpretation—part of what I liked was that there always seemed to be a residual uncertainty, a ‘what if…?’-moment, which just seems to be gone from the revived version.
Also, we’re now on episode three of six, and I find the lack of coherence somewhat disappointing. The issues that were set up in the pilot never really were explored, despite their game-changing nature—Mulder actually had an alien-tech craft within arm’s reach, Scully apparently has alien DNA, and so on. It’s of course fine to have monster of the week episodes, but the show is also about a search for truth, and to me, just re-setting to status quo every week doesn’t work very well.
The first episode should be wrapped up (as much as the X Files allows) in the last episode.
I came away from this episode feeling as though the entire premise of the series had been mocked. Yes, this episode was kinda cute and funny and full of X-Files tropes, but it made my hackles rise all the same. I was lying in bed with a migraine while trying to watch and thought that was my reason for not feeling it, but maybe my reaction was more legit than I at first thought it was.
Yes, I enjoyed the latest episode, it was weird and funny but at the same time it was sort of a parody of the X-Files. They even broke the self-awareness wall by having Mulder’s cell phone ringtone be the show’s theme song.
We only have six episodes, not sure it was worth spending one of them on this.
It was memorable though.
That’s typical of Darin Morgan’s episodes. He is mocking the entire premise of the series.
The original series occasionally had ‘wacky’ episodes like this–it’s nothing new. Bad Blood is one of my favorites (written by Vince Gilligan).
I predict that in the last episode, they’ll reveal that the actors have been forced to perform *X-Files * fanfic written by a young boy with apparently unlimited powers who lives near a cornfield.
My wife asked what happened to the grand conspiracy mentioned in Ep 1. I said they’ll come back to it, but then I realized there were only three episodes left. It was fun, but Ep 1 teased a lot that hasn’t been mentioned again that would have been a good story to tell throughout.
I enjoyed this third episode, thought #2 was nice, and was puzzled by #1. I couldn’t get why Mulder and Scully suddenly came back to the FBI, but I glossed over that.
I enjoyed this third episode acknowledging its own silliness. I don’t want mockery all the time, but I think the series had to let out some self-importance. But unlike a kid finding out Santa Claus is not what he thought, the ending restored faith in the world being bigger and stranger than mere alien mysteries that turn out as cover-ups for megalomaniacs.
As to the plot, it’s obvious that the faux-lizard was really an ancient chameleon, who comes and goes[sub], and has bad karma[/sub]. 10,000 year ago, after his last hibernation, he woke to find the Neolithic humans beginning to dominate. His chameleon abilities adapted his form similar to humans. There’s no telling how long he had been awake at the present time, but he was near to hibernating again. When the human bit him, it wasn’t anything in the human that caused the change. It was the chameleon’s own ability to adapt in the food chain and survive. Once human it also adapted by telepathically reading an amalgam of all the people around it. That’s why he kept doing things general people do but not realizing why. So it all makes sense! 
And leaves open the idea that there are more wonderful things out there to discover!
Of course.
:dubious:
Thanks. You probably gave more thought to the logical underpinnings of the script than the writers did.
I was also surprised there wasn’t a bit more ambiguity about whether Guy Man was really a shapeshifting lizard. IIRC, no one even speculated that the “monster” might just be someone in a costume.
I’d say there’s a little room to wonder if the shapeshifting wasn’t really just wishful (or delusional) thinking on Mulder’s part, though. Normally on a TV show viewers can assume that what we see onscreen is supposed to be a literal, objective version of the “reality” of the story. However, there were a few episodes of the original X-Files series (most notably the Darin Morgan episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”) where we saw things onscreen that definitely were not objective reality but were a character’s subjective version of events. If we take this episode to be a story told largely from Mulder’s perspective, we can question his reliability as a narrator.
I don’t remember there being anything in this episode to clearly signal that Mulder was serving as our narrator, but it did strike me that Scully was not around for the weirder things that Mulder saw and heard about. We also know that not everything Guy said about himself was true, because he lied about having sex with Scully. If we imagine this episode retold with Scully as the viewpoint character, there would have been no clear onscreen view of Guy in lizard form and only a secondhand account from Mulder that Guy even claimed to be a shapeshifting lizard. (ETA: And in Mulder’s account of their conversation, both Mulder and Guy agreed that Guy’s story had logical holes in it.) Even if we consider the peeping motel owner a reliable witness (which is a stretch), Mulder questioned him without Scully present so again she’d only have Mulder’s word for it that the owner claimed to have seen Guy transform.
I don’t think this is about seeing what happened from ‘lens’ of any one character, (though, yes, Mulder was around for all of the revealing things – as if that’s any surprise,) and that was why I object a little for it being a little too silly.
But it was a good story with an interesting twist on “Monsters”. I still liked it overall.
The twist reminded me very much of a short story I read once by a well-known science fiction and fantasy author. Since just comparing this story to the episode largely gives away the twist of the short story, I’ll spoiler the title/author.
“The Wife’s Story”, by Ursula K. Le Guin’s
And here’s a brief summary of the aforementioned short story:
It’s told from the perspective of a werewolf’s wife. She describes how she became suspicious of her husband’s strange behavior and eventually discovered that he was a werewolf. One night when the moon was dark, she saw him transform…into a human. So twist isn’t that the husband was a werewolf, it’s that the wife was a wolf, and had thought her mate was a wolf too.
Ursula K. LeGuin wrote that?
I’ll look for it. Was it in a collection that you recall?
Ep. 1 - I only got 38 minutes recorded due to some sports contest or other which ran over and which my recorder didn’t allow for. It was good to see Scully, Mulder and Skinner again, though;
Ep. 2 - Never in the old series would Mulder have almost gotten a blow job in a restaurant toilet;
Ep. 3 - I was alternately bemoaning the silliness and laughing. I think this is going to be a great 6 episodes.
Bob
I read it in The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, but it’s also in the short story collection The Compass Rose.
Thanks, I’m off to Ebay. 