X-Position

For the past year or so, I've been re-watching all nine seasons of The X-Files, in order from the beginning through to the end. Altogether, this comes to 201 TV episodes and a film, roughly 146 hours of television.

I obviously can't do this much material critical justice in a blog entry, but there are a couple of comments I feel the need to share.

Gillian Anderson is at better actor than David Duchovny, by at least an order of magnitude. She's also a surprisingly gifted director (see the episode all things), although a less-than-fantastic scriptwriter. Duchovny is insufferably twee in both these capacities.

William B Davies (Cancer Man) appears to have structured his episode as a writer-director, En Ami, entirely around close-ups of Scully's cleavage, which I can't really argue with.

The series actually improves enormously in the final three seasons, as characters start developing and being affected by their experiences (something that hasn't happened... well, before, really). New characters arrive, the whole thing becomes an ensemble drama rather than a two-handed anthology series, and it all picks up splendidly just in time for the cancellation.

This does follow a disastrous nadir around the middle of Season 5 -- which is where I got up and left the first time around. Campy self-aware humour worked well in the first three seasons, where it formed a welcome contrast to the po-faced (but in its own way wonderful) horror-mystery material surrounding it -- but this was precisely because it cropped up only in very occasional episodes. Seasons 5 and 6 are almost exclusively camp, twee drivel, with the occasional redeeming gem like William Gibson's fantastic Kill Switch.

Unfortunately, things do get a bit cramped towards the end of Season 9, as the creative team attempts to provide closure for many of the ongoing plotlines, and succeeds only in failing to satisfy with respect to any of them.

SPOILERS now for the final two-parter, The Truth:

Despite everything I'd been promised, the end of the series resolves pretty much bugger all, and doesn't even reveal much that you couldn't have picked up from the earlier arc episodes if you'd been paying attention. The final scene, with Mulder and Scully contemplating the coming alien invasion and trusting to God to help them avert it, is rather sweet, but the rest of the thing is pretty much a waste of time.

Particularly when it reveals -- oh so very surprisingly -- that the series' arch-villain isn't in fact dead, but has survived his terminal cancer and precipitate wheelchair journey down a flight of stairs, as inexplicably as he previously survived being shot in the head and losing all his blood. It obviously runs in the family, as Mulder also frequently comes back from the dead -- in one case after burial and considerable decomposition -- and Cancer Man's other son, Spender, makes a similarly impressive comeback from being shot in the head and set fire to.

In The Truth, a helicopter fires an air-to-surface missile directly at Cancer Man's knees, and we are graphically shown its impact and the subsequent comprehensive detonation of his flesh and skeleton. Fifty quid says they bring him back for the second film, if there ever is one.