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Ruminations on TV Shows, Comics, And Music

The X-Files In 97 Episodes Worth Watching, #5: Nothing Important Happens This Season

6/2/2025

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I started the X-Files Headcanon project during the pandemic and ended up being distracted by a thousand other things.

We're considering watching this Headcanon in a couple of months when we wrap up our watchthrough of The Stargate Headcanon. It will be a fun tonal shift, as the last season of Stargate was pretty bleak, and the X-Files goes from "just spooky" to "occasionally very silly" pretty early in its run.
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41. Paper Hearts
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner, Samantha Mulder, Teena Mulder)

The whole root of Mulder's obsession with aliens began when his sister was abducted by aliens. But what if she wasn't abducted by aliens but by a serial killer.


42. Never Again
(Mulder, Scully)

Did you ever get a really bad tattoo? Not just poorly drawn but one that speaks to you and leads you to to commit crimes? Me, neither.


43. Momento Mori
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner, Smoking Man, The Longe Gunmen, Grey Haired Man, Margaret Scully)

What if there was a type of cancer caused by alien abduction? Would that mean that Scully has that type of cancer? Mulder hires The Longe Gunmen to find some answers.


44. Small Potatoes
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner)

A series of babies are born with tails. This seems very alieny.


45. Zero Sum
(Skinner, Smoking Man, Grey Haired Man, Mulder, Scully, First Elder, Marita Covarrubias)
​
The bees from Season Four are back! Also, Skinner is definitely up to something that Mulder and Scully might want to be aware of.


46. Demons
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Samantha Mulder, Teena Mulder)

Mulder wakes up with a headache and missing time. Did he kill someone during that time?


47. The Unusual Suspects
(The Lone Gunmen, X, Mulder)

The Lone Gunmen are caught running from a box containing a naked Mulder. They're caught by the police from the show Homicide: Life From The Street, which means Lieutenant Munch from Law & Order and a billion other shows, also exists in the X-Files Universe.


48. The Post-Modern Prometheus
(Mulder, Scully)

The monster of the week is a Frankenstein in a comicbook style story. 


49. Kill Switch
(Muder, Scully, The Lone Gunmen)

Artificial Intelligence is the center of an episode written by famed Cyberpunk writer, William Gibson. 


50.Bad Blood
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner)

We're just over halfway through this Headcanon, and we're just now encountering the possibility of vampires? Well, Mulder and Scully aren't fully convinced they've encountered vampires and decide to get their stories straight before getting Skinner involved.
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The X-Files In 97 Episodes Worth Watching, #4: Apocrypha

10/1/2021

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This season is heavy on the overarching conspiracy theory, so get ready to spend a lot of time with Skinner, X, Krycek, Byers, and the Syndicate (featuring Smoking Man and friends!)
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Episode 31: Apocrypha
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Lone Gunmen, First Elder)

We open Season Four with The Syndicate (Smoking Man, Well-Manicured Man, and their associates), The Lone Gunmen, and Krycek. This is super continuity and conspiract heavy and has some very juicy?...oily developments.


Episode 32: Jose Chung's From Outer Space
(Mulder, Scully)

It's Monster Of The Week time! It's a relatively funny one, too, with alien abductions, a foul mouth sherrif whose profanity is amusingly handled for prime time network television, and The Best Cameo of the series, if not the best cameo in all of 90s TV.


Episode 33: Quagmire
(Mulder, Scully)

Frogs. You're already on board, right? The investigation into a decreasing frog population leads to one of the longest and best Mulder/Scully scenes for the entire series.


Episode 34: Wetwired
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X, The Lone Gunmen)

Despite the cast involved in this, this episode isn't focused on the series' long-arc about alien abduction and everybody's past. Instead, we get an investigation into the relationship between television and violence with X, members of The Syndicate, Skinner, and The Lone Gunmen all helping piece together a relatively smaller scale conspiracy.


Episode 35: Talitha Cumi
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X)

Here is the overarching conspiracy episode with some awesome character development between Mulder and Smoking Man.


Episode 36: Herrenvolk
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X, First Elder, Marita Covarrubias, Samantha Mulder, Teena Mulder)

This is the beginning of the X-Files official season four. It's one of those great Build Your Longtime Story By Destroying Part Of It episodes. Also, there's a creepy new wrinkle to the mystery.


Episode 37: Home
(Mulder, Scully)

This is more Friday The 13th than X-Files, as the Monster Of The Week is humanity. Horrible, distorted humanity.


Episode 38: Musings Of A Cigarette Smoking Man
(Smoking Man, The Lone Gunmen)

There is a phenomenon in Doctor Who called Doctor Lite Episodes, wherein the Doctor is either barely used or not at all. This episode has barely any Mulder or Scully, as we see the career of Smoking Man through his own eyes.


Episode 39: Tunguska
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Well-Manicured Man, Marita Covarrubias )

Everyone is turning on everyone, as the US Government demands to know Where Is Fox Mulder? (No, there was no reason to think he was missing before this episode.)


Episode 40: Terma
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Well-Manicured Man)

Where is Fox Mulder? Russia? Why? We end the season trying to find that out.
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The X-Files In 97 Episodes Worth Watching, 3: The Truth Is out There, Like Way Out There

7/4/2021

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One of the biggest problems with "Lost", and there were many, was that there were hardly ever payoffs to the questions posed in episodes. Eventually they would get sort of haphazardly answered, generally inducing a shrug in the viewer. "The X-Files" was definitely on that trajectory in the first two seasons (and would come back to that problem later) but in this season, they do a great job of answering big questions but then revealing that those answers are tiny compared to the bigger questions. Its shifting of focus somehow worked for a while, and this might have been the peak of that technique.

​I have peppered this season with three of the funniest episodes of the series, and also included the first episode of a TV show written by the guy who wrote "Breaking Bad". I think this season is really solid.
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Season 3:
​The Truth Is Out There

Episode 21: Humbug
(Mulder, Scully)

I know what you're thinking, you're starting a season with a Christmas episode? No. "Humbug" is the first comedic episode of the X-Files and the shift in tone is so drastic that it led David Duchovny to say, of the writer, "What I love about his scripts is that he's trying to destroy the show." It's a weird, wonderful Monster Of The Week storyline with no connection to the larger X-Files universe, and it's a total blast.


Episode 22: Soft Light
(Mulder, Scully, X)

On the opposite end of the episode spectrum, "Soft Light" is a conspiracy-centric bummer with killer shadows, the guy who played Monk being convinced the government is out to get him, and a government that is totally out to get him.


Episode 23: Anasazi
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Lone Gunmen)

The beginning of a 3-part story about Mulder's descent into madness after he and Scully receive a tape seeming to confirm several of Mulder's theories about aliens.


Episode 24: The Blessing Way
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Well-Manicured Man, Deep Throat, First Elder)

A major death rocks Mulder during his investigation from the last episode, and once again, the X-Files are closed.


Episode 25: Paper Clip
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, The Well-Manicured Man, The Lone Gunmen, First Elder)

Wrapping up this three-parter we get more revelations than we probably planned on, given the nature of the show.


Episode 26: Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
(Mulder, Scully)

A break is needed after that intense storyarc, and we find it in this amazing and hilarious episode where the dad from "Everybody Loves Raymond" (or Frankenstein's Monster in Young Frankenstein, if you're older than I am) can see how people die, and he assists Mulder and Scully in tracking down a serial killer who targets fortune killers.


Episode 27: Nisei
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner, X, The Lone Gunmen, Red Haired Man)

The first part of a two-episode arc based on the atrocities done to Japanese prisoners of war in WWII, Mulder and Scully come into possession of an "authentic" videotape of an alien autopsy and Scully begins to suspect her abduction last season may have complications.


Episode 28: 731
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, X, Red Haired Man)

More alien conspiracy shenanigans and government conspiracies!


Episode 29: War Of The Copraphages
(Mulder, Scully)

Another great one-off comic episode by the writer of "Humbug" and "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose." Katsaridaphobes are going to want to skip this one.


Episode 30: Piper Maru
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner, Krycek)

We end the season on a conspiracy episode spinning out of the 3-parter from earlier in the season. An investigation into a family member's death leads back to Krycek and that pesky tape.
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The X-Files In 97 Episodes Worth Watching, 2: Trust No One

5/14/2021

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I was a Big Brother in high school. A group of us signed up to be mentors, and spent our late Friday afternoons/early evenings playing sports, board games, pinball, and having dinner. It was as much a bonding between the Bigs as it was between the Bigs and the Littles. And when the Littles went home, a bunch of us would go to the nearest dorm basement and, along with some of our non-mentoring friends, check out the weirdness that was "X-Files".

The first college I went to only really got together to watch "Friends", which isn't at all why I left but does say something about the people at that school. After one semester, I transferred to a school where a bunch of us would get together and watch things like "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", and, of course, "X-Files".

I've watched many TV series over the years, and when I'm watching things on my own, I tend to enjoy it but not absorb it as much. I haven't watched X-Files (except some of the new stuff) in decades. Yet, even reading the first sentence of an episode description, I'll go "Oh yea! That one! I loved that one." or "Ugh. Doggett." I remember laughing at a bunch of "Friends" episodes, but I can read the complete plot of an episode and have no idea whether or not I'd seen it. I guess I never caught "The One That Was Memorable."

Below is Season Two of an X-Files watchlist.
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Season 2:
Trust No One

Episode 11: The Erlenmeyer Flask
(Mulder, Scully, Deep Throat, Smoking Man, Crew Cut Man)

Technically, the final episode of Season 1, I like this much better as the beginning of a season. All of the major characters that have been in play so far have their stories evolved drastically, both the government mystique storylines and the sci-fi premise amped up to eleven. And we get a character death, along with the three words that changed the franchise, and are the title of this reimagined season.


​Episode 12: Little Green Men
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Richard Matheson)

The X-Files get shut down on a fairly regular basis over the course of the series, but it's surprising that their first closure is this early. This episode has Mulder doubting his beliefs from the previous season only to be flung into a new extraterrestrial adjacent adventure. Scully, no longer his partner, tries to track him down. Also, we meet Skinner for the first time!


Episode 13: The Host
(Mulder,  Scully, Skinner, X)
​A creepy Monster Of The Week story involving flukeworms that unfolds as Mulder considers leaving the FBI.


Episode 14: Duane Barry
(Mulder, Scully, Krycek, Duane Barry)

Meet Alex Krycek, he's Mulder's new FBI partner, and he absolutely sucks. He tags along when Mulder investigates a former FBI agent who claims to be a multiple-time alien abductee. Eventually, Scully joins in, and all goes higgledy-piggledy.


Episode 15: Ascension
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Krycek, X, Duane Barry)

Continuing from the previous episode, Mulder and Krycek must find Scully, who has been kidnapped! Why? Well, it is super complicated, but in a fun adventury way. Also, oooh, the X-Files are already reopened.


Episode 16: One Breath
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, X)

Scully is back but something is ... different. Something that will be important to the rest of the series.


Episode 17: Irresistable
(Mulder, Scully)

A Monster Of The Week Story where maybe the monster is just human? Because, like, there are some real monsters out there.


Episode 18: Die Hand Die Verletzt
(Mulder, Scully)

A Monster Of The Week Story where the monster is modern religion, which, like creates some real monsters.


Episode 19: Colony
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner, Alien Bounty Huter)

Aliens! Aliens! This whole series has been about dealing with aliens, so let's get some aliens back. This episode ties the greater mythology to Mulder's childhood. This episode is a blast, but where is it leading?

​
Episode 20: Endgame
(Mulder, Scully, Skinner, X, Alien Bounty Hunter)

Aliens? Or clones? Or alien clones? A very action-oriented follow-up to the previous episode is a very satisfying stopping point to our second season, as Mulder and Scully are now both totally invested in figuring out what the X is going on.
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The X-Files In 97 Episodes Worth Watching, 1: I Want To Believe The 90s Were Real

5/14/2021

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A group of a little over a dozen of us have been watching the Star Trek In Significantly Fewer Seasons (how many? who knows? they Keep Making Star Trek series!), and it's been a blast. One of the regular co-viewers, Valerie asked me last night if I was ever going to do one for X-Files, and I thought "Man, I tried watching all of X-Files at some point, and something stopped me from following through and watching them all. I wonder what it was."

A coma. Not caused by aliens or demons or werecreatures, as far as I know. 

I decided to do a Best 100 Episodes of X-Files, making ten seasons of ten episodes, but it would have been slightly padded. The X-Files, like The Simpsons, and really any show that goes on for too long, becomes a victim of The Law Of Diminishing Returns. I'll take about that when I get to later seasons.

This first season of my Ten Season version of X-Files doesn't even quite contain the original first season, as we have to set up a ton of mythology (which, I need you to inhale deeply, count to ten, ok, let it all out) is only going to get slightly resolved, and that resolution will not be at the end of the series), and really get to know Mulder and Scully.
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Season One:
I Want To Believe The 90s Were Real

Episode 1: Pilot
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Scott Blevins, Billy Miles)

Fox Mulder is a cuckooo pants, conspiracy theorizing, FBI agent who thinks aliens are real and that they kidnapped his kid sister. So he spends his time investigating the weirdest, unsolvable crimes in the division, referred to as The X-Files. His bosses are like "Woah, slow down there Professor Paranoia." and assign a By The Books, Squaresville scientist named Dana Scully to debunk all of his theories and try and solve the crimes rationally. This is the story of how they become friends!


Episode 2: Deep Throat
(Mulder, Scully, Deep Throat)

No, pervs, not the porn. A reference to the Watergate Informant. Mulder has a friend in the agency who helps him connect conspiratorial dots. In this episode, it's all about flying saucers!


Episode 3: Squeeze
(Mulder, Scully, Tooms, Briggs)

No, fans of 1970s British pop, not the dudes who sang "Tempted". A reference to someone constricting themselves to fit in a tight space. Mulder and Scully investigate some murderages that can't be explained, and run into the series' first Monster Of The Week.


Episode 4: Ice
(Mulder, Scully)

No, diamond thieving meth heads, this is about frozen water. It's kind of a "What If The Thing monster was much, much smaller, and therefore more menacing?"


Episode 5: Fallen Angel
(Mulder, Scully, Deep Throat, Max Fenig)

No, Buffy-fans, I know you've had a terrible year finding out about Joss Whedon, and all, but this isn't a fun crossover between two of the 90s best sci-fi shows.  It's about UFOs and alien abductions, so, you know, an early X-Files episode.


Episode 6: Eve
(Mulder, Scully, Deep Throat)

No, Bette Davis devotees, this has no relation to the classic 1950s movie. This is about clones. Like "Orphan Black", kinda, sorta. You know?


Episode 7: Beyond The Sea
(Scully, Mulder)

We're pretty far into the run of the first season, and it's time to see what happens when Scully wants to believe something, and Mulder is like, "Nah, Really?"


Episode 8: EBE
(Mulder, Scully, Deep Throat, The Lone Gunmen)

Are we still doing UFOs and alien abductions? Really? Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Well, in this episode we meet The Lone Gunmen, a group of other conspiracy theorists who are interesting, but not, like, interesting enough to have their own series or anything.


Episode 9: Darkness Falls
(Mulder, Scully)

Oh, I'm a Lumberjack and I'm ok. I work all night and then I disappear completely with no explanation. Where did I go? *tune changes* Where have all the lumberjacks go-one?


Episode 10: Tooms
(Mulder, Scully, Smoking Man, Skinner, Tooms, Briggs)

We wrap up the first season with our first returning villain, our returning menacing supervillain, and the introduction of a new recurring character. 
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