Things Are Getting Strange

Taking a brief break from Season 7, we try to give an overview of the first X-Files game - The X-Files Game.

We get into FMV games as a whole and the specific drawbacks in general and here specifically. There's not a lot of Mulder and Scully in this game, but you can die in a bewildering and often funny succession of odd occasions.

We try to make sense of the plot and end up concluding you're far better off just watching Piper Maru instead. However, if you are curious, our complete (though edited) experience is up on Patreon!

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While it might be a metaphor for the loss of the "truth" in The Sixth Extinction,  it is impossible not to interpret the order of events wherein Dr. Barnes kills a man, that man comes back to life and kills Dr. Barnes, and later when events return to the same beach, the entire UFO is now missing as Grand Theft Spaceship. By zombie.

Quite how Scully will cope with standing on and studying the hull of a downed UFO remains to be seen. Elsewhere we talk questionable science and dubious science.

It is concerning that Mulder's idealized alternate world fantasy of The Sixth Extinction Part 2 - Amor Fati involves him marrying Diana Fowley while she has a distinctly Cennobite-like look. Marries her but not Scully. In a fantasy dream sequence while undergoing brain surgery....

Welcome to the new phase of the conspiracy. Its a lot like the previous...

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This then is the end of The X-Files.

No. Really.

Fine. The point is we can't actually be sure that anything that happens after Field Trip in fact happens in series. It could all be a fungal hallucination as Mulder and Scully are dissolved in yellow goo in an underground cave.

Something of a dramatically bleak ending but hard to argue against.

(Though in reality, we know the universe resets if Scully dies because she can't so this probably isn't strictly true).

There is probably a good reason Scully is on the Ivory Coast at the end of Biogenesis. Probably. Otherwise welcome to the new conspiracy! Where Bibles are magnetic and looking at rubbings of metal can give Mulder migraines.

We are very interested in how Scully is going to excuse what she sees at the end of the episode, but surely there's some explanation.

We also sum up season 6, cover the best and worst episodes - and debate the best villain as always. Tune in next time for season 7!

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Nick has to insist quite a lot that he likes this episode though is not sold on baseball. Which it very much what The Unnatural is all about. A love letter to baseball that's also an X-Files episode that's also a lovely monster of the week episode that's also (sort of) a conspiracy episode and also makes a bit more sense of how the aliens work.

Nothing short of amazing really. We discuss how the episode works so well and how the replacement of a guest star somehow makes the whole situation less awkward than it would have been despite having two different characters with the same name in  the series.

Three of a Kind while not the most important episode and pretty fairly judged as filler content, is at least great fun to watch. Effectively pilot #2 for The Lone Gunmen, its great to see a continuation of The Unusual Suspects with a hilarious guest turn from Scully and the Lone Gunmen themselves in great form.

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Startlingly the first episode this week Scully actually suggests Spontaneous Human Combustion as a possible cause of death. Which if we're honest shouldn't be a huge surprise after the events of, say, Fire back in season 1.

Trevor is a curious monster of the week episode suggesting tornadoes can give you super-powers. But what really floored us this week was the comments from director Rob Bowman about how we apparently completely misunderstood the episode. And really don't accept his stance on this one. Seriously, man, what the hell?

We are not sure if Milagro has a deliberate or completely accidental JD Salinger reference in it. Or if it started as a deliberate nod and then something got muddled because the alleged reference its making is to a sitcom. This despite an episode about a writer.

We're not wholly sure why any of said writer's moves work on Scully or even how the episode works, but we do have an important question: where has Skinner gotten to?

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Content Warning: multiple dog deaths

Arcadia is satire with a capital S. Perfect community built on top of a landfill. Oh and enforced by a trash golem! Or tulpa maybe. Mulder does do a lot of conjecture in this episode...

We discuss the alien nature (to us anyway) of there gated communities and the conformity therein and also the state of Mulder and Scully's fake marriage on display. There's a good deal of fun to be had in this episode despite the more horror-y than normal sting.

In software development, before you get to a release (generally version 1.0) there are few prior steps. Testing something before release is generally done in the beta stage - the thing works generally and shouldn't fall over, but there are things missing and its not at its most stable. The initial version is called alpha and might explode if poked too hard.

This next episode really needed to be held back until the beta version was complete.

Alpha wastes its guest star (Andrew Robinson - Garak in Deep Space Nine) and is borderline incoherent. We discuss all the hits! Like how the villain's plan is basically impossible, how massive dogs are made small, the bewildering ramblings of a suspected otherkin, Scully being jealous (again), and the better AND WORSE alternate intended ways the episode could have gone.

We can even make a case for this being worse than Tesos des Bichos....

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Back to the monster of the week(s)!

Well, monster of the week anyway. Agua Mala is a comedic bottle episode with a unnerving monster, some amusing character moments and a lot of water. Oh so much water just all the time.

We discuss the somewhat odd implications about how Mulder talks about Arthur Dales in this episode and depictions of entomologists on film.

Back to the monster of the week(s)!

Well, monster of the week anyway. Agua Mala is a comedic bottle episode with a unnerving monster.... Wait a minute.

Monday might allegedly be inspired by The Twilight Zone, but its impossible not to drag Groundhog Day, Happy Death Day and Haruhi Suzumiya into a discussion about it.

While there is a pretty clear point to the time-loop, we've got a different one building off of Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose and Tithonus.

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Could this be the end of the conspiracy? Is the planned for day here (about a decade early)? We discuss much of the conspiracy's tangles in Two Fathers. And also make a weird Xenogears connection for kicks.

We try to make sense of the episode's new claims while not being thrilled about CSM point blank talking to the audience through so much of the episode. And get amused by the rubber masks the alien rebels are now resorting to.

One Son really does feel like the end of the conspiracy. Mostly. At least its hard to see this part continuing much longer with the ending in place.

But we can't escape questions that plague us. Like how do the rebel mask things work? Why do people want to share a planet with a species that is quite keen on obliterating everyone there and can do so with impunity? Why is Cassandra Spender actually special?

Despite all the answers we still have questions and the series is instead prepared to move right on...

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SR819 features nano machines and a decidedly confusing plot about Skinner! Until it stops being about Skinner with extreme rapidity and we wonder how Mulder and Scully get to go on this adventure without Kersh throwing yet another book at the pair.

We discuss a certain returning character's career trajectory in The X-Files and his somewhat bewildering actions of late. At least we have Mulder's pet senator back in the action. And still not helping Mulder much at all. We get into just how diplomatic immunity works since it keeps coming up.

Tithonus is an episode that demands discussion of Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose. So much later and possibly inadvertently, one line from Season 3 pays off here. This is a great gothic episode with Scully unaccountably taking some huge risks and plunging herself into danger in a case away from Mulder.

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Content warning: child death, forced abortions, animal abuse

After a run of comedic episodes, season 6 swerves hard into perhaps the darkest plotline The X-Files has ever had. But somehow any description of what happens in Terms of Endearment paints a picture of a bleak and thoroughly depressing episode which is somehow really fun to watch.

Some of it is probably Bruce Campbell, but the episode performs a startling trick of going so dark but somehow making everything bounce along at a good clip. It never lets go of the horror but it never gets too heavy. Not so much a comedy as extremely light-hearted.

The Rain King prompts a typical objection (why is this at this point in the season) but otherwise provides the first X-Files romcom episode. As one reviewer put it, cute but not excessively.

Aside from one dead cow, the episode is otherwise a strange deviation from the normally at least partly harrowing supernatural aspects to instead deliver an examination of Mulder and Scully's relationship reflected elsewhere.

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