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Home really horrified me, especially when Mulder and Scully first come across the mother screaming under the bed. :is scarred for life: And then the ending :( :( :( It's one of the episodes that I have no recollection of watching before actually, so I'm not sure if it was ever shown on the BBC? Kim Manners did a fantastic directing job with really making it feel cinematic in the way that it was paying homage to old horror films. On this watch it's definitely standing out just how much the success of The X-Files owed to the directors and the cinematographers, it's become a bit of a cliché to say about tv episodes now, but many of them really do have the feel of a big-budget film this season. (And hmm in retrospect that kind of epic we're doing this like a feature film feel was missing from season 10. Apparently all of the writers directed their own episodes, but they should really have brought back some of the original directors)
I liked how Home was so creepy partly because it was all about deconstructing the dark underbelly of this idealised vision of life in a small town/wanting things to stay the same. Even Mulder got nostalgic about wanting to live somewhere like that, but then you get the Peacock's determination to procreate and stay ~within the family~ as a reminder that romanticising the past isn't necessarily a good thing. I especially loved how they juxtaposed the old-fashioned music that the Peacock's car played with the brutal killings that they were carrying out to protect their way of life
One question I did have was that it wasn't very clear to me why the baby was being buried in the opening teaser though (and the alternative audio makes it clear that it was intended for the baby to still be alive when they buried it). Umm this was clearly not a family that cared about genetic mutations, and they were obviously upset and wanting to continue the family lineage, so why would they bury the baby at that stage?
The Blu-Rays include a deleted scene from Home that's a cute little moment, but heh I can see why they lost it. Maybe I'm wrong, but it kind of felt more like David and Gillian ab-libbing than it did M/S, I just can't see them joking about Mulder's "pen light" like that
I wanted to like The Field Where I Died because at least it was ambitious and aiming for something other than yet another Tombs rip-off, but I found it impossible to connect with emotionally. I've noticed that Glen Morgan and James Wong tend to give Mulder and Scully a lot of outside relationships actually (Mulder in 3, Scully in Never Again), so it seems fitting that The Field Where I Died makes it clear that those writers never saw them as romantic soulmates, but eh I don't think it makes it any more powerful to make Mulder's soulmate some random guest star that we'll never see again. Mulder seemed to be completely convinced by Melissa being his past life soulmate so fast, but it had zero emotional resonance to me with how quickly we were supposed to buy into it all.
And I'm not saying that I didn't care for it because I'm a shipper, I actually liked the characterisation of Mulder and Scully simply being close friends and always having one another's backs over their past lifetimes, but the problem was that Scully's, "I wouldn't change a day", would be the only part of the episode to really stay with me. Otherwise I think it suffered from trying to tell a huge story of past lives and soulmates within the usual completely self-contained 45 minutes episode of The X-Files. We already know that Melissa is never going to come up again on the show, so really what's the point in establishing this soulmate bond for her and Mulder? I think that it might have sold it more if they had attempted some flashbacks to Mulder and Melissa's past lives even, instead they aim to sell it entirely on the acting of Mulder and Melissa, and that...really didn't carry it off. I can't decide if they were objectively bad performances or not, but I definitely ended up feeling a bit of second-hand embarrassment during those moments, especially when Mulder was getting all emotional and weepy. I'm totally sold when he's breaking down over Scully, Samantha, or some other family member like his mother, but the performance in this episode felt like a ~performance~ to me when it was so hard to emotionally connect to what he was remembering. The same with Melissa's past life regressions, it all felt like a lot of very self-conscious and showy acting tics. Idk I can't completely hate this episode, but I really don't think that they carried it off either. They were trying to sell the story so much on the strength of emotion, and it completely failed to land with me.
It might have been interesting if they had edited an alternative version of the episode for the DVD/Blu-Ray actually to compare, the Blu-Ray shows a few longish deleted scenes and talk about having to cut them out purely for timing reasons, so it sounds like the original directors cut was a lot more involved. It probably would have worked better if they had an hour to tell the story, rather than 45 minutes
And I get the impression that Sanguinarium is a really unpopular episode among the fans, but eh I didn't think that it was all that bad as far as traditional MotW episodes go. I think the biggest problem was that it couldn't balance the black humour as well as Die Hand Die Verletzt did when it dealt with witchcraft (the scenes of the Doctor's meeting felt like a bit of a callback to that episode actually?) One minute it would be poking fun at the idea of witchcraft by having Mulder suggest that a broomstick on the front porch is "probable cause", or having Scully say that why don't they just put out an ABP for someone riding a broomstick and wearing a tall black hat, but then at the same time it obviously did want to be taken seriously as a really dark and gory episode of The X-Files. I think that it might have been a better episode if they had committed to just having fun with it, instead the tones clashed and made it come across as more cheesy than scary, I definitely got the feeling that deep down the writers couldn't really take the topic seriously. Still the twist with the nurse was a reasonably clever one when it turns out that she's actually practising witchcraft in an attempt to protect the patients, and I enjoyed the running gag of Mulder considering a nose-job *g*
I mean it's obviously not the best episode ever or anything, but honestly I just have a lot of fondness for season 4, so that even the MotW episodes that don't quite work are carried off better than some of the rather lackluster MotW episodes from season 3 IMHO. I would sit through this episode any day over a boring episode like Walk or Teso Dos Bichos. There just seems to be a more polished feel about the show in season 4 I guess?
I thought that Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man was a surprisingly effective character study of the CSM. It did a really touching job at looking at the coldness and emptiness of his life, even though it was a bit too much of a stretch when the episode suggested that he would immediately hand in his resignation if he became a successfully published author, he was having way too much fun with his power to just give it up like that! Still it was a nice touch to see just how frustrated and upset the CSM got when they messed with the ending of his story (and lol him getting so excited and carried away about its publication, only for it to be revealed as just some trashy magazine). His being a frustrated writer actually fits rather nicely with how much he tried to impose his will on the real world after no one wanted to read his "frankly crap" fiction :P The episode did a good job of humanising the character IMO, while not taking anything away from him being the shows figure of evil
I've seen some suggestions that the episode was meant to be taken as a complete parody of the conspiracy episodes, but I didn't get that from it at all? Maybe when they take the CSM's reach a bit too far with the Oscars and Superbowl comment they were having fun with themselves, but otherwise I wouldn't say that there are enough winks to tell us that this episode isn't meant to be taken seriously as the characters history? Was it taken as canon at the time or not does anyone know? I was surprised that the DVD/Blu-Ray extras had no interviews or commentary for this episode actually, it would have been nice to get some more thoughts on it from the writing staff, although interestingly I did read this interview with Glen Morgan where he talks more about their intentions with it
Another problem arose when William B. Davis announced he hated the script. “I thought Bill was going to be thrilled to have a show about him,” Wong said. “I had dinner with him, and basically he spent the entire time telling me, ‘This is a terrible script! This is horrible! I can’t do this!’ He didn’t like anything about it. He thought it didn’t make sense, that that he didn’t know who this person was, that it wasn’t him. He hated it.” Davis promptly called Carter to ask if this was the real history of the Cigarette Smoking Man (Carter told him no), and he continued to express his concerns with the script throughout the shoot....But for Morgan and Wong, the events are really the Cigarette Smoking Man’s history, even if they are related in flashback. “The Cigarette Smoking Man’s flashbacks were my idea, because I indeed wanted the episode to be a memoir,” Morgan said. But the idea that Frohike could be the real narrator was a Carter-imposed addition to the script, to make it seem as if the events of the episode were not real. Carter even changed the name of the script, from “Memoirs of a Cigarette Smoking Man” to “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.”
And as ever I find it hard to think of much to say about the mythology episodes for some reason, but Tunguska and Terma were both pretty fun, I especially enjoyed the buddy comedy feel of the Mulder and Krycek team-up. The production values feel really high too, what with them running away from people on horses and from explosions, and Mulder getting locked up in prison in Russia! One thing that did annoy me though was Mulder and Skinner's treatment of Krycek. However despicable a character he might be, it made Mulder and Skinner look like real bullies to keep taking physical jabs and using him as a punching-bag when he was in handcuffs. I felt like behind the scenes got a bit carried away with look how much fun the characters are having with tormenting Krycek, but I would have expected Skinner especially to handle it way more professionally than he did
Paper Hearts is another brilliant script from Vince Gillian, and the sort of moving character piece for Mulder that Scully got in the first season with Beyond The Sea. I've read some complaints that the episode doesn't work because it's always obvious that Mulder is being played, and that of course the Samantha reveal isn't going to be revealed this early on, but that never bothered me. I couldn't care less that it doesn't add anything to the ~mythology~, the episode is clearly about focusing on Mulder as a character, and as such it was a really chilling, heartbreaking, and beautiful episode of the show and one of my absolute favourites. Its one of the episodes that has always really stood out in mind with the way that it explores the impact on Mulder when he questions whether his lifelong quest to find Samantha might amount to nothing more than her already having been killed by human evil. Some of those sequences are incredibly powerful, particularly when Mulder realises that the remains aren't Samantha, or when he's sooo relieved that Roche falls for his test. I loved David's delivery of, "It's the wrong house, you stupid son of a bitch!". He really got across how relieved Mulder was in that moment, and how he couldn't wait to get those words out and show Roche up as a liar
I loved how concerned for Mulder Scully was in this one too, especially the scene where she's trying to tell Mulder to stop digging, but then ultimately ends up helping him to dig up the remains when he pleads, "Help me, Scully" <3
And I'm not really sure what to say about El Mundo Gira, it was one that I wasn't looking forward to at all because John Shiban, but I thought it had an interesting idea at least with the main characters gradual transformation into a kind of monster. It just wasn't well-written enough to carry it off, because John Shiban. The characters all seemed really stereotypical, but I *think* the episode was doing that deliberately? At least with the lingering appearance of the soap opera on the tv, and the characters telling each other different tales of what "really" happened, it seemed to be trying to set up some kind of soap opera commentary with that stereotypical love triangle between two brothers. It wasn't a very good episode though, it was really clumsy and awkward in what it was trying to say, but it was at the very least more ambitious than Teso Dos Bichos was I suppose, even the crappier MotW tales this year seem to be trying harder to do something different than some of the procedural episodes from the previous seasons
Oh and the attempted political commentary on illegal immigrants was really heavy-handed, especially the way it ended with apparently nobody caring, even though most of the episode had been focusing on what a deadly and contagious disease was being carried that could potentially kill thousands. But okay, apparently nobody could care less about tracking down the disease carriers?
Actually my favourite moment of the episode would probably be Scully's pointed side-eye at Mulder when the brother talks about only fools believing in these superstitious tales :P
And then Leonard Betts was a pretty fun MotW, it definitely balances the black humour better than Sanguinarium managed anyway. I especially enjoyed Scully's reaction when the head started blinking, or the faces Mulder was making when they were digging around the medical waste *g*
It was one of the most original of those kind of mutant characters since Squeeze too, so many of the follow-ups like 2Shy and Teliko just seemed to be trying to copy the original idea, whereas it came across like they had really thought through this time how to come up with interesting explanations on his biology and why he needed to feed from cancer cells. I also liked how they made him a recognisably human monster, that he's clearly apologetic and not feeding out of choice. I'm really loving season 4 so far, partly because it hardly contains any straight-forward procedurals, there's a lot more interest in experimentation and character pieces, and even a straight-forward MotW tale manages to throw in an amazing twist to tie in with the central arc. I loved that moment when he turns to Scully with, "You have something I need", and the audience immediately knows exactly what he's getting at
I liked how Home was so creepy partly because it was all about deconstructing the dark underbelly of this idealised vision of life in a small town/wanting things to stay the same. Even Mulder got nostalgic about wanting to live somewhere like that, but then you get the Peacock's determination to procreate and stay ~within the family~ as a reminder that romanticising the past isn't necessarily a good thing. I especially loved how they juxtaposed the old-fashioned music that the Peacock's car played with the brutal killings that they were carrying out to protect their way of life
One question I did have was that it wasn't very clear to me why the baby was being buried in the opening teaser though (and the alternative audio makes it clear that it was intended for the baby to still be alive when they buried it). Umm this was clearly not a family that cared about genetic mutations, and they were obviously upset and wanting to continue the family lineage, so why would they bury the baby at that stage?
The Blu-Rays include a deleted scene from Home that's a cute little moment, but heh I can see why they lost it. Maybe I'm wrong, but it kind of felt more like David and Gillian ab-libbing than it did M/S, I just can't see them joking about Mulder's "pen light" like that
I wanted to like The Field Where I Died because at least it was ambitious and aiming for something other than yet another Tombs rip-off, but I found it impossible to connect with emotionally. I've noticed that Glen Morgan and James Wong tend to give Mulder and Scully a lot of outside relationships actually (Mulder in 3, Scully in Never Again), so it seems fitting that The Field Where I Died makes it clear that those writers never saw them as romantic soulmates, but eh I don't think it makes it any more powerful to make Mulder's soulmate some random guest star that we'll never see again. Mulder seemed to be completely convinced by Melissa being his past life soulmate so fast, but it had zero emotional resonance to me with how quickly we were supposed to buy into it all.
And I'm not saying that I didn't care for it because I'm a shipper, I actually liked the characterisation of Mulder and Scully simply being close friends and always having one another's backs over their past lifetimes, but the problem was that Scully's, "I wouldn't change a day", would be the only part of the episode to really stay with me. Otherwise I think it suffered from trying to tell a huge story of past lives and soulmates within the usual completely self-contained 45 minutes episode of The X-Files. We already know that Melissa is never going to come up again on the show, so really what's the point in establishing this soulmate bond for her and Mulder? I think that it might have sold it more if they had attempted some flashbacks to Mulder and Melissa's past lives even, instead they aim to sell it entirely on the acting of Mulder and Melissa, and that...really didn't carry it off. I can't decide if they were objectively bad performances or not, but I definitely ended up feeling a bit of second-hand embarrassment during those moments, especially when Mulder was getting all emotional and weepy. I'm totally sold when he's breaking down over Scully, Samantha, or some other family member like his mother, but the performance in this episode felt like a ~performance~ to me when it was so hard to emotionally connect to what he was remembering. The same with Melissa's past life regressions, it all felt like a lot of very self-conscious and showy acting tics. Idk I can't completely hate this episode, but I really don't think that they carried it off either. They were trying to sell the story so much on the strength of emotion, and it completely failed to land with me.
It might have been interesting if they had edited an alternative version of the episode for the DVD/Blu-Ray actually to compare, the Blu-Ray shows a few longish deleted scenes and talk about having to cut them out purely for timing reasons, so it sounds like the original directors cut was a lot more involved. It probably would have worked better if they had an hour to tell the story, rather than 45 minutes
And I get the impression that Sanguinarium is a really unpopular episode among the fans, but eh I didn't think that it was all that bad as far as traditional MotW episodes go. I think the biggest problem was that it couldn't balance the black humour as well as Die Hand Die Verletzt did when it dealt with witchcraft (the scenes of the Doctor's meeting felt like a bit of a callback to that episode actually?) One minute it would be poking fun at the idea of witchcraft by having Mulder suggest that a broomstick on the front porch is "probable cause", or having Scully say that why don't they just put out an ABP for someone riding a broomstick and wearing a tall black hat, but then at the same time it obviously did want to be taken seriously as a really dark and gory episode of The X-Files. I think that it might have been a better episode if they had committed to just having fun with it, instead the tones clashed and made it come across as more cheesy than scary, I definitely got the feeling that deep down the writers couldn't really take the topic seriously. Still the twist with the nurse was a reasonably clever one when it turns out that she's actually practising witchcraft in an attempt to protect the patients, and I enjoyed the running gag of Mulder considering a nose-job *g*
I mean it's obviously not the best episode ever or anything, but honestly I just have a lot of fondness for season 4, so that even the MotW episodes that don't quite work are carried off better than some of the rather lackluster MotW episodes from season 3 IMHO. I would sit through this episode any day over a boring episode like Walk or Teso Dos Bichos. There just seems to be a more polished feel about the show in season 4 I guess?
I thought that Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man was a surprisingly effective character study of the CSM. It did a really touching job at looking at the coldness and emptiness of his life, even though it was a bit too much of a stretch when the episode suggested that he would immediately hand in his resignation if he became a successfully published author, he was having way too much fun with his power to just give it up like that! Still it was a nice touch to see just how frustrated and upset the CSM got when they messed with the ending of his story (and lol him getting so excited and carried away about its publication, only for it to be revealed as just some trashy magazine). His being a frustrated writer actually fits rather nicely with how much he tried to impose his will on the real world after no one wanted to read his "frankly crap" fiction :P The episode did a good job of humanising the character IMO, while not taking anything away from him being the shows figure of evil
I've seen some suggestions that the episode was meant to be taken as a complete parody of the conspiracy episodes, but I didn't get that from it at all? Maybe when they take the CSM's reach a bit too far with the Oscars and Superbowl comment they were having fun with themselves, but otherwise I wouldn't say that there are enough winks to tell us that this episode isn't meant to be taken seriously as the characters history? Was it taken as canon at the time or not does anyone know? I was surprised that the DVD/Blu-Ray extras had no interviews or commentary for this episode actually, it would have been nice to get some more thoughts on it from the writing staff, although interestingly I did read this interview with Glen Morgan where he talks more about their intentions with it
Another problem arose when William B. Davis announced he hated the script. “I thought Bill was going to be thrilled to have a show about him,” Wong said. “I had dinner with him, and basically he spent the entire time telling me, ‘This is a terrible script! This is horrible! I can’t do this!’ He didn’t like anything about it. He thought it didn’t make sense, that that he didn’t know who this person was, that it wasn’t him. He hated it.” Davis promptly called Carter to ask if this was the real history of the Cigarette Smoking Man (Carter told him no), and he continued to express his concerns with the script throughout the shoot....But for Morgan and Wong, the events are really the Cigarette Smoking Man’s history, even if they are related in flashback. “The Cigarette Smoking Man’s flashbacks were my idea, because I indeed wanted the episode to be a memoir,” Morgan said. But the idea that Frohike could be the real narrator was a Carter-imposed addition to the script, to make it seem as if the events of the episode were not real. Carter even changed the name of the script, from “Memoirs of a Cigarette Smoking Man” to “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.”
And as ever I find it hard to think of much to say about the mythology episodes for some reason, but Tunguska and Terma were both pretty fun, I especially enjoyed the buddy comedy feel of the Mulder and Krycek team-up. The production values feel really high too, what with them running away from people on horses and from explosions, and Mulder getting locked up in prison in Russia! One thing that did annoy me though was Mulder and Skinner's treatment of Krycek. However despicable a character he might be, it made Mulder and Skinner look like real bullies to keep taking physical jabs and using him as a punching-bag when he was in handcuffs. I felt like behind the scenes got a bit carried away with look how much fun the characters are having with tormenting Krycek, but I would have expected Skinner especially to handle it way more professionally than he did
Paper Hearts is another brilliant script from Vince Gillian, and the sort of moving character piece for Mulder that Scully got in the first season with Beyond The Sea. I've read some complaints that the episode doesn't work because it's always obvious that Mulder is being played, and that of course the Samantha reveal isn't going to be revealed this early on, but that never bothered me. I couldn't care less that it doesn't add anything to the ~mythology~, the episode is clearly about focusing on Mulder as a character, and as such it was a really chilling, heartbreaking, and beautiful episode of the show and one of my absolute favourites. Its one of the episodes that has always really stood out in mind with the way that it explores the impact on Mulder when he questions whether his lifelong quest to find Samantha might amount to nothing more than her already having been killed by human evil. Some of those sequences are incredibly powerful, particularly when Mulder realises that the remains aren't Samantha, or when he's sooo relieved that Roche falls for his test. I loved David's delivery of, "It's the wrong house, you stupid son of a bitch!". He really got across how relieved Mulder was in that moment, and how he couldn't wait to get those words out and show Roche up as a liar
I loved how concerned for Mulder Scully was in this one too, especially the scene where she's trying to tell Mulder to stop digging, but then ultimately ends up helping him to dig up the remains when he pleads, "Help me, Scully" <3
And I'm not really sure what to say about El Mundo Gira, it was one that I wasn't looking forward to at all because John Shiban, but I thought it had an interesting idea at least with the main characters gradual transformation into a kind of monster. It just wasn't well-written enough to carry it off, because John Shiban. The characters all seemed really stereotypical, but I *think* the episode was doing that deliberately? At least with the lingering appearance of the soap opera on the tv, and the characters telling each other different tales of what "really" happened, it seemed to be trying to set up some kind of soap opera commentary with that stereotypical love triangle between two brothers. It wasn't a very good episode though, it was really clumsy and awkward in what it was trying to say, but it was at the very least more ambitious than Teso Dos Bichos was I suppose, even the crappier MotW tales this year seem to be trying harder to do something different than some of the procedural episodes from the previous seasons
Oh and the attempted political commentary on illegal immigrants was really heavy-handed, especially the way it ended with apparently nobody caring, even though most of the episode had been focusing on what a deadly and contagious disease was being carried that could potentially kill thousands. But okay, apparently nobody could care less about tracking down the disease carriers?
Actually my favourite moment of the episode would probably be Scully's pointed side-eye at Mulder when the brother talks about only fools believing in these superstitious tales :P
And then Leonard Betts was a pretty fun MotW, it definitely balances the black humour better than Sanguinarium managed anyway. I especially enjoyed Scully's reaction when the head started blinking, or the faces Mulder was making when they were digging around the medical waste *g*
It was one of the most original of those kind of mutant characters since Squeeze too, so many of the follow-ups like 2Shy and Teliko just seemed to be trying to copy the original idea, whereas it came across like they had really thought through this time how to come up with interesting explanations on his biology and why he needed to feed from cancer cells. I also liked how they made him a recognisably human monster, that he's clearly apologetic and not feeding out of choice. I'm really loving season 4 so far, partly because it hardly contains any straight-forward procedurals, there's a lot more interest in experimentation and character pieces, and even a straight-forward MotW tale manages to throw in an amazing twist to tie in with the central arc. I loved that moment when he turns to Scully with, "You have something I need", and the audience immediately knows exactly what he's getting at
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Date: 2016-07-29 07:51 pm (UTC)