Posted in: Movies | Tagged: David Duchovny, entertainment, fox, gillian anderson, Robbie Amell, television, x-files

The X-Files: Event Series – I Wanted To Believe

I didn't get to watch the X-Files: Event Series when it aired on Fox back in January. I caught the ending of one episode and that was about it. But I got sent a Blu-ray copy of the six episodes to check out and I did so over the last couple of days.

I watched the show regularly for the first few season when it ran back in the 90's. I was hooked early on, amazed by the season finales and then frustrated with the start of the new seasons as they put all the genies back into the bottle. The status quo was always Fox Mulder believed and Dana Scully didn't. I checked out about the time Robert Patrick joined the show and David Duchovny left. So with the main stars back, I wanted to like it…. and I sort of did.

My review comes down to basically this question, "what are you expecting from the six-episode season?" They call it an "event series", but its not. The First and Sixth episodes are part of an event with the other four kind of stand alone episodes that might move the overall story ahead a smidge at best.

The first episode was very dramatic, Mulder's eyes are opened to the real conspiracy and everyone is running around like a chicken with their head cut off. Six episodes like this would be a bit frantic but exciting and fast paced. But we didn't get that. All the set up done here was then pushed aside with the only thing coming out of the episode was the reopening of the X-Files.

The second episode was a monster-of-the-week type of story that they used to do, but because it was an event series, I spent the whole time trying to figure out how it tied into the overall story. It didn't. But that said, it was a good monster-of-the-week episode for a show that just about created that motif.

The third episode was what the show had done on different occasions. A somewhat comedic episode with Mulder having a crisis of faith and a nice spotlight on comedic actor Rhys Darby. It reminded me in tone of the episode from the main run with Alex Trebek and Jesse Ventura. A fun episode but again, nothing to do with the event.

Episode four was another monster-of-the-week episode but also delved a bit into Dana's personal life with the passing of her mother. A tough episode for me to watch having just loss my grandmother a week ago. The story was again good for the type it was but had little to do with the main arc as I could see it other than to stress the connection to her own child she gave up for adoption.

The fifth episode sort of fit into the event in that in introduced two new characters that were a carbon copy of Mulder and Scully. Agent Miller (Robbie Amell) and Agent Einstein (Lauren Ambrose). It has some humorous moments with an overall serious theme and showed how the older agents could lead the younger ones astray but still got the job done. If this is a passing of the torch episode, it seems out of place and since the characters return, it feels like its more than just a fun one-off thing to do.

The final episode brings back the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B Davis) who we got a glimpse of in the first episode as well as Agent Reyes (Annabeth Gish) and suddenly all hell is breaking loose. Everything is supposed to be revealed but in truth, it's just kind of a mess that isn't explained but rather thrown out there for the reader to unravel. And it ends with no resolution and a cliff hanger.

Whatever good feelings I had for the event series going into the final episode were killed by the ending which wasn't an ending at all. If you've come to the event series for an event… you'll be disappointed. It's not an event in anyway. It's just build up.

But if you are looking for more episodes of the X-Files TV series you loved from over a decade ago… here are five more you can enjoy. Skip the sixth one until we see for sure that they'll be coming back to finish the story and then only watch it an hour before the new season starts.

The episode with Rhys Darby is definitely the highlight of the six, especially for fans of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. 

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