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Humbug was the first episode I ever saw.  I had seen the Jim Rose Circus in concert at a Manson/NIN concert (I am OLD) and seeing Rose on the show piqued my interest.  I was hooked after that.

 

My wife and I, both huge fans of the show back in the day, tried to rewatch it sometime last year and tapped out a few episodes into season 5.  After 4 seasons, the mythology was collapsing on itself, the monster of the week episodes had nothing new to say, and the comedy episodes had gone from cute to entirely too self-aware.  It's pretty obvious Chris Carter had a few good ideas but no clue about what to do, long-term.

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That's the problem I have with Lost now. I want to go through it again, or even other shows from that era, but the 22-24 episode orders are ridiculous. I'm happy more and more shows are moving towards the 13 episode run. Like, I'd love to watch Agents of Shield, but not that many episodes.

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Word. Trying to binge older TV series really exposes the weakness of long seasons, where some episodes are so glaringly skippable examples of "well, we had a 24-episode order to fill. Sorry."

Even my beloved Mission Impossible is full of rote episodes: heel foreigner has secretly replaced friendly (politician/cardinal/...) and IMF must foil the plot and rescue the babyface in peril.

And Wild Wild West is even worse.

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I think its a show that would have been better under the british model - shorter and finite season(s).

NO. Most of the best episodes of the series, the ones that have best withstood the test of time, would not have seen the light of day with a shorter seasons.

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I think its a show that would have been better under the british model - shorter and finite season(s).

NO. Most of the best episodes of the series, the ones that have best withstood the test of time, would not have seen the light of day with a shorter seasons.

Do you think it would have been all mythology and no MOTW episodes at all?

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I think its a show that would have been better under the british model - shorter and finite season(s).

NO. Most of the best episodes of the series, the ones that have best withstood the test of time, would not have seen the light of day with a shorter seasons.
Do you think it would have been all mythology and no MOTW episodes at all?
Depends on how long of an order it was, but yeah, it would've been more mythology than MOTW. The general consensus nowadays is that the MOTW stuff was the best, but it was the mythology that had people going wild in the 90's. At the pre-movie height of the show (before the success of the show made it apparent they were never going to be able to wrap up the mythology and thus had to start dragging it out more slowly), they were doing 7-8 mythology episodes a season, and those weren't going anywhere. So you'd be left with like 2-6 episodes for MOTW stuff. A lot of great stuff would've gotten cut.

As an example, in season 3, Darin Morgan wrote 3 episodes himself, including two all-time classics in Clyde Bruckman and Jose Chung. He doesn't get 3 episodes for himself with only at most a half dozen episodes to share between the rest of the writing staff.

And without 24 episodes to fill, it's highly unlikely Chris Carter accepts a script called "Soft Light" in season 2 from some nobody named Vince Gilligan, and then who knows where the fuck we are in this world.

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Well, I watched the movie. There was an interesting idea in there for a thriller. A convicted paedophile priest has visions of a number of victims of a serial killer,

it turns out that the killer was a victim of the priest as a kid, thus the priest was ultimately responsible for setting this course of events in action.

That would've been an interesting idea to explore in another movie. Instead, this film goes off into organ harvesting, two headed dogs and Frankenstein. There's really no reason this needed to be an X-Files story, and I can see why fans were angry when they got this after 6 years off air. Completely unnecessary.

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Going back to the 24 episode season thing, that's the main reason I haven't watched Person of Interest. If I'd caught it at the beginning and watched week by week it would be fine but as most of my viewing is done on demand these days it seems like a big commitment to make to catch up on it now

 

When this mini-season was announced, I would have assumed they'd have gone the Fringe-route where all the episodes tie in to a bigger arc in some shape or form

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I doubt the big 4 will ever fully buy in to shorter seasons except for "special event" series, though I think Empire on Fox had shorter seasons but that's an outlier.  For the most part, viewers go to cable for "prestige" dramas and NBC, CBS etc for "same old shit" shows that are comfortable and easy to watch -- another go 'round of CSI or L&O, for instance.  So the broadcast networks go for quantity over quality.  CBS is McDonald's to AMC's Five Guys or BGR or whatever.  You get my point.

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Well, I watched the movie. There was an interesting idea in there for a thriller. A convicted paedophile priest has visions of a number of victims of a serial killer That would've been an interesting idea to explore in another movie. Instead, this film goes off into organ harvesting, two headed dogs and Frankenstein. There's really no reason this needed to be an X-Files story, and I can see why fans were angry when they got this after 6 years off air. Completely unnecessary.

 

Well, we - the fans - have some culpability for the story. In the years immediately after the show ended, people turned hard on the whole mythology aspect. So whenever CC or DD were at a con and the inevitable "we want another movie!" thing came up, it was usually correlated with "You know, the mythos was whatever but it was the MOTW eps that we loved!"

 

So that's where Carter's head was at when he did it. Of course, the problem is if you look at all the great classic MOTW eps, pretty much none of them were actually written by Carter. They were all done by Darin Morgan, Vince Gilligan, or Morgan & Wong.

 

I went back and got a copy of the '08 movie since we've been talking about it. I'm about halfway through and your analysis seems spot on. The story they set up with the pedophile priest who may or may not by psychic is actually quite good, unfortunately it's about to go careening off the rails when it gets to that other stuff.

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I think its a show that would have been better under the british model - shorter and finite season(s).

NO. Most of the best episodes of the series, the ones that have best withstood the test of time, would not have seen the light of day with a shorter seasons.
Do you think it would have been all mythology and no MOTW episodes at all?
Depends on how long of an order it was, but yeah, it would've been more mythology than MOTW. The general consensus nowadays is that the MOTW stuff was the best, but it was the mythology that had people going wild in the 90's. At the pre-movie height of the show (before the success of the show made it apparent they were never going to be able to wrap up the mythology and thus had to start dragging it out more slowly), they were doing 7-8 mythology episodes a season, and those weren't going anywhere. So you'd be left with like 2-6 episodes for MOTW stuff. A lot of great stuff would've gotten cut.

As an example, in season 3, Darin Morgan wrote 3 episodes himself, including two all-time classics in Clyde Bruckman and Jose Chung. He doesn't get 3 episodes for himself with only at most a half dozen episodes to share between the rest of the writing staff.

And without 24 episodes to fill, it's highly unlikely Chris Carter accepts a script called "Soft Light" in season 2 from some nobody named Vince Gilligan, and then who knows where the fuck we are in this world.

 

 

In today's world post 9-11 with all of the crazies in both parties believing conspiracies pointing to both political parties it could work.  Just look at the underlying support for the main political candidates; there is very little, if any, common sense left in the world.

 

You could seriously spin something and run with it for years and people would eat it up.  

 

Just look at how people get information now and how easy it is to manipulate people through articles void of facts.

 

I don't like being political but in this current environment you could have a hit, if it is done right.

 

The world is a different place now and a lot of things they warned about have come true in some small form.  Twist the facts a bit and the truths are much larger.

 

15 years ago a show like this was a huge risk.  Now the History Channel and other channels have hours of programming devoted to these types of conspiracies.  

 

Finding Bigfoot will have been on television for 5 years this May and run through its 8th season.  

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So who else DVRed this to watch the Rumble and ended up getting a bunch of football highlights and 30 minutes of show?

*raises hand*

 

As if I needed a reason to hate Terry Bradshaw more...

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You didn't miss much, imo.

 

The first episode didn't do much for me, to the point I have no plans to check out the rest.  Script wasn't particularly good, and Duchovny and Anderson both seemed to be in low energy mode.  I wasn't particularly surprised where they moved the characters - Scully seems disaffected and Mulder's a depressed loner - but it didn't make them appealing to me either.

 

As for the mythology,

 

Retconning the mythology of the series so that's it not aliens trying to infiltrate but a cabal of powerful people trying to take over the US using scavenged alien technology is an even more ridiculous idea that the ideas they ran with 15 years ago. I rolled my eyes when Mulder was trying to explain all this to Scully at the end. They managed to make him sound even more crazy than usual/.

 

I dunno.  I was mostly bored.  There was no spark there.  The way they characterized Mulder's past 15 years made him rather unappealing.  Scully seemed very much a blank slate.  And I kinda think the new status quo gets reconned either in episode 6 or in the next movie or tv season, if there is one.

 

Gillian Anderson should have demanded "Hannibal" lighting and makeup for her scenes.  She looked great in Hannibal.  Here not so much.

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I loved this episode. There was a lot of exposition to fill in new viewers (or people who just forgot the show) and set up the new mythology but I thought it was a pretty much perfect follow up to where they left off. This was the X-Files movie I always wanted but they never gave us. A lot of great callbacks to classic stuff and I'm very interested in the new mythology.

 

Actually, I'd be interested if this was more or less the story Carter wanted to tell originally but had to change to keep the show going when Fox demanded he milk it for all its worth. This kind of reminded me of one of those What If? comics where they have a creator do a story he wanted but got changed (the Hobgoblin reveal, the Clone Saga...)

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So wait.. is it 2 mythology episodes followed with episodes 1 and 6 being Mythology and 2-5 being monster of the week like I read somewhere?

 

I enjoyed episode 1 quite a bit, though

I felt they were way to overt with the Area 51 segmetns (i.e. just straight up showing the alien with no real sense of surprise. Just "Oh hey, there's an alien crawling on the ground")

 

James

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I liked it a ton too, and it totally fit the tone of the original series for me.

 

I dunno what critics were expecting, unless they're remembering the original with some kind of rose-tinted glasses. The original series was pretty flawed, as well.

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