X-files reboot?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Mirrorblade.1, Jan 18, 2015.

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  1. California Couple

    California Couple dislike us on facebook

    Location:
    Newport Beach
    SPOILER!!!!
    Do NOT read.

    Well we know Cig man can come back.
    Fox shot him in the chest several times and never took the head shot.
    Then he floated away, never going under water.
    So alien technology (Kevlar) means he ain't dead.
     
  2. smilin ed

    smilin ed Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham
    Reading some whole-series reviews talking about two excellent episodes and a two or three good ones makes me want to take ten episodes on the trot from the original series and see if they were any more consistent. I suspect not. Likewise, the sympathy that reviewers show towards Anderson (a far better actor than this, blah, blah) and the negativity towards Duchovny's performances also seems surprising. I like the show and I like Duchovny, but never at any point did I think he was an acting great and I don't think he's any worse now than he was then. He inhabits the role rather well. Overall, I've enjoyed this series. The only episode I didn't care for was the first, and of the rest, there were (I think) four that were top-notch, a couple good and the others at least decent. I think that's pretty good numbers when you look back at earlier series. I do think that the shows haven't been well-served by what seems a short running time, however. Some of these stories could have been developed further (Familiar, for example) over an actual hour of TV time (or more).
     
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  3. Mirrorblade.1

    Mirrorblade.1 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Best episdoe of the season very graphic but great..
    Please let csm die please no more.,.
    A new villian is needed.
     
    marblesmike likes this.
  4. marblesmike

    marblesmike Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania
    I know others have mentioned it before, but man oh man did they up the blood and gore this season! Is this indicative of the violence in network television nowadays?
     
  5. Wright

    Wright Forum Resident

    Apparently, none of series regulars ostensibly killed in the last episode are necessarily dead - this all according to Carter:

    Skinner, in an act of sacrifice, tried to gun down Monica Reyes and the Smoking Man. Reyes, it seemed, took a few bullets. And Skinner ended up sandwiched between two cars. Did both characters meet their maker?

    “As I like to say, no one stopped to take their pulses, so of course there's a possibility that they both survived,” Carter said.


    [...] Mulder finally takes out William B. Davis’ Smoking Man with several gunshot before throwing him into the ocean. CSM has survived a missle, so surely he could take a few bullets from Mulder at point-blank range, right? Carter, as always, was cryptic about CSM’s fate.

    “Scully had these images of him when she had her visions, with a face that had been totally reconstructed. Then, as we saw in episode, the season opener this season, and the season finale, he seemed to have been completely healed, although he had minor scarring. That was by design. He has powers to rejuvenate. So, is he dead? That's a question that remains to be answered,” Carter said.
     
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  6. Mirrorblade.1

    Mirrorblade.1 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    William B Davis getting up there..
    I wish Carter have guts let characters die and stay dead..
    Monica is gone..
     
  7. smilin ed

    smilin ed Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham
    I hope Skinner lives, however...
     
    MikeInFla likes this.
  8. MikeInFla

    MikeInFla Glad to be out of Florida

    Location:
    Kalamazoo, MI
    Was really hoping to see John Doggett but Robert Patrick had scheduling issues.
     
  9. NickCarraway

    NickCarraway Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gastonia, NC
    It looked to me like he dove under his car before CSM's car hit him.
     
  10. NickCarraway

    NickCarraway Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gastonia, NC
    TXF has turned into a Monty Python sketch.

    [​IMG]
     
  11. I really disliked the first couple of episodes this season. They seemed amateurish

    But then things clicked and they hit their stride and I thoroughly the second half or more of the season.

    Thank goodness Glen Morgan was involved. Carter seems to have lost his mojo.
     
    Severin22 likes this.
  12. GentleSenator

    GentleSenator what if

    Location:
    Aloha, OR
    i agree with you but what about the end?
     
  13. I thought the end was perfect.
     
    Encuentro likes this.
  14. Sean

    Sean Senior Member

    Location:
    Ottawa
    Speaking of X files, I was playing this tonight.
    [​IMG]
     
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  15. smilin ed

    smilin ed Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham
    Sadly, in the UK on the often execrable Channel 5, the show was shifted from a 9 pm slot to a 10 pm slot and even to an 11 pm slot. Wish the BBC had been able to keep it. Perhaps this was down to the negative critical reaction to it in the US and and the kind of moronic UK pieces that followed (i.e. why review the show when we can base our comments on what we read on US websites...) like The Guardian asking if it was ever any good in the first place etc etc. Shame, because I agree with Mazzy (though I enjoyed the second episode more than he did). I certainly hope it's not the last series.
     
  16. Wright

    Wright Forum Resident

    As I look back on both these seasons, I think they should have just grabbed the bull by the horns and done the whole alien colonization thing, which the whole original show was leading up to.
     
    Dennis Metz likes this.
  17. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I wish they’d just gone full serialization and dealt with the alien issue nonstop over the entire season. End every episode on a cliff hanger, kill off some major characters on the way, and end the series with this cast with it resolved.
     
    Wright likes this.
  18. Severin22

    Severin22 Well-Known Member

    Location:
    WI
    I thought the finale was a good way to end the show, much much better than The Truth, or the 2008 film. If thats the way it ends I'm happy. Though if they bring it back, you bet I'll be watching.
     
    marblesmike, Lownote30 and Encuentro like this.
  19. Wright

    Wright Forum Resident

    Yeah, that's what I meant... Carter might have thought that he was up-do-date when it comes to content, but he misjudged the way that TV shows have changed in terms of form in the past 15 years. The combination of standalone and serialized episodes just doesn't work these days.
     
    DreadPikathulhu likes this.
  20. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I thought that some of the stand-alone episodes were better than the mythology episodes, but a competent writer could have found a way to integrate those into a serialized season without stopping the main plot. After 25 years I just don’t care enough about the alien invasion - move on to something new!
     
  21. Wright

    Wright Forum Resident

    I agree: some of the standalones were quite good, but I didn't feel like I was able to enjoy them on their own terms. It still felt like stalling, like procrastination, in a way that I didn't experience during the original run.
     
  22. Encuentro

    Encuentro Forum Resident

    Yes, Star Trek: Discovery was able to pull that off. Many episodes were semi-standalone episodes but still tied to the Klingon storyline. The integration was seamless. So it can be done.

    The tech run amok episode was one of the best of this season, but it wasn’t tied to the mythology arc. It could have been loosely tied to the mythology arc with a couple of tweaks here and there, similarly to the season 3 episode “Wetwired.” That episode dealt with television signals being used to control people. It worked well as a standalone episode and was loosely connected to the mythology arc. Or they could have just ended the mythology arc at some point and moved on to a new arc, brought the series up to date and introduced a serialized format as Star Trek: Discovery has. Discovery’s creators recognized that times have changed and adjusted accordingly.

    Don’t get me wrong. I have been enjoying this revival, but it seems that Chris Carter wants to relive the glory years of the 90s, evidenced by the fact that he is using the old introduction. The 90s are over. It would interesting to see a 21st Century X-Files.
     
    DreadPikathulhu likes this.
  23. tone ded freb

    tone ded freb Senior Member

    Location:
    Arizona Snowbowl
    I'm grateful we got these two new seasons. It was like revisiting an old friend. As mentioned above, it did seem more graphically violent, though.
     
    Galley and smilin ed like this.
  24. balzac

    balzac Senior Member

    Awful, awful finale. But I expected this from Chris Carter.

    Last thing first: I doubt Fox will pick this up for another season due to mediocre ratings (last I checked), but if Fox does pick it up, or if they get a deal to go first-run on Hulu or Netflix or something for another season, regardless of which characters/actors come back, they need to FIRE Chris Carter. Awful writing, awful direction. I don't know if he's technically the "showrunner", but he's certainly steering the ship. They need to remove him.

    As I've said before, if they want to give him some sort of "Advisor" role (kind of what George Lucas was *supposed* to be when he sold Star Wars to Disney; essentially a ceremonial position where he could make some random suggestion that they may or may not use, and with the showrunner having the option of ignoring him), that's fine. But new showrunner, new writers, new directors.

    Contrary to reports I've seen that suggest Season 11 was either "much better" or "much worse" than Season 10, I thought they were pretty identical in quality. I suppose Season 11 by virtue of being longer had a few more "okay" standalone episodes.

    But man, this finale was bad as a single episode of TV, and was bad as a season finale, and bad as it pertains to the show's mythology.

    The kid playing William isn't a good enough actor to pull off what they're asking of him (and what they're asking is pretty minimal anyway). His "monologue" (all of which *already* sound ridiculous due to Carter's idiosyncratic awful writing) was poorly delivered. Out of his league acting-wise.

    They've made William and utterly unlikable character in every way. He's a total d**k to those *multiple* girlfriends, and they dragged them *back* onto the show again to play out his story in this finale.

    Super annoying that they had Scully and Mulder flip-flop on their feelings for William in the final scene. Now all of a sudden, Scully is like "Meh, he's dead, whatever..." and Mulder is upset. I have to say that "If I'm not a father than what am I?" may be the LEAST Mulder-ish line in the history of this show.

    Gun shot head wounds in the episode were weirdly minimally gory, yet William literally explodes people? It was laughable.

    I could go on and on, but this was just awful, awful TV. I had the bar set so very low, and this was just as bad if not worse than I could have imagined. I guess they avoided the super-rushed, haphazard nature of last season's finale, but they did so by basically DELETING the entire alien invasion/government coverup conspiracy stuff, as well as the already-hackneyed CSM "virus" subplot.

    Instead, they had CSM and Reyes running around bumbling more than Skeletor and one of his henchmen. Has CSM ever been *this* disorganized and impotent? He's not scary or intimidating at all, so what's left for his character?

    Scully is pregnant. Chris Carter elicits more face-palms than ever before. Continually doing cliffhangers (what, was *this* episode all a dream too?) is lazy and dumb enough, but they couldn't even make it a slightly good cliffhanger.

    Fire Chris Carter, get this on Hulu or Netflix for one finale season, pay Gillian Anderson a TON to get her to come back to wrap this thing up for a final 5 or 10 episodes. Carter has dug a hole that I don't think even the most talented writer could fully dig the show out from under (without rebooting the whole thing I guess, or just ignoring Season 10 and 11), but a great TV writer and showrunner could patch this up much better.
     
    GentleSenator likes this.
  25. marblesmike

    marblesmike Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania
    I take it you didn't like it!

    I don't think Chris Carter needs to be fired, as he's the creator of the show, but of course the quality isn't as high as it was during its prime. I mean, sure I could have nitpicked every little thing that happened and said "jeez it didn't meet my expectations so it was awful," but I didn't. Maybe I wanted to like it and in the end, that attitude is what saved me from hating the new season. On the flip side, you all but confirmed that you expected to not like it and I do think that has impacted your ability to watch the show with any sort of enjoyment. To each his own though. It'll be interesting to see where they go with the show. I think I'm in the majority when I say I don't think they need to or should bring back the CSM if they do bring the show back, but hey it's the X-files, so who knows.
     
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