FabXXL

This one almost gets there. Again, great guest actor making a meal out of his part. Mark Sheppard is in everything, and he’s always awesome. Sadly, there is an abominable actress attempting to play cool and sexy, and mistaking it for distracted and boring. Amanda Pays is dire as Mulder’s ex from Oxford. Duchovny isn’t great in this episode, either. Ex-girlfriend and pyrophobia are too much for him to handle all in one episode it seems. Still very watchable, but comes just under the bar set in the last couple of eps. Doesn’t help that Scully talks about “5th and 6th degree burns.” I’m pretty sure 3rd is the worst you can get outside of a crematorium. 7.

Again, awesome. Creepy cloning. Terrifying twins. The crazy agent from Frasier doing triple crazy. I don’t want to give too much away, because it starts with a truly horrifying exsanguination scene and careens into homicidal mania from there on in, but this is a great episode. Scully and Mulder are painted as a bit dim, because they have all the evidence in front of them, but don’t really suspect the killers until they are nearly victims themselves. Dickheads. Nevertheless, great performances all round. 8.

This show is a yo-yo! Awesome episode, terrible episode, awesome episode. Mulder and Scully get involved in a plot involving a space ship crashing and the ensuing government/army cover-up. There is a wacky dude called Max who is following it all on his police scanner, and Mulder wants to get to the bottom of it all. Scully is in full sceptic mode, pointing out that Mulder’s evidence that Max is an abductee could be explained away by his epilepsy and schizophrenia (he has a lot of pills in his Winnebago). Mulder witnesses an alien moment in a shed with Max, but his boss at the FBI dismisses it and shuts down the X-Files. Until Deep Throat resurrects them. Great creepy Deep Throat scenes. Love this. 8.

Ugh. Tiresome. Even though it has Sarah Jessica Parker’s dad from Girls Just Want to Have Fun as the boss of the space program, and the Borg Queen from Star Trek: Voyager is in it. This is a mess. I don’t really understand what is going on. It doesn’t help that every time there is something tense going on in outer space, everybody stands around mission control biting their lips listening to the radio. Something about the face on Mars and a possessed astronaut. I lost interest. Sometimes a tight budget can be a blessing, like in the last episode, and sometimes you get this shizen. As tempted as I am to go all Eurovision and give it nul points, the casting is superb. 2.

Awesome. See, you can rip off an old movie and have it still be awesome. When they were doing HAL from 2001 in the last episode they ballsed it up royally, but here they do The Thing and it is a corker. Mulder and Scully are trapped in an arctic base with alien tapeworms that make you turn violently psychotic. This is the best ep since stretchy Tooms. The acting helps, it’s totally a “so and so from thingamybob” episode. Stuck in the arctic are Bania from Seinfeld, Jack’s boss Mason from 24, the marine from China Beach who’s in Sons of Anarchy now and Lynette from Desperate Housewives. This is awesome. Why did I watch those other episodes? 9.

The computer is crazy and trying to kill people. This can hardly constitute a spoiler, because who would want to watch this all the way through? The only reason to put up with this is to see the great scenes with Deep Throat. He’s a cack. Otherwise there is nothing redeeming about this whatsoever. Even Scully having a combination Doctor Who / Willy Wonka moment in a ventilation shaft with a fan can’t redeem it. Best watched while doing an online tax return, so your paranoia about the motivations of the ATO software seem valid. 4.

This is all over the place. So many red herrings trying to obfuscate a really boring plot. First Mulder and Scully are looking for terrorists, while we are meant to believe there is some sort of telekinesis going on. Then there is a faked suicide plot and an arms dealer, with a rather violent haunting. It’s an episode of Ghost Whisperer ten years too early, without the camp value of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s outrageous bosom. Nup. 5.

There is some malarkey regarding an urban legend about a bigfoot creature that lives near casinos, and some raised-by-wolves nonsense. Lots of chasing shadows and people on roofs while Scully has a date with the most boring man who ever lived. The local police hate Mulder and want to shut him down, and he gets slashed by a wild woman. I hope he’s had his tetanus booster. This episode is best watched while doing something else. I was baking a fruitcake while my nan shouted ingredients from the other room. 5.

This is slightly spooky, but also a bit meh. A teenage girl goes missing. Was she abducted by aliens or bikies? The mum had some kind of alien encounter when she was a Brownie or a Girl Guide - aliens love cookies - and now her little boy gets binary messages from the static on the tv; binary messages which turn out to be defence satellite transmissions. Weird. Mulder gets too involved because it turns out his sister was abducted when he was a little kid and never came back. The binary messages turn out to make up a huge picture of the kidnapped girl, who turns up at the end, after they uncover a pedestrian plot involving pregnancy, murder and those bikies. 7.

Now, this is more like it! Creepy serial killer that makes a nest with newspaper and bile and can stretch into tiny spaces. Played by that creepy dude who married a 16yo cheerleader last year. Totally frightening. There are barely any special effects, apart from some dire CGI stretching as the serial killer, Tooms, who eats livers before getting in his bile nest for thirty years hibernation, squeezes through ventilation ducts and chimneys. It’s totally horrific. Again, there is a clear link to The Silence of the Lambs, with the serial killing and FBI profiling, but creepy supernatural malarkey as well. Loves it. 9.

Despite the promise of the title, Mulder and Scully do not go looking for danger and intrigue in the world of adult films. They get caught up in Gulf War syndrome and experimental planes which may or may not have been cobbled together from bits of crashed spaceships. ‘Deep Throat’ clearly refers to a government informant, a senator or public servant (it isn’t really clear which) who makes all kinds of enigmatic statements to Mulder about the government fiddling about with alien nonsense. You can see that this backstory wants to burst out of the more traditional narrative that is going on. Scully wraps it all up in a handy voiceover at the end. 7.

Okay, apparently I’m watching the X-Files. It was brought up in the group a couple of times, because the lesbians all want an excuse to perve on Scully. Dirty bitches. Although, there is something competently hot about her hacking into a corpse with her coat and goggles on. I don’t like her hair in the pilot. Way too straight and severe. There are also some deleted scenes with her boyfriend, which would have made the whole Mulder and Scully sexual tension thing really weird. I like the pilot episode a lot. Mulder is too willing to believe in spacemen, and Scully is too rational for her own good. I don’t know how on earth they are going to wring nine seasons out of this meagre premise. (BTW: Spoiler alert - don’t read this blog and THEN go watch the episodes, because I don’t care if I ruin things for you. That’s your problem).

It’s pretty clear that The Silence of the Lambs was fairly contemporary to this story, and Scully is Jodie Foster FBI-lite, and Mulder is really hot. Sometimes I don’t care about his dry wit. I just want him to be naked. Like in that show he does now where he has sex with teenagers all the time. Or is that a documentary about his real life?

I’m not sure I’m buying the plot of this first episode. It’s a little bit Scooby-Doo. “I wonder who the culprit could be? Aliens, or the only other person in the story who we’ve ignored as a suspect because he’s catatonic?” There are some scary moments with weird lesions (that Scully thinks she has, but they turn out to be mosquito bites) and nasal cavity implants, that we never really get an answer to. 

I liked it. The characters are set up well, and it’s nicely unsettling. I’m giving it a 7.