Things Are Getting Strange

We're not entirely sure if Scully buys Jigsaw brand mobiles for her baby or the foley-artist made a strange choice for season 9's opener, but when baby William seems to use telekinesis to make his mobile move... It does sound like something out of Saw...

Welcome to Season 9! It all looks and sounds and feels a lot better than another series we've been struggling through. And in a possible bid to get more viewers both episodes involve Lucy Lawless not wearing anything.

We discuss how the tone of the series has changed dramatically after real world events and how much more serious things have gotten. Despite the super-Soldier stuff.

But at least Reyes is now part of the main cast. New intro feels wrong though.

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...it won't attract the worm!

Weapon of Choice used (for no particular reason) in All About Yves is one of the high points. We get into why even with the writers throwing every trick in the bag to get a second series, even the revelatory answers were never going to be exactly great by way of Star Wars and Twin Peaks.

Plus, Kim has a far better plan to capture Yves than anything Morris Fletcher has dreamt up and its really hard to overlook how much simpler and effective and quick her suggestion would be.

As is usual we get into an overview of the series, along with best and worst episodes and look forward to returning to The X-Files.

Farewell The Lone Gunmen! You could have been a fun series if you consisted of episodes like The Unusual Suspects, Three of a Kind, or Pilot. Alas, you made Jimmy Bond a mainstay of the series and kinda wrecked everything. Kim even has a far more interesting use for him in the series too...

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We were told these two episodes were an improvement... and that was not wrong!

The Lying Game impressively avoids a gigantic pitfall that would have made the episode incredibly uncomfortable and lowered our impression of the characters still further. It also boasts a guest appearance from Mitch Pileggi who does a stellar job of impersonating Jimmy when events call for it.

We'll even overlook how the reasons the LGM get into the plot aren't exactly meant to be their thing, the plot does revolve around the kind of thing they would care about. It's doing well!

But it's just... why don't they even try talking to Mulder or Scully or Doggett as events spool out? Why do we need to add a moment when a dog humps Langley's leg? Why does Skinner not jump to shapeshifter as the explanation when confronted by himself?

The Cap'n Toby Show is likewise more LGM-like than a lot of the series. It even has a scene about how the LGM find stories which feels so intrinsic and fundamental, its actually really odd it wasn't in episode 3.

Despite this, the episode while better, it remains faintly awkward with some odd focuses. And as has become a pattern, the original three LGM do one thing while Yves and Jimmy do another. And at the 11th hour, the series tries to imply something more about Yves, but there's only one (sort of two) episodes to go and no time to really get into it.

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It is hard to muster energy for The Lone Gunmen at this point...

Diagnosis Jimmy feels stitched together from discarded parts of other episodes and continues to call into question how Jimmy is able to exist in the real world. Meanwhile the other LGM-centric plot feels so poorly justified for its inclusion.

Unprofessional nurses and weirdly ineffective bear-traps abound...

Tango de los Pistoleros is a better episode but has so many question marks hanging over it that its still hard to enjoy. We wind up talking alot about how the characters don't appear to have any character arcs and again how weird it is that the series can't even attempt to duplicate either LGM-centric The X-Files episodes...

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We've reached episode 100 and so... are taking a break from The Lone Gunmen for this week.

Instead we have taken a trip to Springfield to witness the reasonably inexplicable crossover of The X-Files into The Simpsons. Which remains a lot of fun and is an extremely highly rated episode even now.

A lot of jokes and only a little threat of fear, famine and pestilence...

We also talk about the spec script, Flight 180, that went on to become Final Destination. We talk about the differences between the script and the eventual film, Charles Scully, and Scully's... shot fired retort to Mulder in one bewildering moment.

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...which was probably more baffling on release, but now we have to ask why the LGM don't actively use Linux for like paranoid reasons...

Back off hiatus! And despite the episode title being Planet of the Frohikes, the episode is more about Jimmy and chimpanzees and not really about Frohike at all. We get into the episode tipping its hand way too early, the The Murders in the Rue Morgue inferences and are somewhat floored by Yves actually being in-character.

Why does the series have a running gag about the LGM's newspaper being trash? How much has Dreamland influenced all this?

Alas it could not last: Maximum Byers has Yves pushed back into an eye-candy role. Its also blatantly influenced by The Green Mile just with cockroaches in place of mice and the series actively referencing The A-Team.

Next time, we take a break from this series as we have reached episode 100!

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Stuff happened between watching Three Men and a Smoking Diaper and when we recorded this episode and made it somehow even less fun than the first time around when we were merely severely annoyed by every little thing in it.

Quite apart from the Lone Gunmen apparently getting into Gonzo Journalism rather than their normal style, the continued reliance on Jimmy as the "presentable" member of the gang (and not, say, Byers), the apparent lack of using Jimmy for his intended purpose (explain technical terms) and the juvenile humor, somehow the episode just casually tosses Frohike and Langely literally kidnapping a child and apparently of the mind to just hang onto it come the ending.

That this is Chris Carter's fault is even more astonishing being someone who should know far better than this.

To say Madam, I'm Adam is better is not hard. However, the initially fun hook drops by the way-side almost immediately and the entire premise and tone of the episode is from some half-forgotten early (and cancelled) sitcom from the 90s by the last third.

Its a peculiar episode, the Lone Gunmen repeatedly refuse to dwell on the actual sinister background details, no one apparently has any idea what to do with Yves and the hook and explanation don't really connect... Not unheard of in The X-Files either, but given this episode ostensibly is about a man convinced he was abducted with aliens and ends with disrupting a wedding in a wrestling ring, all former examples were somewhat mild.

At least next week's episode is written by Vince Gilligan. That's... gotta be a good thing. Right??

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Somehow the third episode of the series is Eine Kleine Frohike, an episode of The Lone Gunmen which feels like it should come from a hypothetical season 4 when the writers have well and truly run out of ideas. That it's also taking inspiration from The Ladykillers is just an additional bizarre twist to the whole mess.

We return to wondering if this series is just supposed to be an unauthorized Mission Impossible reboot or it just somehow has amazing rubber masks for some other reason. Jimmy's presence in the series continues to mystify and annoy given his depiction as barely capable of tying his own shoes.

There's been butt related moments in all the episodes so far, but so much greater is Langely's encounter with a bull in Like Water for Octane. Somehow this is a running thing in this series.

Overall this is much more like the kind of episode we expect from this as a spin-off, but we get hung up on silo demolition and the astonishing excuse the episode chooses to use to not introduce water-powered cars to the wider X-Files universe.

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We swap from the bureaucratic FBI to a low-circulation newspaper office run by three familiar characters. Welcome to The Lone Gunmen. The one series spin-off of the popular trio into their own show!

Second time we're discussing an episode titled Pilot...

For the most part the series starts strong with a plot more Lone Gunmen like than The X-Files provided for quite a time. There's some Mission: Impossible, some unfortunate correct guessing at events that occurred less than a year from broadcast, and a whole new character whose presence we can't help but be suspicious of.

Bond, Jimmy Bond does not provide much comfort. A whole other new character introduced and set to be a main-stay according to the credits. A plot that seems decidedly non-Lone Gunmen. And a continued insistence on the group barely scraping buy with their funds.

We wind up talking about why Jimmy is here and real world blind sports versus how they are depicted in this episode.

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The X-Files could genuinely have ended with Existence. There's room for a future version of the series, but a lot of plot is resolved and the current alien threat is so nebulous. But Season 9 looms. But before that: The Lone Gunmen.

And before that: We get hung up on all the Biblical imagery in this episode, none of it subtle. Including the UFO/guiding star thing. We are increasingly unsure on how any of the conspiracy works or what this means, but the Sculder shippers are presumably very happy.

Still curious about who exactly William's father is...?

We also wrap up this season with best and worst episodes. And best villain.

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