frelling_tralk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frelling_tralk) wrote2016-07-19 01:58 pm
frelling_tralk) wrote2016-07-19 01:58 pm
Entry tags:
X-Files season 3 re-watch
I wasn't really a big fan of The Blessing Way tbh, it felt very typical Chris Carter with the looong monologues and all of the new age mysticism. It feels like the kind of thing that everyone would roll their eyes at CC for these days, but I guess that it worked for audiences more in the 90's, these days it feels really self-indulgent
Scully looking into the chip and (finally!) getting curious about her abduction and undergoing hypnotherapy was the more interesting part of the premiere for me, in fact there's a deleted scene with Scully and her family members talking which I would far rather have seen in the episode than the Mulder monologues *g* CSM and Skinner also got some pretty great scenes in both episodes, Paper Clip dealing more with the conspiracy was a lot more interesting than The Blessing Way for me, and who could forget, "This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass" <3
And then D.P.O was a pretty good MotW episode. Having Kim Manners there to direct really helped make a lot of the sequences stand out, the opening teaser was fantastic and very creepy, the lighting getting called down from the sky was another great moment, and the death of Jack Black's character
Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose was absolutely brilliant, but it's harder to think of what to say when you basically loved everything about an episode *g* I love all the comedy of course, especially the twist in the opening teaser when it's Mulder that gets thrown out for being the skeptic lmao. But also I loved what a tragic character study it was, Scully had some really touching scenes as she began to emphasise with Clyde and how meaningless everything seemed to him. I liked that it was an episode more from the PoV of Clyde Bruckman, so that you kind of saw Mulder and Scully through his eyes a little bit and emphasised with how disturbing he found the show's typical detachment to death
Sadly I wasn't crazy about the next run of episodes. They all felt competently done at least, but nothing particularly inspired either. The direction of The List was actually pretty scary and really made me jump in places, but the story itself felt kind of pointless in how little Mulder and Scully understood of the case in the end. I didn't understand what Chris Carter was trying to say with it anyway tbh, all the talk of reincarnation was pretty confusing when the episode seemed to be presenting it as a typical tale of a ghost seeking revenge after death, where does reincarnation come into that? It's not how I understand that concept at all.
2Shy was another episode that was just okay to me, but a bit too much like a re-tread of Tombs. Oh and what did stand out was that none of the victims were all that fat considering that you're talking about a killer who specifically targets bigger women to suck as much fat as possible! It would surely make sense then for him to be targeting really obese women, but while granted the woman in the opening teaser was pretty chubby, the other woman he was dating didn't even look fat to me?? I guess that says a lot on how acceptable it was to have really overweight women in guest roles, but eh they should of at least cast a heavier woman for his second intended victim.
And The Walk was probably my least favourite of those three episodes, but then it was the first John Shiban script :P Again it was probably the direction that stood out more than the writing, the opening teaser was particularly memorable, but the story itself just bored me after a while. I feel like these three episodes are good examples of episodes that would probably be fine to watch as a weekly episode to give you some good scares, but don't work as well with the more modern concept of binge-watching.
I guess that pacing issues were inevitably going to come up with 24/25 episode seasons though, and it's easy to forget that they were never intending for audiences back then to watch all of the MOTW episodes one after the other, still it's definitely tempting these days to skip over a fair few of them and go right to the classics. Honestly on my next re-watch I'm probably just going to skip that whole second disk and go straight from Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose to the mythology two-parter
Saying that though, Oubliette is the one episode on the second disk that I really liked (if liked is the right word for such a depressing episode *g*) I thought that it was a very good episode for Mulder's character as he comes to emphasise with Lucy so strongly, recognising that she's been trapped in a cycle of victimhood ever since the kidnapping which she never really did manage to escape from :(
I absolutely loved War of the Coprophages naturally, especially all of the scenes with Scully managing to swiftly and logically solve every death over the phone heh, while Syzygy hasn't aged all that well. I remember it being one of my favourites back in the 90's, but eh it's really not as good as I remember, although I still loved the scenes of M/S snapping at one another. I always loved the episodes that had fun playing around with the Mulder and Scully partnership, "Sure. Fine. Whatever". "Her name is Bambi?" War of the Coprophages was definitely the more interesting look at how Mulder and Scully spend their "days off" though and said a lot more about them as characters, while Syzygy played off Mulder and Scully's little tiff as being all about the planets not being aligned Idk. There was a bit of a pacing issue with placing such similar episodes one after the other anyway, and it didn't do any favours to Syzygy as an episode, but I assume that playing them together was intentional for whatever reason?
Grotesque was another episode that I really enjoyed. I loved the psychological horror in this one with finding out that it wasn't demonic possession at all, that Patterson was responsible for the killers after all those years he had spend "looking into the abyss". The direction and the lighting were all really fantastic as well, and the set design with the gargoyle was very creepy. The episode really had some genuinely horrific and unsettling moments, particularly when Mulder first discovers the body under the clay, or that final scene with Patterson locked away and screaming that he didn't do it :shudders: Oh and I thought it was kind of an interesting twist that for once it wasn't the typical blonde female victims of a serial killer, rather it was male art models that were being objectified and killed
Pusher was another terrific episode, watching it now I was struck by how similar the themes are to Breaking Bad actually, that idea of a little man "wanting to be big" who seizes on the possibilities the brain tumour offers him to go out in a blaze of glory. He even gives himself his own own Heisenberg name with "Pusher, as well as insisting on calling and taking credit for deaths that were initially dismissed as suicides (very Walter White!) I pretty much loved all of the set pieces of this episode, the opening teaser and the lingering on "cerulean blue" leading to that shock collision with the truck, the guy about to set himself on fire and begging them to stop him, talking Frank Burst into a heart attack over the phone, and of course that final Russian Roulette sequence! Such a fabulous episode
And then we have Teso Dos Bichos which is another John Shiban script, and is therefore once again terrible. It's just a bunch of boring b-movie clichés really and it all feels so banal, it feels like everyone involved has decided that this will be one of the throwaway episodes of a 24 episode season, but what a waste of time for everyone involved
Urgh I hated Hell Money, I found it so dour and depressing. It didn't even feel much like an X-Files, more a plot that could have been on any cop show that Mulder and Scully just happened to wonder in too. I guess that was partly the point, that Mulder and Scully were so on the outskirts of the case because they were outsiders to the Chinese community, but yeah idk I just found this case really bleak, it's too much for me when some poor character starts sacrificing his own body parts in order to pay for his daughters health care!
It was good to get some background on Skinner in Avatar, and I appreciated how supportive of him Mulder and Scully were, but I must admit that the appearance of the old woman in the red coat and what all that was supposed to mean kind of lost me. Skinner was looking *really* good in this episode though, I thought he looked particularly nice in the white shirt
Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” is obviously one of the best episodes ever!! It's one of the episodes that I remember very strongly from the 90's, mostly for all the funny bits. Mulder's scream when he sees the dead alien, the descriptions of Mulder and Scully when they're positioned as the "Men in Black", Mulder and the pie, "Yep that's a bleeping dead alien if ever I bleeping saw one". But this time around it also really left me appreciating how sad and existential it all was, and how so much of it was about how we should be searching for meaning in other human beings, rather than becoming obsessive about looking up into the stars and trying to find some absolute truth that doesn't even exist. "Then there are those who care not about extraterrestrials, searching for meaning in other human beings. Rare or lucky are those who find it. For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways, on this planet, we are all alone."
Quagmire was another fabulous episode, I loved how it was all about the search for monsters and why Mulder needs so badly to discover one, rather than being about discovering the monster itself. I wanted to punch Mulder though when he was so insensitive about Scully's dog/just wanted to go right back to talking about his monster quest, but he made up for it later (well somewhat anyway!) when he tried to explain to Scully why his quest for the truth matters to him so much. You could really tell that a lot of the episode was rewritten by Darin Morgan, I'm surprised that he didn't get any writing credit for this episode, you definitely felt his influence enough that I think it would have been more than justified
Wetwired is one of the episodes that stands out really strongly in my mind, all because of making Scully get so paranoid that she pulls a gun on Mulder. I'm always the most invested when the case affects the central characters in some way, and Mulder's, "Scully, you are the only one I trust" still makes me tear up /lame. Fantastic opening teaser too. The one thing I would say is that this time around I felt like Wetwired was a bit uneven, it had some very memorable images, but it didn't feel like it came together as well as it could have done. (And it was very weird how another informant kept showing up instead of Mr X, was that actor just not available for whatever reason?) I have a real soft spot for it because of the Scully paranoia plot though, I just love that stand-off between her and Mulder.
Oh and I enjoyed the finale as well of course, I've found myself enjoying the mythology episodes more than I was expecting on this re-watch actually. These days it seems like almost everyone prefers the MotW's, and I totally get why after the mytharc became so convoluted in the end, but when binge-watching the season in one go I did appreciate how the mythology episodes are really the main episodes to deal more with the sort of long-lasting character development which you rarely get in the stand-alones. Even when the case does directly impact Mulder or Scully in some way, it's not like it's going to be brought up in the following episode and become a long-running thread, whereas the mythology episodes will continue plots like say Scully looking into the chip in her neck.
It is all very inconsistent of course, particularly when Melissa's death gets completely dropped and only mentioned again in time for the next mythology episode, but still it does feel like those episodes are the biggest ones for focusing on Mulder and Scully's characters, that they are the ones that introduce the long-lasting emotional stakes and the big cliffhangers. I'm not sure it's fair that they often get completely dismissed these days in favour of the MotW episodes. Yeah there were a lot of classic MotW episodes of course, but there were also a fair few that felt quite inconsequential compared to the epicness that you got in say the Nisei/731 two-parter for example, and you can really see why the mythology episodes maybe made a bigger impact at the time. (At least I think it was the case that originally most fans argued for the conspiracy episodes over the MotW episodes, and now it's the reverse?)
Scully looking into the chip and (finally!) getting curious about her abduction and undergoing hypnotherapy was the more interesting part of the premiere for me, in fact there's a deleted scene with Scully and her family members talking which I would far rather have seen in the episode than the Mulder monologues *g* CSM and Skinner also got some pretty great scenes in both episodes, Paper Clip dealing more with the conspiracy was a lot more interesting than The Blessing Way for me, and who could forget, "This is where you pucker up and kiss my ass" <3
And then D.P.O was a pretty good MotW episode. Having Kim Manners there to direct really helped make a lot of the sequences stand out, the opening teaser was fantastic and very creepy, the lighting getting called down from the sky was another great moment, and the death of Jack Black's character
Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose was absolutely brilliant, but it's harder to think of what to say when you basically loved everything about an episode *g* I love all the comedy of course, especially the twist in the opening teaser when it's Mulder that gets thrown out for being the skeptic lmao. But also I loved what a tragic character study it was, Scully had some really touching scenes as she began to emphasise with Clyde and how meaningless everything seemed to him. I liked that it was an episode more from the PoV of Clyde Bruckman, so that you kind of saw Mulder and Scully through his eyes a little bit and emphasised with how disturbing he found the show's typical detachment to death
Sadly I wasn't crazy about the next run of episodes. They all felt competently done at least, but nothing particularly inspired either. The direction of The List was actually pretty scary and really made me jump in places, but the story itself felt kind of pointless in how little Mulder and Scully understood of the case in the end. I didn't understand what Chris Carter was trying to say with it anyway tbh, all the talk of reincarnation was pretty confusing when the episode seemed to be presenting it as a typical tale of a ghost seeking revenge after death, where does reincarnation come into that? It's not how I understand that concept at all.
2Shy was another episode that was just okay to me, but a bit too much like a re-tread of Tombs. Oh and what did stand out was that none of the victims were all that fat considering that you're talking about a killer who specifically targets bigger women to suck as much fat as possible! It would surely make sense then for him to be targeting really obese women, but while granted the woman in the opening teaser was pretty chubby, the other woman he was dating didn't even look fat to me?? I guess that says a lot on how acceptable it was to have really overweight women in guest roles, but eh they should of at least cast a heavier woman for his second intended victim.
And The Walk was probably my least favourite of those three episodes, but then it was the first John Shiban script :P Again it was probably the direction that stood out more than the writing, the opening teaser was particularly memorable, but the story itself just bored me after a while. I feel like these three episodes are good examples of episodes that would probably be fine to watch as a weekly episode to give you some good scares, but don't work as well with the more modern concept of binge-watching.
I guess that pacing issues were inevitably going to come up with 24/25 episode seasons though, and it's easy to forget that they were never intending for audiences back then to watch all of the MOTW episodes one after the other, still it's definitely tempting these days to skip over a fair few of them and go right to the classics. Honestly on my next re-watch I'm probably just going to skip that whole second disk and go straight from Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose to the mythology two-parter
Saying that though, Oubliette is the one episode on the second disk that I really liked (if liked is the right word for such a depressing episode *g*) I thought that it was a very good episode for Mulder's character as he comes to emphasise with Lucy so strongly, recognising that she's been trapped in a cycle of victimhood ever since the kidnapping which she never really did manage to escape from :(
I absolutely loved War of the Coprophages naturally, especially all of the scenes with Scully managing to swiftly and logically solve every death over the phone heh, while Syzygy hasn't aged all that well. I remember it being one of my favourites back in the 90's, but eh it's really not as good as I remember, although I still loved the scenes of M/S snapping at one another. I always loved the episodes that had fun playing around with the Mulder and Scully partnership, "Sure. Fine. Whatever". "Her name is Bambi?" War of the Coprophages was definitely the more interesting look at how Mulder and Scully spend their "days off" though and said a lot more about them as characters, while Syzygy played off Mulder and Scully's little tiff as being all about the planets not being aligned Idk. There was a bit of a pacing issue with placing such similar episodes one after the other anyway, and it didn't do any favours to Syzygy as an episode, but I assume that playing them together was intentional for whatever reason?
Grotesque was another episode that I really enjoyed. I loved the psychological horror in this one with finding out that it wasn't demonic possession at all, that Patterson was responsible for the killers after all those years he had spend "looking into the abyss". The direction and the lighting were all really fantastic as well, and the set design with the gargoyle was very creepy. The episode really had some genuinely horrific and unsettling moments, particularly when Mulder first discovers the body under the clay, or that final scene with Patterson locked away and screaming that he didn't do it :shudders: Oh and I thought it was kind of an interesting twist that for once it wasn't the typical blonde female victims of a serial killer, rather it was male art models that were being objectified and killed
Pusher was another terrific episode, watching it now I was struck by how similar the themes are to Breaking Bad actually, that idea of a little man "wanting to be big" who seizes on the possibilities the brain tumour offers him to go out in a blaze of glory. He even gives himself his own own Heisenberg name with "Pusher, as well as insisting on calling and taking credit for deaths that were initially dismissed as suicides (very Walter White!) I pretty much loved all of the set pieces of this episode, the opening teaser and the lingering on "cerulean blue" leading to that shock collision with the truck, the guy about to set himself on fire and begging them to stop him, talking Frank Burst into a heart attack over the phone, and of course that final Russian Roulette sequence! Such a fabulous episode
And then we have Teso Dos Bichos which is another John Shiban script, and is therefore once again terrible. It's just a bunch of boring b-movie clichés really and it all feels so banal, it feels like everyone involved has decided that this will be one of the throwaway episodes of a 24 episode season, but what a waste of time for everyone involved
Urgh I hated Hell Money, I found it so dour and depressing. It didn't even feel much like an X-Files, more a plot that could have been on any cop show that Mulder and Scully just happened to wonder in too. I guess that was partly the point, that Mulder and Scully were so on the outskirts of the case because they were outsiders to the Chinese community, but yeah idk I just found this case really bleak, it's too much for me when some poor character starts sacrificing his own body parts in order to pay for his daughters health care!
It was good to get some background on Skinner in Avatar, and I appreciated how supportive of him Mulder and Scully were, but I must admit that the appearance of the old woman in the red coat and what all that was supposed to mean kind of lost me. Skinner was looking *really* good in this episode though, I thought he looked particularly nice in the white shirt
Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” is obviously one of the best episodes ever!! It's one of the episodes that I remember very strongly from the 90's, mostly for all the funny bits. Mulder's scream when he sees the dead alien, the descriptions of Mulder and Scully when they're positioned as the "Men in Black", Mulder and the pie, "Yep that's a bleeping dead alien if ever I bleeping saw one". But this time around it also really left me appreciating how sad and existential it all was, and how so much of it was about how we should be searching for meaning in other human beings, rather than becoming obsessive about looking up into the stars and trying to find some absolute truth that doesn't even exist. "Then there are those who care not about extraterrestrials, searching for meaning in other human beings. Rare or lucky are those who find it. For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways, on this planet, we are all alone."
Quagmire was another fabulous episode, I loved how it was all about the search for monsters and why Mulder needs so badly to discover one, rather than being about discovering the monster itself. I wanted to punch Mulder though when he was so insensitive about Scully's dog/just wanted to go right back to talking about his monster quest, but he made up for it later (well somewhat anyway!) when he tried to explain to Scully why his quest for the truth matters to him so much. You could really tell that a lot of the episode was rewritten by Darin Morgan, I'm surprised that he didn't get any writing credit for this episode, you definitely felt his influence enough that I think it would have been more than justified
Wetwired is one of the episodes that stands out really strongly in my mind, all because of making Scully get so paranoid that she pulls a gun on Mulder. I'm always the most invested when the case affects the central characters in some way, and Mulder's, "Scully, you are the only one I trust" still makes me tear up /lame. Fantastic opening teaser too. The one thing I would say is that this time around I felt like Wetwired was a bit uneven, it had some very memorable images, but it didn't feel like it came together as well as it could have done. (And it was very weird how another informant kept showing up instead of Mr X, was that actor just not available for whatever reason?) I have a real soft spot for it because of the Scully paranoia plot though, I just love that stand-off between her and Mulder.
Oh and I enjoyed the finale as well of course, I've found myself enjoying the mythology episodes more than I was expecting on this re-watch actually. These days it seems like almost everyone prefers the MotW's, and I totally get why after the mytharc became so convoluted in the end, but when binge-watching the season in one go I did appreciate how the mythology episodes are really the main episodes to deal more with the sort of long-lasting character development which you rarely get in the stand-alones. Even when the case does directly impact Mulder or Scully in some way, it's not like it's going to be brought up in the following episode and become a long-running thread, whereas the mythology episodes will continue plots like say Scully looking into the chip in her neck.
It is all very inconsistent of course, particularly when Melissa's death gets completely dropped and only mentioned again in time for the next mythology episode, but still it does feel like those episodes are the biggest ones for focusing on Mulder and Scully's characters, that they are the ones that introduce the long-lasting emotional stakes and the big cliffhangers. I'm not sure it's fair that they often get completely dismissed these days in favour of the MotW episodes. Yeah there were a lot of classic MotW episodes of course, but there were also a fair few that felt quite inconsequential compared to the epicness that you got in say the Nisei/731 two-parter for example, and you can really see why the mythology episodes maybe made a bigger impact at the time. (At least I think it was the case that originally most fans argued for the conspiracy episodes over the MotW episodes, and now it's the reverse?)