Things Are Getting Strange

Time for a new alien species!

Piper Maru brings us the very sinister, very dangerous Black Oil. Whether the alien in truth or - as Mulder conjectures - a medium for transference, its still damned cool as a new threat.

Anyone, anywhere might be infected! Though just watching their eyes for a bit tends to give them away.

And, you know, that the Black Oil is perhaps one of the worst stealth operatives in the world except for the times it is.

Apocrypha is probably the best second part of a two-parter we've had to date, even if Cancer Man's suggestion to Skinner digging too deep into Melissa Scully's death is sending the same assassin to shoot Skinner and when that doesn't work, sending the same assassin to shoot him all over again.

Still we get some tremendously creepy moments, a potential reworking of the power dynamics in the Syndicate and are left wondering if Cancer Man shouting "You saw nothing" ever works for him.

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...The X-Files also stares back into you!

Aside from a few fun moments (and pre-fame Ryan Reynolds), Syzygy has little to recommend it. Mulder and Scully are out of character and kinda annoying and increasingly unprofessional.

Still! It oddly provided the origin point of the Keystone Cops footage we found in our Let's Play of The X-Files Game (part 1 available on Patreon). We get to talk about 90's teen culture and how we would rather the episode focused more on ostensible villains Terri and Margi.

Grotesque manages to change some of Mulder's backstory and be inconsistent with its own plot. As one of the admitted major inspirations on Millennium it is not without interest for future detail, even if Nick wanted a more supernatural-edge to the episode, while Kim would rather the Seven-like aspect got more focus.

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Wherein Kim is very keen on Bambi Berenbaum's bug talk in War of the Coprophages.

But that's after Revelations which seeks to invert the usual Mulder and Scully dynamic by making Mulder staunchly sceptical and Scully open to less scientific conclusions. I only wish Scully applied her new-found beliefs to every other episode going forward.

Also; tip for demons/agents of evil/other nefarious agents - booking rental cars under known demonic names makes you pretty obvious.

War of the Coprophages is the latest by Darin Morgan so we have a new funny episode with some pointed jabs at Mulder's entire belief-system. And Sculder shippers get some unexpected food in this installment.

We've also got a Let's Play of The X-Files Game in the works over on Patreon!

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...and you too could own a.... lacklustre alien autopsy video.

Nisei starts with what looks an awful lot like an alien autopsy on a train and ends with Mulder leaping onto a completely different train. Which may or may not contain... something.

We get quite taken with the "red-haired man" as he is known, though according to one DVD somewhere, he does have a name.  The episode is pretty exciting with Mulder doing stunts, avoiding armed soldiers and swimming in a harbour at night. But Scully might be on the verge of finding out what happened after Skyland Mountain. While Mulder sparks an international incident.

731 seems to forget that Mulder caused an international incident (or Skinner was just lying for some reason) and goes in some odd directions to turn Scully back into a hardcore sceptic all over again. Because Reginald FirstElder said so.

We make note of some lazy props and are so very taken with X's turn this time around.

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Content warning: Both episodes contain depictions and discussions of suicide. The Walk contains child death and Oubliette contains depictions of mental illness. Listener discretion is advised.

And we're back.

The Walk is basically Excelsis Dei version 2 but much less skin-crawlingly gross and with a more compelling villain. Who has way more scruples than the elderly patients in the former episode. Not above killing a load of people.

We once again have some issues picking out character names but otherwise this is an effective monster of the week episode.

Oubliette rambles into a discussion about Jack the Ripper at one point. If there is a simple note about the episode its that it should be a little longer. Not a two parter, but the episode feels a tad rushed as is.

I had been anticipating this episode as a huge Scully Killed Another One with Bad First Aid, but it turned out to be nowhere close to as bad as her prior stunts - and Kim will confirm its not a bad depicition of CPR. That said, there's a weird failure to help keep someone warm and Scully's apparent exasperation at the medical impossibility of drowning in river water in a car a mile away...

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Content warning for 2Shy - stalking, emotional manipulation of women

We continue the monster of the week portion of Season 3!

The List is a killer ghost plot for whom the supernatural menace is less impressive than the one in Shadows. In one sense this is to heighten ambiguity of just how supernatural the episode is (until the ending sting anyway). In another, why Neech is bothering with smothering people with pillows when surely he can crush their throats from the inside?

Kinda feels that maybe the episode would be better as a ghost POV thing. Still! The guest stars are good and the series got a set that got reused a bunch of times. And we get to talk about the discomforting working with insect larvae one of the actors had to do.

2 Shy! Not just a song by Kajagoogoo (also I managed to mix up The Lion's Mouth with The Lion Sleeps Tonight (they were one after another on a cat-themed mix-tape in the 90s and I got the bands completely wrong). Kajagoogoo did not sing the latter) but the identity of a gross fat-eating vampire.

Virgil Incanto has one of the least plausible X-Files' names to date (and Kim is on hand to explain why) and is a thoroughly unpleasant villain for the week. There is fun to be had in the shaky 90s notions of how the internet worked and the semi-justified naming of a sex worker as "Holly McClane".

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The X-Files takes a hard left turn back to monster of the week goodness!

Somehow we wound up discussing the sadly never arranged Fire vs D.P.O. face-off which would pit a recovered Cecil L'Ively against the still seemingly still-powered Darin Peter Oswald. As far as we know no one's tried this in any official release...

Kim is pleased with unexpectedly accurate defibrillator depiction but disheartened by the utterly implausible fulgurite scene.

Does Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose need anything more to be said about it? It tends to either top or come very close in lists of the best X-Files episodes, and its incredibly hard to argue against that. We make our best efforts to say anything new...

Revisiting the episode reveals a thoroughly downbeat and bleak episode riddled with black humour, great jokes and characters. And some setups for the future. Scully has a dog now and apparently doesn't die. Mr Bruckman is somewhat less accommodating towards Mulder...

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Look, we like Samantha here. Doesn't feel like Bill Mulder was exactly hugely invested in his daughter based on the implications Paper Clip sets up.

But that's after The Blessing Way which has some great stuff for Scully, and some... screentime for Mulder. Questions about of how Mulder got out of a (for want of a better term) hermetically sealed room, for which Camoflauge Man (no, really, we're pretty sure that's his name) can find no trace of him minutes later.

Yes, there are some explanations of how Mulder's escapology works but none are exactly satisfying. Still, this episode introduces Well-Manicured Man and 1st Elder leading to a wondering of why didn't Bill Mulder get a similarly themed name (or did he?!).

Paper Clip is back into the real conspiratorial mode however and gives us some intriguing hints of what the shadowy forces are up to as well as making Cigarette Smoking Man human in a way we've not seen previously.

Mulder remains a bit of a jerk (we could blame the lingering after-effects of being drugged I suppose) and Scully loses another family member as we try to puzzle out what the hell the presumable aliens at Strughold mining facility were trying to do.

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The end of season 2!

Anasazi seems to make clear that CSM is just in a perpetual state of lying. Not entirely sure you could even find out what he wants for breakfast.

We're not completely convinced by the encryption on the Thinker's downloads - nor where this guy has been for most of the season after getting name-checked in One Breath.

We also get to find out what our Twitter/Mastodon followers thought of the season in terms of best and worst episodes. And best villain, though thanks to the one person who really threw us a curve-ball on the answers...

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We're pretty sure people aren't too fond of Soft Light, but really it's a good episode with a great guest star in Tony Shaloub and exposes a whole other depth to the character of X otherwise not even hinted at.

Sure, the science makes no sense, but this hasn't ever really stopped any other episode of The X-Files. Plus, this is the first episode written by Vince Gilligan who'll go on to produce some notable future episodes and some reasonably popular mega-successes.

We've started keeping track of the genesis of X-Files episodes, and in the stakes of being as disgusting as possible, Our Town does win out. Currently at any rate. Not wholly sure what to make of Mulder's initial theory that is obviously wrong from the cold open.

And maybe this should have lent into the blackly comic aspects of the premise...

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