X-Files Season 3
Previously:
Onwards...
21. 2 Shy
"2Shy" - eww. eww. eww. eww. eww. eww. eww. And eww. Just disgusting, both in terms of SFX and in terms of being horribly misogynistic and just nasty. Just eww.
20. Teso Dos Bichos
"Teso Dos Bichos" - The one with the bad cat animatronics! People digging in the least convincing Ecuador ever (its very blatantly Vancouver) find an old skull. The old skull is brought back to the USA, and lots of people get savaged by the spirit of a panther or similar creature. It's silly, its got lots of characters who barely get time to breathe before they die, and the effects are hilariously bad. Plus the story is so stereotyped it nearly falls under the weight of the badly used tropes. A low point in the series.
19. Revelations
"Revelations" - A man who dislikes fake stigmata chases down reverends and kills them by smoke SFX strangulation ala Pyramids of Mars. He really wants to kill a small kid, who might be Jesus. Also apparently Jesus Kid knew Scully was destined to save him because... reasons. I didn't get this one.
18. Avatar
"Avatar" - Down to Earth again with a bump, Skinner gets divorced, hooks up with a hooker, and then she is promptly murdered by... well, I'm not sure. Some sort of not succubus old woman, who is actually trying to protect Skinner somehow? And is murdering prostitutes. This was confusing and boring.
17. Talitha Cumi
"Talitha Cumi" - So the cold opening with a shooting at a burger joint being interrupted by an old guy (Roy Thinnes!) who can cure the sick is very arresting. Then we get a long period of people talking slowly and portentously to each other, so you know its a Chris Carter finale. David Duchovny helped with the script, apparently. Ciggie Man and Mulder's mum have a fight, then she has a stroke. This was to start the "I am your father" storyline which I think they gave up on, as the continuity for Cigarette Smoking Man became more muddled. Eventually, the FBI agents decide to bring their old guy to see Mulder's mum, but oh noes - the Bounty Hunter from Season 2 is back! Tune in next season to find out what happens. Anasazi, this is not. Hell, its not even the one on the train from earlier this season.
16. The List
"The List" - One mum never let us see as kids. A man is executed on death row, but not before announcing he's coming back as a murder ghost to get 5 people he hates. Cue a death row guard being found dead, and paranoia over the aforementioned list of enemies which seems to be getting shorter. One guard has a moustache solely so you'll recognise his head when it is found, away from its body. Some gory SFX, as the show is revelling in some nasty shots just for the sake of it. The lost far too young JT Walsh is in good form as a corrupt prison boss, but he's one of the few good things in this, as he uses the X-File as an excuse to bump off some prisoners causing him a headache. And then he was on the list all along... surprise. Or not. All in all, a bit of a mess.
15. Wetwired
"Wetwired" - It's Blood over all again. I thought that when I was a kid. It's slightly less dull. The cold opening with the guy killing the house intruder only for it to be revealed its his own wife (he has gone mad and is seeing things) is very dark. Pretty much a repeat of the S2 story though.
14. D.P.O.
"D.P.O" - the teen with the lightning powers. Darren Peter Oswald is a complete sod. He kills people for fun, he kills his best friend Jack White for sod all reason, and he keeps stalking his former teacher, even though she's married, over a decade older, and not interested in him. Dodgy guy gets dodgy powers and is dodgy.
13. Piper Maru/Apocrypha
"Piper Maru/Apocrypha" - Black oil alien goo infects a NAVY diver, who then spreads it to his wife, who spreads it to Krychek, who bleeds goo from his eyes (eww) into a spaceship. Skinner gets shot, but survives. Scully talks to some people. Like watching portentous paint dry.
12. War of the Coprophages
"War of the Coprophages" - The one with the cockroaches. Deemed as a 5/5 classic by fandom, its really a bunch of people dying because they're scared of bugs. A Scully lite story, Gillian Anderson steals the entire episode with her bored reactions to phone calls from Mulder about the case, and the fact his accomplice on this case is called Bambi. "Bambi?" It's just a bit dull. And not that funny?
11. Quagmire
"Quagmire" - The dog dies. A real life gator would be too full to eat all those people in one day. The ending bad SFX Nessie is silly. The bit where Mulder and Scully talk about Moby Dick is cool. It's just very silly.
10. Pusher
"Pusher" - The film look on this has dated really badly. It looks old, in a way several episodes don't. Pusher is a good but limited villain. He can also talk people into heart attacks, somehow. The power of love defeats him when he tries to set Mulder and Scully against each other.
9. The Walk
"The Walk" - The one where the soldier who has lost his limbs in war uses astral projection to kill the relatives of the army heads he blames for his injuries, while also keeping them alive to suffer. This one has the whole army/how we treat disabled veterans as placeholders for all the spooky, which should be problematic... but then it some of the most well done creepy ghost bits in the series. The kid seeing a ghost rushing off from the post is a proper jump scare. Said kid meets his end via ghost in a sandpit, which haunted me as a child. A sergeant meets her death in a swimming pool in a memorably set piece too. A well done bit of horror.
8. Nisei/731
"Nisei"/"731" - This is like the good, the bad and the ugly of Chris Carter. The cold opening, with train engineers waving at kids, before parking a train convoy on which a group of Japanese scientists are gunned down, is stark and places the conspiracy right in your backyard. Then we have two running stories: Mulder tries to catch a train which has an alien on it, and Scully finds some other women who went through her abduction, and they are all dying of cancer. Gillian Anderson treats her half of the plot with a dignity far above the material. David Duchovny seems to be in a conspiracy thriller with action scenes. This is all over the place. The US government massacre a bunch of leprosy victims. Mulder leaps off a bridge onto a moving train. X basically saves the day, and the image of him carrying Mulder to safety from an exploding train was worth the expense. Also, randomly Not Jay Leno just straight up tells Scully 90% of what they were doing, in the hope she wont notice the 10% he's omitting (the aliens bit). A mess, but with some memorable scenes.
7. The Blessing Way/Paperclip
"The Blessing Way"/"Paperclip" - I still can't decide if Albert Hoosten is a positive or negative portrayal of a Navajo elder. He has many of the tropes of the magical noble non-white character, yet he is one of the few characters able to utterly trump Cigarette Man's conspiracy with no comebacks. He's played by an actual Native actor (Floyd Red Crow Westerman) though a Sioux playing a Navajo elder, by geography and culture, is akin to a Brit playing an Egyptian! The entire concept of the Blessing Way is using the tropes and stereotypes of another culture for a technobabble reason to bring Fox Mulder back to life. I guess, when you consider the show tries to treat them with respect, that things can possibly problematic yet also progressive for their time or this time. Anyhow, Westerman is good, and the whole ceremony gives us a chance to see Jerry Hardin again, who kills it as usual. And Peter Donat's Bill Mulder is back, as a lying bastard, this time as a ghost.
From this point on, the show turns from quirky alien conspiracies to international pro-Nazi experimentations hushed up. It gets angrier and bigger but the show will never be the same. Walter Gotell shows up as a Nazi and is great and terrifying. Gotell, better known for his long running appearances as sympathetic KGB boss General Gogol in the James Bond series, is very frail here (he was dying from cancer in real life) but the real life German Jew who only just escaped the Holocaust imbues his dying Nazi's frailty with everyday evil and unrepentant disdain. He's chilling in a way SFX monsters can never be.
This two parter does a lot of good things. It introduces John Neville's marvellous Well Manicured Man, who will go on to be massively underused. He manages to mix a sense of honour and a grim acceptance of death in equal measure, his amiability is not an act, but make no mistake, this guy is colder than X or Ciggie. I like the introduction of the full conspiracy as a bunch of easily panicked toffs. We get to see Not Jay Leno (Don S Williams), God from Star Trek (George Murdock) and two unnamed conspirators I am now nicknaming Balding Man and Easily Panicked Man. These guys prove Robert Anton Wilsons theory that any large government conspiracy would be prone to ¤¤¤¤ ups. They can't even execute Alex Krychek without buggering the whole thing up.
What else is good? The cliffhanger. So John Neville has warned Scully that she will be assassinated either by two crooks, or by someone she knows who has been paid off. Then she finds Skinner in Mulder's apartment, and draws a gun on him, so he, shocked, draws a gun on her. Episode ends with two good guys about to shoot each other because they've become paranoid as hell. That's good drama.
Bad stuff? Well, they kill off Scully's sister (a mistake imo), and the whole thing is a bit unwieldy, and the character stuff is holding it all together because the plot is rapidly becoming hot bollocks. Yet again Scully sees proof of aliens, but will be sceptical when needed. Oh, and while I love Frohike rushing to Scully's side for his own comfort when he hears Mulder is dead, he also finds out that her sister has been shot from looking up ICU charts for his entertainment. That dude is weird.
Overall, enjoyable, but I fear for the future of this arc.
6. Hell Money
"Hell Money" - The only episode of the X-Files to scare my mum! Because, as she puts it, there's nothing SF or fantastical about it, its desperate minorities being targeted by smugglers which happens all the time in real life. A murder in San Francisco's Chinatown leads Mulder and Scully to a case of a deadly rigged lottery, an organ smuggling scheme, and a gang who disguise their murders through chance and spirituality. The Hell Money is a spiritual token with which the dead pay for their sins. In 2022, The University of Toronto had to apologise for handing out Hell Money as a badly researched attempt to show off their multicultural links, to the horror of their Chinese students. This is a story about victimisation and ethnic stereotyping, and sadly we can't confine those to the realm of the X-Files alone.
5. Syzygy
(Or the winner of the episode I can't spell the title of properly award this season)
"Syzygy" - This is HILARIOUS. I'm not sure it was meant to be though. The power of Uranus is in the sky, making everyone in a small town a bit crazy. It even effects Mulder and Scully, who can't cope with Uranus and are snappy throughout. Two teenage girls, born in 1979, which gives them super Carrie telekinesis power for 24 hours (and also the weeks before hand, for plot reasons) are feuding over a boy, and respond to this by killing his friend, his girlfriend, and him. The redshirt guy in the cold opening is bloody Ryan Reynolds. Scully's valiant attempt to keep a straight face to the choreographed tale of Satanic abuse is actually funnier than anything in the previous episode, and her "Sure. Fine. Whatever" can't give a toss about the story atittude, as she faces down more and more insane conspiracy theories is actually laugh out loud. As is the fact everyone in the town assumes they are in a X-Files case and keep looking to the FBI agents, and when its all solved and wasn't Satanists, they react like the Thermians from Galaxy Quest. "You have saved us from the Satanists!" Scully just gives up. There's a tarot reader who is the only sane person in town, and warns Scully about the power of Uranus. The two teens - ie the murderers - are hysterically OTT too. They kill a random dude because he knocked juice over on them. And in the midst of all this, some saliant and timely points about witch hunts and fearmongering, and how the crowd, riled up, immediately go after the only queer coded character in town. It's ludicrously funny, and its not trying to be, but its also pointing a mirror at society too.
I liked this one. Its very daft. I think Chris Carter was trying to write a serious tale and then claimed it was a comedy afterwards, though.
Also, the gist of one scene:
Crowd: And the Satanists took the babies and killed them!
Scully: If there was Satanists taking your babies, how come none of you have any missing children?
(pause)
Crowd: And the Satanists are creating magic babies to kill! They're evil!
Absolutely bat¤¤¤¤.
4. Oubliette
"Oubliette" - The only monsters in this one are human. Michael Chieffo (an instantly recognisable face from 90s TV bit parts) is a child molester who kidnaps his latest teenage girl victim. Elsewhere in the country, one of his former victims, the now adult Lucy, collapses suffering from the injuries the younger girl has. The FBI assume she's a criminal, but this is a darker story about how crime effects people over decades, and an unwanted connection between two victims of the same man. Poor Lucy is one of the most sympathetic characters in the series, unable to escape abuse she suffered as a child, suffering paranormally for reasons no one understands and in the end, dead. Two episodes ago they tried to go super dark SF and became all Season 1 Torchwood, and here they went small scale and human and became dark as hell.
3. Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'
"Jose Chung's "From Outer Space" - So this is the first time I've seen this since I read Rob Shearman's review of the story. He hates it, btw. But I remembered the episode fondly from childhood, so watching as an adult. Yes, the first Act takes far too long to get going, and there's a few too many jokes that go over the line of good taste to set up the "alien abduction" story everyone is investigating. By the first ad break, Rob might have a point... but after that, there's too many things that amuse me. The teen who want to be abducted by aliens. The chain smoking alien. "Who was the third alien?" "Who, Lord Kinboat?" The Stupendous Yappi showing up again. The teen being fine when Scully is doing an autopsy on an alien but throwing up as soon as its revealed it was a human in a mask. That autopsy showing up as one of those 90s alien autopsy videos. Alex Trebek. The Rashomon style unreliable narrators.
And two of my favourite things in this series. Firstly, Jesse Ventura as The Man in Black.
"Venus was at its peak brilliance last night. You probably thought you saw something up in the sky other than Venus, but I assure you, it was Venus. Your scientists have yet to discover how neural networks create self-consciousness, let alone how the human brain processes two-dimensional retinal images into the three-dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet you somehow brazenly declare seeing is believing?"
Glorious.
But you know what is more glorious. The Kim Manners inspired Detective Manners, and how all of his dialogue is censored in Scully's retelling of event. "Thanks a lot, you really bleeped up this case!" "Hey! I just got a call from some crazy bleep-head saying he was an eyewitness to this alien abduction. Do you feel like talking to this blank-hole?" "Yeah, that's a bleeping dead alien body if I ever bleeping saw one."
Glorious. RIP Kim Manners, apparently the X-Files and Supernatural teams loved your sweary ways.
Also, the Air Force murder two pilots to cover up an abduction in this one. Which is really dark, and no one mentions that bit. They got distracted by Lord Kinboat and Mulder's girlish scream.
A classic. A messy classic, but a classic none the less.
2. Grotesque
"Grotesque" - Now, this one is dark. As in its very darkly lit, but its also grim. Our "monster of the week" is a serial killer, obsessed with gargoyles, who is arrested early on, after murdering a life art model. The FBI agent who tracked the killer down, an early mentor of Mulder, spent years on this case, trying to get into the mind of the killer, being haunted by his failures to prevent more suffering. And then, the copycat killings start. The murderer is safely locked away, but claims some sort of gargoyle demon forced him to murder. Meanwhile there's worries about Mulder's mentor. This is fascinating, a study of how obsession, even in the cause of good, can take over someone's mind and drive them insane. The only monster here is the human mind. Great but also difficult to watch.
#1 Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" - What to love about Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose? The way the killer appears in the background of several scenes. The Stupendous Yappi. Bruckman's terrible attempts to play the lottery. The cop who is delighted to learn he wont die of lung cancer, seconds before being stabbed to death. That its genuinely very funny. Peter Boyle filling Clyde with such empathy and sympathy that he won an Emmy for the role. The excellent script where every line furthers plot, foreshadows future events, or establishes character traits. "Women's intuition" and the fact the cop believes Mulder. That this hilarious episode is a serious and well done debate about free will and self-determination v predestination. The killer and Bruckman believe if they see things, they are condemned to live them, Scully ain't got no time for that, and thinks the act of seeing it allows you to change it. And she is right. Hints of Scully being immortal, which I ran with in the Outside In Wants to Believe book, which also contained my single worst pun I've ever written, if you believe Jon Arnold. It's funny, it's sad, its farcical, its intelligent, it empathetic, its ridiculous, its about the irrelevance of life and the joie de vivre at the same time. It even manages to quote Beyond the Sea. Frankly, the X-Files justifies 12 seasons of wacky conspiracy rubbish by sometimes, like here, producing works of genuine art. This story is, unsurpassably, sublime.
I've got to the end of Season 3. It had more money, but a lot of the stories seemed to be more expensive versions of stories from S2. And for all that, less engaging too. When it hit on form, it produced great TV (Clyde Bruckman, Grotesque) but this was very much a very top heavy season.
Next up, season 4. Which according to Wiki, I may have only seen 4 or 5 episodes before.
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