X-files reboot?

They either used the same piece of footage twice during the car chase or aproached two identical bridges during the chase! I thought Sully's arc last night was not very well thought out. "Hey I have to run out of the hospital because this is all so important" followed by "this is so important I must drive a car despite being only half-conscious" followed by "oh wait, we have seven more weeks to fill, never mind, it's not that important."

Despite that it was nice to see everyone again and the show grabbed me enough to keep watching.

 

Or "look how the new Ford Mustang destroys the Dodge Charger!"

 

Chris Carter really just loves to overcomplicate and overstuff everything. The plot, the dialogue, the editing, the pacing.

I'm not sure I'd call the reviews of this season raves (it's apparently at 79% on Rotten Tomatoes, though I'm not a fan of their methods), and some of the positive reviews seem to be a bit too nostalgic and overly-forgiving. But considering how close to trainwreck status last season was (mainly the Carter-penned/helmed episodes), I was surprised that this premiere was *slightly* less of a near trainwreck.

Still awful, signature Carter-penned dialogue where the characters speechify at each other and use 20 words when 8 would suffice and seem to be more spouting declarative statements or obvious/near-rhetorical questions at each other (think the "conversation" between Reyes and CSM).

Duchovny is continuing his sleepy performance; there's little of the urgency he had in early seasons of the original run.

The CSM's deal has seemingly been changed (again!) from proud defender of what he feels are American values (however warped his ideals are) and what's right, to a 100% misanthropic cynic who basically is fully prepared and willing to let everyone die and be "God" in a world populated by, I guess, just him, Reyes, and Scully and her son? What happened to the guy who wanted to become an author (one of the best CSM-centric episodes of the original run)?

I thought retconning the end of last season to something perilously close to "it was all a dream" was pretty lame. I guess they dug themselves out of the hole a little bit. But I'm not convinced they originally planned for that ending to be a dream/hallucination/vision, etc.

I did think it was slightly clever (and also simultaneously ridiculous) to go back to that old, weird episode where CSM semi-kidnaps Scully, and indicate a very different meaning to that episode.

 

I'm pretty sure there were at least 87 shots of speedometers during that car chase. It started to veer into parody territory.

I also had to laugh at the absurd discussion between Scully and Mulder at the end where Chris Carter attempts to explain why everything in Episode 1 will be ignored for the next 8 stand-alone episodes.

Also, while I doubt there are many hardcore Monica Reyes fans among the X-Files fan community, if one were inclined to have appreciated her character in the original series run, they pretty much threw her character out the window. She's helping the CSM why? She gave up her entire life for immunity and to rule the world with CSM and Scully and not much of anyone else? Her doing this all for immunity was the specified reason (I guess) during Scully's now-retconned "hallucination", but presumably that's still the case now as well? So she really spent 12-13 or more years doing CSM's laundry and lighting his cigarettes all so we can survive the outbreak? Whaaa?

 

And "even though my symptoms are elevated heart rate, abnormal brain activity, and hallucinations, I hope the hospital puts lots of scalpels next to my bed so that when Mulder leaves his gun in his Mustang he can still kill the henchman".

 

Gillian Anderson is leaving, ratings have cratered from last year, and now they've used the 'Bobby Ewing in the shower' approach to resolving a cliffhanger... stick a fork in this series, it's done... and not a moment too soon.

 

The huge gap between last season and this season certainly didn't help the ratings. That the awful-looking "911" show airing after it actually got *higher* ratings tells me it's highly unlikely Fox will greenlight another season, at least for airing on the network.

Maybe some sort of soft reboot/sequel thing with a new cast on cable might be plausible, not that I'd want that.

I guess they don't have the time-shifting DVR numbers yet, so maybe that'll show higher numbers.

 

While watching, I probably enjoyed it more than the mythology episodes last season. It was a solid hour of entertainment. But as soon as you start thinking about it, it begins to fall apart.

- So, the last season finale was basically just a vision/dream/hallucination? That's a very lazy way of getting out of that painted corner, and hard to believe that a TV show would pull this stunt in 2018.

- Why was the Smoking Man disfigured in Scully's vision, but not in "reality"? And how did he survive unscatched from the missile attack in the original series finale?

- Similarly, how did Agent Spender heal so well from when we saw him last, disfigured to the point of being unidentifiable?

- Who are the new Syndicate? Why didn't we see them in the original series, and why weren't they killed along with the rest of the group?

- Why did the Smoking Man fake the moon landing? Just a cool shot?

- So, we're back to the alien colonization being real... it's just that the aliens had a change of heart because of global warming? Ok, good. At least it doesn't invalidate the whole original series.

 

Those critic reviews are baffling. Carter took a ridiculous finale plot from last season, rewound the whole thing and then made it worse and sillier than before. I would have preferred if they took the now cliched time jump forward between seasons and tried to make sense of last season's mess slowly over the course of the this season.

 

And not unlike the distant cousin show Fringe, which also had an extended Ford commercial as an episode.

When the car chase began I was reminded of Bullitt because of Mustang vs. Charger, just not as exciting.

Picture quality was meh. Grainy during dark scenes.

 

I'm just the opposite. I love the stand-alone monster of the week episodes, especially the funny ones, and couldn't care less about the myth arc. All I want out of this is to have a fun romp with characters we have come to love.

 

Vive la difference.

 

42 minutes is pretty much the standard length for a 2017 American network dramatic TV series.

 

Oh brother... New trailer has Mulder talking about parallel universes. Is that what Scully's dream or vision was?

 

Chris Carter and David Lynch are in a fight to see who can better alienate his show's original fanbase.

 

The last shot of season 11 will be "Mulder" walking out in a dress and saying "what town is this?" and then it pans out to the Twin Peaks sign.

 

On closer reflection, there was some kind of weird Lynchian parrallelism going on in the episode. In Scully's vision, the Smoking Man and Monica Reyes are holed up in that house in Spartanburg. And when Mulder goes there to visit, he finds an equivalent couple: another smoking man and another brown-haired woman. Hmmm...

Edit: And what about the two new agents, who are basically inverted mirror images of Mulder and Scully?

 

holy sh** i agree with everything you said.

 

I liked the Faked Moon Landing scene made me smile.

 

I don't think the publicity for this season has been great. I was not aware of it until last weekend.

The younger crowd who I know had no idea about it.

 

Really liked the new episode...

 

It's obvious that Chris Carter isn't ready to pull the trigger on alien invasion, even when he does pull the trigger on alien invasion as he appeared to do last season. It's almost as if he said 'I really wish I hadn't done that' and desperately searched for some way to take it all back. It's like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, promising time and time again that she won't pull the ball away. Charlie Brown eventually falls for it and ends up on his back. Chris Carter has the Earth's population infected by an alien virus. A UFO flies over Washington. But...nope. He was just kidding.

Bring on the standalone episodes. The vast majority of The X-Files' best and most creative episodes are the standalone episodes. Of course, the vast number of episodes overall are the standalone episodes, but in my opinion, there is nothing in the mythology arc that can compare to some of the great standalone episodes over the course of the show's initial 9 season run.

 

Deep Throat, EBE, The Erlenmeyer Flask, Colony/End Game, Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip.

And that's just off the top of my head from basic memory... all utterly exceptional in their own right and proof of just what an extraordinary and era-defining show it used to be. The series should have ended - and does for me - at the conclusion of Season 8; everything is wrapped up as neatly and gracefully as could be achieved at that point, and it's a pretty great season too - Robert Patrick was outstanding! - but Carter just can't let go, and that has hurt the show and it's legacy... these new episodes (both last and this year's) will kill that legacy stone cold dead, mark my words.

Goodbye X-Files, you were great once.

 

Alright, I finally had a chance to sit down and watch the whole show tonight. My thoughts:

• the story was haaaaaaarible. Cliche after cliche, awful dialogue, totally convoluted to the point of being nonsensical.

• all the blacks were crushed and the whole thing was too contrasty. It's as if they had a gamma space problem that nobody caught.

• there were bizarre juddery motion artifacts during some of the car chase shots, almost like an interlace/progressive issue. Not good.

• I did hear about a -5dB difference between program audio level and the commercials, so either the spots were too hot or the show was too low.

Having said all that... at this point it's just total mindless entertainment, and I just roll my eyes and laugh. But I'm still watching.