Popcorn Culture
Ruminations on TV Shows, Comics, And Music
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. 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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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!) 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. 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. Season 3: |
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