Toby Watches The X-Files

[Toby Frost]

Jose Chung's From Outer Space - Season 3, Episode 20

An author writing a book about aliens examines the conflicting stories surrounding that apparent abduction of a young couple. Everyone has their own version of events, and things become progressively weirder and more absurd.

This is a strange episode, almost a Rashomon-type story where everyone's viewpoint is seen very literally. It's a good parody of the folklore around flying saucers, and plays up the silliness of some of the stories, but it's amusing rather than outright funny. There are a lot of nods to abduction stories, and a good picture of an alien smoking a cigarette that mocks the cover of Whitley Strieber's Communion.

Overall, this is a very good episode, and a crafty way of the series acknowledging its own absurdity. Definitely one of the best I've seen, although a similar story played straight would be really interesting, too.

Another, unfortunate, fact about The X-Files is that large numbers of people now believe stuff far stupider and more dangerous than anything Fox Mulder comes out with. Today I read that many Americans believe that Joe Biden and Taylor Swift worked together to rig the Superbowl. I would be interested to know which positions they play.

 

[Toby Frost]

Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose - Series 3, Episode 4

A man who can foretell deaths becomes involved in the hunt for a serial killer.

This is a very good episode. Peter Boyle is great as the psychic, whose gifts have made him world-weary. The humour largely comes from the situation, and doesn't feel forced. I think the best episodes have a sort of low-level eeriness, which is more unnerving than frightening. There's an interesting scene in which Boyle's character talks about a dream, where the slightly aged special effects make the vision he's having all the more unsettling. The only bum note comes from a cartoony Yuri Geller-type psychic, who is played for laughs. Really good.

 

[Toby Frost]

The List - Season 3, Episode 5

A convict on death row promises to return from the dead to kill five people in the prison where he was incarcerated.

This is a relentlessly bleak episode, almost completely without likeable characters. There's a lot of gore, which isn't necessarily a good thing in this show. I suspect that The X-Files works better when it's being subtle. JT Walsh is decent as a prison governor: he's always a villain, but he's very good at it. Ken Foree (Peter in the original Dawn of the Dead) plays a prison officer. (This show includes some really good character actors.) The story is largely set in jail, which is a weird set lit with green lights, like something from an experimental theatre production. The lack of swearing feels quite strange in a horror story set in a prison. It's drab more than sinister, and ultimately there's not much to it. Not a great episode.

 

[Toby Frost]

The Host - Season 2, Episode 2

A human-flukeworm hybrid kills and breeds in the sewer system.

Well, this is delightful. The combination of parasitic worms and sewage combines to make this one of the grossest episodes yet. The monster, which looks like a man-shaped lamprey, is really pretty impressive (and disgusting) and we see a surprising amount of it. In fact, quite a lot of people see it during the course of the episode, and there seems to be no explaining it away. The episode is well-structured, with a couple of good set-pieces. I'm surprised how poorly-guarded this thing is, though! If David Cronenberg made a story about waste treatment, it would look quite like this.

 

[KGeo777]

The Host - Season 2, Episode 2

A human-flukeworm hybrid kills and breeds in the sewer system.

Flukeman!
Yeah this is one of the more famous ones.

That and the Tooms storyline.


I see you are not watching them in sequence?

Jumping between seasons.
Interesting--I felt that show was more sequential than older series so there was references to other episodes more often (in the alien shows especially).