I’ve heard a lot of high praise but it’s such a weird fucking show. It’s like as if Alex Jones made a TV show with all the cliche conspiracy theories.
I don’t know if I want to continue.
In fairness, you need to give recognition to the prominence and date of the show - a fair few X-Files episodes are what made that theory a common cliche. (Same reason Halo 1 comes across nowadays as a bland generic shooter despite being full of original ideas - because all following shooters are clones of it.)
Either way, the middle seasons are best in my opinion, they do a better job of taking themselves less seriously, some goofy fun, and having fun with weird ideas.
This true, along with a bunch of other TV firsts or tropes it created. Moody atmospheric electronic scores. Filmic shooting style with actual dark scenes broken through by those xenon torch beams. Doing actual science and testing on camera. A mythology arc that runs through weekly adventures before being the focus for a couple of episodes at a time. Etc etc.
My example is always the OG Halloween - It seems cliche now because everyone since then has copied it so much.
There was that one episode where it's made perfectly clear MLK was assassinated for "talkin like a maoist"
I don't really see what it has to do with Alex Jones unless that's just the only other time you've heard of a conspiracy theorist. It's a show about the deep state and I hate to tell you this but the deep state isn't just like a right-wing fringe lunatic thing it a) exists and b)has been studied and analyzed by many on the left.
I give props to the show for putting the postwar US-West German-Japanese fascist axis on Primetime. They have episodes called "Paperclip" and "731".
Also a lot of the Monster of the Week episodes explain their paranormal phenomena by talking about actual US programs and history like MKULTRA, testing drugs on troops, testing bio weapons on civilians, etc.
It's a goofy, silly show with two young hotties, but it has decent politics.
I think it's more otherworldly and esoteric than Jones's anti-semitic dog whistles and "satanic globalists", but sort of.
It's Scooby Doo, but with adults and better production values.
Scooby Doo (2002) is the only Scooby doo with adults and a scene where shaggy grows tits
:tromp: FAKE FAN! Fake scooby doo fan! Shaggy only grows tits in the second movie, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004).
It's a stylish paranormal mystery show. People don't like it because it's super insightful or anything, it's just fun watching Mulder and Scully fight Mothman.
That said the Alex Jones comparison isn't totally out there, conspiracy theories were literally becoming a "thing" in popular consciousness at that point like never before. Alex Jones first TV show and X-Files both premiered in '93. They both hooked into the zeitgeist for some reason.
It's like a lighter, fluffier Hellboy, really. Or what the FBI does when the BPRD can't be bothered to deal with small time stuff.
They both hooked into the zeitgeist for some reason.
Computers were becoming more common and people were ready to barf their most unhinged theories they've kept to themselves for years. I imagine conspiracy theories also added onto the "rebellious" nature of the decentralized internet at the time
Honestly it's a fun watch when I want to turn off my brain and see Mulder deal with something stupid (like there's a Midwestern vampire episode that's pretty awesome), the overall metaplot is fuckin' weird though but I prefer it over Supernatural that just defaulted to Christian mythology
I gotta hand it to Supernatural though that they went super hard on christian mythology. Also I think anything else would've felt way out of place to culturally disrespectful since it's basically US Midwest People: The Show.
Charming as they are, Sam and Dean shoot Buddha in the face or something would've felt wrong
Honestly I've always favored the "all the mythologies are true" type of new weird cosmology (i.e. it's all true but humans are unable to fully grasp it) instead of how Supernatural had a lot of other culture's deities as subservient (Kali having a fling with Michael and then most other Hindu gods getting punked on by Satan) or just outright beneath the main Christian styled antagonists. Good series though, especially with Sam and Dean being a great brother relationship captured on TV.
One quote that always stuck in my brain was having Odin make some quip about "I'm supposed to get eaten by a big wolf!"
And like come on dude thats your fated destiny in your mind, you cause so much bullshit trying to avoid that fate it shouldn't be a joke to you! Just lazy and bad writing.
In fairness I'm pretty sure they also fought a war with the angels and won in a later season. It leaned hard in to Christian mythology but iirc their conclusion was that god was absent, evil, or both, and that at the end of the day the agendas of heaven and hell were the same as far as normal people are concerned.
But yeah, the "not-white people dieties and archaic white people dieties are all the same and actually they're cannibal fairies or something" was a very woo boy slow down a moment episode.
It really is part of my top 10 X-Files episodes. Also the Leech Man, anything with the hacker nerd guys, as well as the crazy ghost episode were all really fun.
I gave up on Supernatural like the 8th time Dean had personal growth and started to become a well rounded functional person and they were like "Shit we got renewed for another season better kill all the women in his life so he can go back to being a nomadic man-child!"
Have you ever just sat down and watched a couple hours of Alex Jones? Not youtube compilations but the raw shit? IDK maybe early 2000s Jones was different, but for at least ten years it's all just undisguised racism and standard GOP talking points. Delivered in a real bad improv style because it's obvious he doesn't prepare or actually believes anything
You've got cause and effect backwards. X-files created the cliche theories for the show. It's really more Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM than Jones. Keep in mind this was the 90s. People were just as ignorant but there wasn't an infinite fountain of bizarre delusion at everyone's fingertips the way there is now. There were fewer venues to fall in to the "Fluoride is a commie plot" world.
A big thing with the X-Files wasn't the conspiracy stuff, it was that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had great stage presence and were regarded as the sexiest people on television. Or that the show had "arc stories" related to an overarching plot, which wasn't really a thing at the time. It was sort of a horror anthology show for the most part. You were supposed to sympathize with Fox's moon eyed credulity and willingness to believe every silly thing that came along bc of the disappearance of his sister, while Scully's flat-earth atheist businesslike professional attitude provided a foil and, like, seriousness to an otherwise silly series. Together they made for a fun team as they coped with whatever weird thing happend this week.
It had some notably good episodes. The one stand-out I can remember is the recurring character who was responsible for a bunch of locked-room mystery murders. It turned out he could squeeze himself through tiny spaces and came out of hybernation every few decades to eat people's livers before going back to sleep. it was creepy as hell by the standards of 90s television.
The one stand-out I can remember is the recurring character who was responsible for a bunch of locked-room mystery murders. It turned out he could squeeze himself through tiny spaces and came out of hybernation every few decades to eat people’s livers before going back to sleep.
Eugene Tooms, great episode whenever I see like a grated vent or something like that in a bathroom it's the first thing my mind goes to all these years later
Kinda, but with the Seinfeld caveat that it's the source of all those cliches rather than a hack show that's just copying them all. It also takes the concept seriously and comes out the other end with decent politics, Alex Jones came later and is just abusing famous cliches to smuggle in his fascist ideology. Like seriously, he's an unbelievable hack and moron, 99% of shit he says is reworded movie quotes or plot points.
Obviously there's no accounting for taste and all that, but "idk I'm just not having fun" is unironically a better reason to dislike something than misunderstanding what it is.
Kinda, but with the Seinfeld caveat that it’s the source of all those cliches rather than a hack show that’s just copying them all.
Macbeth is overrated, it's just a bunch of famous quotes strung together
:I-was-saying: I enjoyed the plot lines. The arc where Scully was 'abducted' and everyone was freaking out about the implications :chefs-kiss:
X-files is a fictional TV show with the premise "what if a skeptic doctor and a weirdo with nice hair--will they, won't they--went around looking into unexplainable paranormal events and found out many of them were real, and also there was a global conspiracy conducted at the highest levels of many governments about extraterrestrials?"
alex jones' meteoric rise came later and was basically, "what if Alex Jones, like Junior Soprano, watched the X-files believing it was documentary footage."
also, the most intensely controversial favorite/hated episode is from Season 4 and titled "Home". i still think about it sometimes, though maybe that's because i watched it as a teenager. i think it wasn't rebroadcast until syndication and was the first episode to have a "viewer discretion is advised" warning. it was absolutely too much for people back then. it's a one-shot/monster of the week episode and has nothing to do with any arcs, so it can be watched any time. (CW: i don't want to spoiler it, but it's jacked the fuck up).
What if Alex Jones is just the X-Files: The Broadcast Media?
