Date: September 7th, 2026 8:48 AM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
The Unnatural. I always found this episode too sentimental and saccharine for my tastes, though it was acclaimed at the time because it was the era of Forrest Gump and that sort of thing.
Date: September 7th, 2026 9:43 AM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
That’s a good one. It would be hard for me to make a top ten or even top twenty tbh. I do believe it was the best show ever made. Yes even better than The Sopranos and stuff. The Sopranos was a personal drama and social commentary, but the X Files strove for the Numinous and has more depth, with a surface veneer of being about “aliens” so dumbs could still get into it.
Date: September 7th, 2026 10:06 AM Author: Richard Ames
If the show had ended after the first movie came out, it would be the GOAT. Sadly, they beat it to death over the subsequent 4 seasons. They then dug up the corpse and fucked it with a hammer and axe when they did the reboot.
The first few seasons are truly among the best TV ever by far.
Date: September 7th, 2026 1:19 PM Author: Richard Ames
What are your favorite episodes? Are you into the mytharc or more into the standalones? I am a big Mytharc stan and think it actually made a lot of sense through the first movie.
Date: September 7th, 2026 1:32 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
The mytharc is the heart of the show imo and still my favorite. But it wasn’t like the “mystery box” bullshit of today’s shows - they were two or three-part arcs that stood on their own as well as being components of a longer through line. So to me they are all essentially standalone while also being part of a greater whole. That is hard to pull off which is why I don’t think the show gets enough credit.
And I am of the opinion that it has always made sense, while being open to interpretation. Even in the later, weaker seasons they never threw something at you that retconned or rendered inchoate the threads that came before. I think Carter always had it in mind that the mythology was ultimately about a conspiracy to cleanse the earth’s population and engineer an elite race that would inherit the globe. They throw misdirects at you like the Syndicate believing an alien colonization is inevitable, but if you pay attention there is reason to believe that was a cover for a more sinister and human-centric plan to use extraterrestrial threats as a pretext for their own goals.
Date: September 7th, 2026 1:59 PM Author: Provocative Dingle Berry
Ffs OYT. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Piper Maru oil is not FTF oil. WMM’s panic is real. Cassandra/El Rico does not reconcile with My Struggle. Samantha gets ripped out of the 1973 architecture and dumped into Closure. William changes ontological status every six episodes. The Super Soldiers arrive after the Syndicate is ash and somehow 12/22/12 is still supposed to describe one continuous plan. It doesn’t. The bees know it. The black oil knows it. The alien fetus knows it. I Curate the mythology because the wreckage is beautiful. You’re trying to retcon the retcons while sitting there with the exact cranial profile of the species responsible for half of them. The grays are Bald. You are Bald. At some point Occam gets a vote.
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:07 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
You damned Fool. It was clear that the Black Oil was only a medium and that the Syndicate thought they were negotiating over the mechanism of human enslavement, only to discover that the mechanism may actually be human replacement. The Piper Maru oil was trying to get back to the ship, the FtF oil was a dormant strain with reproductive designs.
Samantha died young as a result of the hybrid experiments. Nothing that is revealed conflicts with this. You were duped by the Cigarette Smoking Man.
William was a misstep, I’ll give you that, but he does serve as a sort of savior figure in the show’s Christian subtext.
The Syndicate was burned alive by the Rebels but that doesn’t mean that the Engineering of Super Soldiers just vanished, you idiot. I don’t have to listen to this fucking crap.
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:18 PM Author: Provocative Dingle Berry
Maru/Krycek, Tunguska vaccine, FTF gestation, Cassandra as accession condition, El Rico…. you are mistaking recurrence of signifiers for persistence of mechanism. “Different strain” is not continuity imho.
Same with Closure laid over the ’73 collateral logic, and Rohrer/Knowle/magnetite laid over the ashes. Continuity of surface is not the same thing as continuity of structure. You keep mistaking a smooth surface for structural integrity, which, given your gray-alien Baldness, is perhaps less interpretation than projection.
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:25 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
lol stfu you son of a bitch. I could argue all these points for days but you will just come back with intellectually dishonest ChatGPT summarizations. You are no better than Kritschgau ffs.
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:31 PM Author: Provocative Dingle Berry
I don’t think so, champ. Maru, FTF, El Rico, Closure, magnetite. Pick one seam and argue it. Or don’t. Don’t hand me the collective 6-hour oral tradition of Carterism and pretend you made a point.
Date: September 7th, 2026 7:24 PM Author: Richard Ames
Ehh, I am with cowgod here. There was some real retconning later on (especially around Samantha IMO) and the whole plotline of Mulder being "the key to all this" or whatever CSM said was just so ridiculous.
Part of why the early seasons were so great is because the stakes were so high. CSM absolutely wanted Mulder and Scully dead when they had the tape (the one that Krycek ended up with later on.) If not for Skinner using the Navajo dude to bargain for their safety, they were cooked.
Also I can rewatch the Purity Control episode along like 100x. Fuckin' a the early mytharc stuff is the GOAT.
Date: September 7th, 2026 7:35 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
The Erlenmeyer Flask? Yeah it’s an all-time great, but E.B.E is my personal favorite from season one.
The thing about Samantha is that Mulder never actually saw her again. He saw what may have been clones, and that made sense because she was chosen by his father to be “abducted” for the project. It was later revealed that she died during her captivity and experimentation as a pre-teen. Sein und Zeit/Closure was essentially an epilogue to the whole thing and introduced the Walk-Ins for some spiritual “closure”, but she was still dead. People were just angry that they didn’t get some lame “happy” ending imo.
Date: September 7th, 2026 7:42 PM Author: Richard Ames
Yeah I think this is fair. It's less the desire for a happy ending and more the fact that "clones" got thrown around a lot. Though damn when Mulder first walks in and sees a bunch of Samantha clones. Fuckin a!
What is your favorite actual episode? E.B.E. is fucking good, though Erlenmeyer Flask takes Season One for me. I always enjoyed the Piper Maru / Apocrypha two-parter in Season 3.
Date: September 7th, 2026 7:50 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
My favorite from the myth arc is Anasazi/Blessing Way/Paper Clip, that was top tier. Tunguska arc too - Terma has the best ending in the show’s run. There really wasn’t anything I didn’t like until we got to season 7 and the William stuff. I was satisfied with Two Fathers/One Son and they probably should’ve ended it there.
When it comes to the anthology eps, there are too many to list. All of the commonly cited greats are there, but I also love the really dark/nasty/weird ones like The List, Grotesque, Eve, Tithonus, etc etc etc.
Date: September 7th, 2026 8:06 PM Author: Richard Ames
Oh damn yeah all of those are epic. Krycek becoming friends with the guards in the Gulag in Tunguska / Terma. Fucking LMAO.
The end of Redux II when Mulder names Section Chief Blevins as the traitor is also fucking incredible. Dude runs to his office and is taken out while in a total fucking panic.
Expand on how you think X-Files was striving for the numinous. Not arguing necessarily just curious how you think how. You view the themes as more existential and fundamental as characterized in Mulder's alienation
Date: September 8th, 2026 10:36 AM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
I don’t know how you can pose this question if you’ve seen the show. It is right there in the tagline “The Truth is Out There”. It has a double meaning that should be obvious.
The show treats mystery as something intellectually and spiritually significant, rather than a lore database or puzzle to be solved. It intentionally leaves the tension between faith, science, and longing for something more unresolved.
Date: September 13th, 2026 2:49 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
Mi apologia. If you really are interested, there was much scholarship written on TXF even years after it ended, in the blogging heyday. Including by myself, but that is mostly lost in the old internet like so much vain Gen X endeavor:
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:14 PM Author: bespoke rigpig
Would I enjoy this as a kid from the 90s who recognized and enjoyed the x files parody episode on the Simpsons but never watched the show? Enjoyed Californication and I wouldn’t mind a Scottish? mommy gf circa that playful cucumber-themed clip (NOT cucumbers tp in this case) if that helps clarify my perspective at all 🐶
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:34 PM Author: Provocative Dingle Berry
I’m not recommending an Entire Show to anyone I don’t dislike unless it’s Short af like firefly or True Detective season 1. Lonesome Dove. Is Twin Peaks “hidden” to normies?
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:38 PM Author: bespoke rigpig
Tyty 😋
I love all 4 you just mentioned, 180 - Would you JUDGE me as a curator if I admit I prefer TD2 to TD1? I love the McConaughey Harrelson duo of course but that’s what stands out to me in memory, while TD2 is rich beyond compare IMO (I also love noir stuff and I’m from SoCal so that probably adds to it for me) 🤔
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:41 PM Author: vibrant ceo plaza
I never even watched season 2 because I heard it was Bad.
You don’t even need to watch anything but the Return and maybe season one of Twin Peaks imo. The whole point of The Return was that you can’t go back. It was a meta teardown of the whole idea and basically a Film in its own right.
Date: September 7th, 2026 2:50 PM Author: bespoke rigpig
If you like the golden age of noir and/or neonoir you’ll like s2 IMO
Tyty for this description of Return, because it’s never interested me until now but now I’m unironically intrigued (love both seasons of the original show and the FWWM movie FWIW)
Still always lol whenever I reflect on how I was introduced to Kyle Maclachlan, Halle berry, AND Elizabeth Taylor (the flintstones movie of course!) 😹
Date: September 7th, 2026 7:44 PM Author: Richard Ames
The Return is incredible. No one on Earth could've gotten away with having the Dougie character for 5+ episodes other than Lynch. Truly a spectacle for all time.
I am assuming you've watched the dude on YouTube with the 4 hour "I explain Twin Peaks" video. If not, highly worth it.
Date: September 8th, 2026 10:26 AM Author: Richard Ames
To be fair, I watched it pretty late at night over the course of a few days. So it is probably longer than I recall. But it was compelling, even if Lynch would probably just laugh and call the guy a doofus.