Saturday, August 24, 2013

The X-Files: Episodes 5-10

Gotta check in and report my progress on my attempt to finally watch every episode of the X-Files.

Episode 5: The Jersey Devil
Uh... Mulder and Scully find a cave woman, and she tries to sell them Geicko car insurance. Zing! Just kidding. Well, I was serious about the cave woman part. Not the best episode.

Episode 6: Shadows
A woman is maybe killing people using telekinesis, but then it turns out it's actually the ghost of her former boss who's trying to save her. Spoiler warning! Now you don't have to sit through this dumb episode.

Episode 7: Ghost in the Machine
An evil artificial intelligent computer that runs an office building becomes self-aware and murders people. That's a pretty dumb plot, but this episode was great fun. Loved it. The X-Files was always at its best when the plots were unapologetically stupid.

Episode 8: Ice
Classic. Mulder and Scully travel to the Arctic with a team of scientists to investigate the mysterious deaths of a group of researchers digging in the ice. Turns out those researchers uncovered an alien species that inhabits your body and makes you turn crazy and murderous. This episode is just a rip-off of The Thing, but it's so well done you'll forgive it. And the Thing was just a remake of an earlier film anyway, that was based on a book that was a riff on Lovecraft.

But, anyway, this one definitely ranks high on my list of best X-Files episodes ever.

Episode 9: Space
And then we have maybe the worst X-Files episode ever. Some ghost is disrupting shuttle launches... or something. It's basically just a bunch of stock footage of the space shuttle intercut into a terrible episode of the X-Files. Skip it.

Episode 10: Fallen Angel
Mulder thinks a government quarantine of a small town is actually a conspiracy to cover up an alien crash site... and he's right! Weird episode, but a lot of fun. The alien ones are always worth watching, because that's the show's main mythology.

2 comments:

Mugato said...

You got two home runs in this 5, Ice and Fallen Angel are so good. I always found the jersey devil very interesting and this episode was just sooo fucking disappointing.

The recurring plot episodes are always hits, but the "others" are mostly strike outs.

Sincerely,

Gary Gaetti

Justin Garrett Blum said...

Ah, computers that become self-aware and murderous. Was that a cliche yet in the 90s?