Gen X-Files: a Rewatch Podcast

One brother is frozen in a tube. The other is having a very bad week at work.

This week, we’re covering The X-Files season 1, episode 23, “Roland,” as Mulder and Scully investigate an aerospace lab where professional jealousy has turned deadly. Join longtime fans Dash and Melz and Dash’s mom Angel, our resident first-time watcher, for killer wind tunnels, stolen research, and one dead (?) scientist with some extremely unresolved issues.

We talk about Željko Ivanek’s performance, Mulder’s gentler side, and why Roland and Tracy give this strange little murder mystery its heart. There’s also that final look in the mirror to debate, some excellent wordless acting to appreciate, and the question of whether “solved” means anything when you have to put it in an official report. Along the way, True Blood meets Blue Bloods, a Lexus receives a threat, and our cryogenics discussion somehow leads to Sinbad’s Shazaam and a man named Walter Grieselbeef.

No X-Files homework required. We recap the episode as we go, so pull up a chair and get into it with us.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Shoot us an email at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter, @GenXFilesPod

Can a murdered cop reincarnate through conception and come back as a deeply unsettling eight-year-old girl?

Dash and Melz (longtime fans and couple) and Angel (first-time watcher and Dash’s mom) are digging into “Born Again,” the episode that sends Mulder and Scully to Buffalo for a creepy kid, a murdered police officer, some very suspicious former partners, and what may be the most complicated case of Ghost Jacking yet.

Meanwhile, Angel is immediately onboard with creepy-kid X-Files, we try to figure out exactly how reincarnation-by-conception is supposed to work, and everybody involved in making this episode apparently likes it a whole lot less than we do.

Also: Pillsbury Alibi Dust, Mulder and Langly’s 4/20 plans, the question of just how solved this case actually is, and a surprisingly serious conversation about whether a dead man’s soul can hitch a sperm ride at the exact moment of climax. Basically, way more paranormal reproductive science than anyone asked for.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter @GenXFilesPod.

Eugene Victor Tooms is back, he’s hungry for liver, and somehow he’s not even the weirdest thing we talk about this week.

Dash and Melz (longtime fans and couple) and Angel (first-time watcher and Dash’s mom) are digging into “Tooms,” the episode that gives us the return of our favorite stretchy yellow-eyed sewer freak, the arrival of Assistant Director Walter Skinner, and the Cigarette Smoking Man lurking silently in the corner like tobacco-scented bad news.

Meanwhile, Angel predicts “alien pimples that have men hiding in them,” Mulder finds a genuine secret mall apartment, Scully likes Mulder enough to make him a sandwich, and we try to figure out how a man who should be approximately 900 years old was still working as a sheriff.

Also: a childhood encounter with a horrifyingly flat rat, the Roto-Rooter Tooms Trapper, Skinner sex logistics, whether Tooms goos when he goons, and the important realization that nothing makes sense and Scully writes it down.

Plus, Angel gives Cigarette Smoking Man a prognosis that’s hard to argue with.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter @GenXFilesPod

The X-Files Season 1, Episode 20: Darkness Falls. This week on the podcast, Dash & Melz, long-time fans and couple, and Angel, first-time watcher and Dash’s mom, head into the Washington forest, where Mulder and Scully investigate a missing logging crew and discover something ancient, glowing, and very hungry.

Along the way, we question the episode’s increasingly confusing rules about light and shadow, discover Mulder’s weakness for loggers, investigate a suspiciously rubber tree, and gaze at an aura farming environmentalist. Angel, meanwhile, is still trying to determine whether FOX sold her an episode about gigantic spiders from space.

Never seen The X-Files? You’re good. Angel is watching for the first time.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected]

The X Files Season 1, Episode 19: Shapes. This week, Dash & Melz, long time fans and couple, and Angel, first time watcher and Dash’s mom, head to Montana, where a rancher shoots a man he swears was a wild animal. Mulder finds shed skin, changing footprints, mysterious fangs, and an old X File pointing to something that has been happening here for a very long time. Whatever it is, everyone seems extremely committed to it not being a werewolf.

Along the way, Lyle Parker shows us his deeply emotional poetry, Scully takes repeated psychic damage, Discount Sam Elliott makes his wrestling debut, and Mulder is especially smelly. We also encounter the origin of scrapbooking, a rodeo poetry reading, vegetarian vampires, cows containing multiple seas, and one mountain lion who keeps getting blamed for absolutely everything.

Somewhere in all of this, we start wondering how much weird shit Scully is expected to look directly at before she is allowed to admit something strange might be happening. Angel, meanwhile, cuts through the entire debate with the definitive review of Shapes: “It ain’t a werewolf, but it was a good werewolf story.”

Never seen The X Files? You’re good. Angel is watching for the first time. If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected]

The bell has rung, the gloves are off, and two sort of similar supernatural nightmares are stepping into the ring. In our first Familiar Film Title Fight sidefile, 1981’s The Evil Dead goes head-to-head with 1986’s Spookies, a movie originally called Twisted Souls and starring, as far as we’re concerned, Who the Fuck Knows.

Dash, Melz, and Steve compare the movies’ isolated locations, monsters, occult weirdness, effects, questionable decision-making, and very different relationships with coherent storytelling. Along the way, we dig into The Evil Dead’s famously scrappy production, Bruce Campbell’s baby-faced beginnings, and whether Sam Raimi’s horror classic still holds up.

Meanwhile, Spookies traps its victims inside a sprawling mansion and gives us farting zombies, an absolutely deranged Ouija board, a scrotum-headed spider lady, Dick Vein Dracula, and one zombie chase that may actually be longer than Titanic. We deepen our understanding of semen demons, reverse pregnancy, why haunted forests apparently require a refractory period, and exactly where Steve would take Spookies if given the opportunity.

Only one movie can leave with the championship belt. Will it be the horror classic, or whatever the hell Spookies is? You'll have to listen to find out.

If you're reading this, you're a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected]

Stephen King wanted to prove he was the one guy who really knew how to adapt Stephen King. So in 1986, extremely high on cocaine, he directed Maximum Overdrive. He never directed another movie.

For this Side File, Dash, Melz, and Dash’s dad Steve revisit the movie where a comet makes machines turn on humanity... or aliens do it, maybe... and a bunch of people get trapped at a truck stop while sentient semis circle them for reasons nobody seems interested in explaining. Somewhere along the way, we discover that in 1986, there were at least two Steves on cocaine.

We get Stephen King’s sardine breath, a lawnmower accident that cost a cinematographer his eye, the inexplicable Green Goblin truck, the lost X-rated gore cut, Emilio Estevez licking sweat off a woman’s forehead, Dash’s dad confessing his past as one of the Mailbox Bandits, and a deleted scene where Optimus Prime finally deals with Yeardley Smith.

Also: can the trucks hear? Seriously. We need to know.

It’s Maximum Overdrive. We watched it so you don’t have to overdrive yourself up a wall.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected]

The X-Files Season 1, Episode 18: Miracle Man. This week, Dash & Melz (long-time fans and couple) and Angel (first-time watcher and Dash’s mom) head to Tennessee for teenage faith healers, suspicious deaths, a Mulder mic-drop moment, and the discovery that Scully learned some strange stuff in med school.

Samuel Hartley has been performing miracles since he was a kid, but when people start dying and Samuel tells Mulder things about Samantha he should not know, things get weird fast.

Along the way, a courtroom fills with insects, Sheriff Daniels gets repeatedly lip-cucked, Samuel looks like Justin Bieber became a youth pastor, and we get into chicken-tender theology, air-vent potato chunks, hideous religion-themed '90s computer software, and wonder if we have listeners in Heaven.

Angel’s memory of her grandmother being taken to a real faith healer sends us down a rabbit hole that ends with the incredible discovery: It was Leroy Jenkins the whole time.

Miracle Man is extremely goofy, surprisingly sad, and somehow both make the other better.

Never seen The X-Files? You’re good. Angel is watching for the first time.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? [email protected]

Matt Anderson wanted Deep Throat. Unfortunately, the only thing being swallowed this week is the truth.

Matt, host of Does This Come in Chromium? and co-host of Bloody Bits, joins Dash, Melz and first-time watcher Angel for “E.B.E.” A UFO goes down, a suspicious truck rolls through Tennessee, and Mulder becomes convinced an extraterrestrial biological entity is being buried inside a military cover-up. Scully has doubts, Deep Throat keeps making everything murkier, and the government seems determined to make sure nobody knows which conspiracy is the real one.

It’s also the first appearance of the Lone Gunmen, three paranoid weirdos who were supposed to be a one-off and immediately became essential. We dig into how early X-Files fans helped push the show toward more UFO mythology, more conspiracy and, apparently, a whole lot more Deep Throat.

Meanwhile, Matt introduces Shark Ears Surveillance, we investigate radioactive bird poop, wait for the blue light special on Deep Throat, question whether an alien can be heavy enough to wreck a truck, and uncover more from the roughly 900 hours of deleted footage filmed for every episode.

Never seen The X-Files? You’re good. Angel hasn’t either. We take you through the whole episode from beginning to end, so longtime fans can revisit the conspiracy and newcomers can walk straight into it with us.

If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Shoot us an email at [email protected].

Grab your conspiracy theory Koosh Ball, check your current age, and join us for another Side File as Dash, Angel, and Melz sit down with podcaster, writer, and Friend, Matt Anderson.

Across a conversation about comics, conspiracies, horror movies, and the deeply questionable decisions that lead someone into podcasting, we learn how Matt went from wanting to write comics as a kid to actually doing it, why he considers himself the ultimate victor over one particularly discouraging teacher, and how it feels to be nine years old.

Along the way, Matt tells us how the return of The X-Files derailed his shot at writing an ongoing comic for IDW, digs up his original 2015 pitch and actually reads it for us, and discovers some suspicious similarities between his idea and where the show eventually went. We also devise a conspiracy theory fighting tournament and learn far more than anyone requested about the twenty pages of erotic Kung Fu Panda fanfiction inspired by a character Matt created.

If you're reading this, you're a friend.

Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Feel free to email us at [email protected].