Why would the FBI even have an X-Files?

It's obvious having a department to investigate unexplained shit would come back and bite them in the ass if the government is responsible for a lot of said unexplained shit.

"It was all for show, they didn't really think Mulder and Scully would accomplish anything!"

Then why even leave it to chance? Why not just have the X-Files exist only on paper with no resources allocated whatsoever? Or if they have to make more of a show of it, just assign two glowies who are already in on it and just follow a script that never points back to the deep state.

There actually has been government research into the paranormal dumbass

Because they wanted to control Mulder. He was like a release valve.

Agree OP is a dumbass

The deep state wasn’t planning that far ahead. The x files had existed for decades before under a different name. They had never made much progress before

Project Blue was ran by guys like The Cigarette Smoking Man. Their job was to cover shit up not expose it.

Not conspiracy bullshit. Like actual research.

It’s a huge glaring hole. First tried to explain that allowed Mulder to do X Files because he was a top agent and was one of the best FBI profilers on track to take over a director of FBI before he found the X Files. He also had a connection with a senator. But as it went along just no way wouldn’t have suicided his ass let alone allow him keep doing X Files. Him being Cigarette Smoking Man son is only somewhat explainable reason.

There were people high up on their side too, they had a motivated person or two in their corner and their enemies didn't take them very seriously.

Early on, the X-Files was mostly about spooking cold cases that Mulder was reinvestigating because something similar was happening, or odd murders that were because of something paranormal. They dip into aliens a bit, with Mulder's sad lost sister, but then Skully's actress got preggers os they needed her to bugger off for a season so they had her be abducted. Or was she? But then the aliens and alien conspiracy is now fully cemented into the storyline and mythos.

And originally, Mulder is said to have "friends in high places" in congress or the Senate who support him, but this is forgotten about.

All of this is so that the show can be episodic since anything else means the show ends or vastly changes.

some FBI agent literally got in trouble for assisting with the storyboards, dumbass
the episodes were the least grounded ones and iirc he was black

There was more than one faction in the government. It wasn't all controlled by one person. Also the people behind some of that stuff figured they could manipulate Mulder. Also Mulder was CSM's son. Also CSM argued if they killed Mulder it would just make all the other conspiracy schizos following his work even more convinced he was on the right track.

It's only a problem once the alien mythos becomes the focal storyline. Originally Mulder is looking up old unexeplained cold cases that don't seem to make any sense - thus "X-Files" for uncategoziable and seem outside the norm of explanation. Mulder is seen as mostly wasting his time because he experienced something inexplicable with the loss of his sister, and he hopes that he can solve it by chasing these ghost stories.

The problem for the overall story is that it's all true, and they keep finding incontrovertable evidence of goblins, witches, etc but they get away. If they had kept cameras on them they'd prove it all. And then the Alien Conspiracy Mythos becomes the main storyline - and this involves a faction of the government siding with the aliens. Honestly, kinda lame.

X-Files is a top tier show, but treat it like an anthology show with no continuity and Mulder and Skully are rebooted each episode. It's Twilight Zone, with FBI agents.

In the end, I don't think the entire alien mythos made any sense. There's that one episode where they spill the beans on the whole plot, but if you go back to ep 1 onwards, there's so much that isn't explained or can't be explained.

Has anyone listed all the contradictions? I swear Mulder's sister comes back like 3 times, and some of them were clones?

Show is a fucking mess myth wise because making shit up as they went. Which is fine. It’s them totally ignoring their own cannon that got annoying.

Aliens are here but don’t know that much about them. No wait, government been working for them. No wait wait, just going to take over world. Ignore that, there was no aliens Cigarette Smoking Man just wants to take over everything because he’s a evil white guy

CSM being Mulder's father never made sense to me. It was an obvious late season asspull by Chris Carter. Samantha's father? Sure. Fox's? No. Out of everyone in The Syndicate the only one that really tried to kill Mulder more than once was CSM...except for that one time Krycek asked why don't they just kill Mulder, and CSM says no, because it'd turn one man's quest into a crusade, or whatever. The rest of the Syndicate (WMM, First Elder, Deep Throat, X, Strughold) didn't feel like killing Mulder was worth the trouble.

Mulder being CSM's son, means Scully's son is his half-brother. That's some daytime soap opera bullshit. Fuck that!

I think the premise is incredibly sad while the payoff pretty lame. Mulder's sister is gone and he can't cope with the loss and is chasing phantoms in the hopes of finding her. Can you imagine your sister being abducted, and the only memory you have is something so strange you aren't sure if it was real or a hallucination? Not only do you have a lack of answers, you aren't even sure what happened. That would drive anyone mad and cling to any theory no matter how absurd or insane it sounded.

the payoff

The aliums kidnap one family member of the syndicate as collateral. Basically the kind of shit Kings used to do with nobility.

It actually does make sense. He convinced Mulder’s mom to have aliens abduct Samantha and basically torture her with experiments. He also had syndicate take Scully instead of Mulder to be abducted and experimented on. Only time he tried to kill Mulder was when has the top secret tape but he was trying to save his own ass from being killed by syndicate and valued his own life of his bastard son

A bigger twist would be Samantha's abduction wasn't alien related.

kidnappers come in and place rags soaked with chemicals over their faces

Mulder is in a stupor, and awakens and stumbles down to see her taken away

in the darkness, he sees the flashlight shining behind Samantha and her being held up

he passes out

awakens and it felt like a dream, and he thinks it was an alien abduction

They teases that possibly with Tom Noonan episode which was really good

I wouldn’t mind another spin off continuation of X Files that ignores the horrific revival. If it’s shot in Vancouver BC again and not woke garbage. Which won’t happen. Got some black dude doing the reboot and Disney owned X Files now so it’ll be total ass

I think its more about 'the left hand doesnt know what the right hand does' - of the USA/Pentagon, which is all very fitting and realistic. Even today the different agencies fight for talent and 'gains'.

It's ogre, anon.

It was truly a different time. Many of the plots from 90s sci-fi shows would never be allowed today.

I think there were rumors of something similar to the X-Files, because FBI does have a lot of cold cases of disapearances, and it often is the ones investigating shit like cattle mutilation.

archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2008/july/myths_072408

I hate when actors inject their own politics into their characters. Scully is a Catholic and her best stories dealt with her faith. So no. she wouldn’t get some lefty all about women having the right to murder babies. And Mulder is an anti government, conspiracy sperg He’s be regular on Alex Jones podcast

I recently watched the one season they made of the Lone Gunmen spinoff. It was a fun show for a fan if quite cheesy at times. The last couple episodes brought back Michael McKean as Morris Fletcher intended to be the main villain going forward. Series ended on a cliffhanger. Shame.
What was weird was how they changed their personalities to no longer be such die-hard anti-government skeptics. Their rhetoric was really toned down.

Ignoring the details of the plot, the reason the show worked so well:

shot on 35mm film, excellent lighting, blocking,

sense of mystery and fantastical elements kept in the shadow

effects and costuming extremely good with genuinely terrifying designs

early seasons are horror

modest budget but they spend it extremely well

each ep is episodic and most are self-contained 50 minute mysteries that get wrapped up

each ep feels like a movie

Guess what you can't do anymore? Everything's digital with shitty cgi and lighting and costumes. The people who know how to design great effects and costumes? Don't exist. The show might be on the surface dealing with a creature that's silly - some mutant eel man, but the designs are grounded and the effects great to it's sold as plausible to the audience.

Even adjusted for inflation, new shows have budgets like 10x higher, and it all looks like shit. The old guard of people who know how to shoot, write, film, make costumes, etc are just GONE.

POV: You are (yet another) a dead hooker

I agree except X Files is one first regular shows I remember that used CGI. It’s pretty rough when watch some of FX now

Remeber when the motherfucking Predator that kidnapped Max Fenig in Season 1?

Oh, and here's the absolutely kino opening sequence for the show. It's easily torrentable.
And yes I thought it was funny a new character's actor was basically named Stephen Sneeden.
youtube.com/watch?v=OM1Gren46LU

Sure, it's part of that 90's transition period. but the episodes that visually hold up the most are the earliest seasons which were a lot darker and moodier, and tonally was more like a horror anthology series. The designs people remember the most are mostly the guys in suit monsters.

Have you seen Shocker?

I saw Squeeze when I was like 10-11 years old and it terrified me. For weeks afterward if I was sitting on the toilet I would stare at the vent to make sure the screws didn't start coming out.

The Lone Gunmen show failed because it was trying to be discount Fox James Bond type shit, when it should have kept the tone and look of the early X-Files. Moody, mysterious, investigating some old cold case file. Have to keep the plots grounded and relatively low stakes.

What was up with him and the dead hookers?

Controlled opposition

it should have kept the tone and look of the early X-Files

Absolutely agree. They also nerfed the Gunmen themselves. It could have been so much more.

This isn't talked about as much, but I do remember the early seasons being visually darker with a lot more shadows, and the tone being more like a horror anthology series. As the show goes on, it gets a big brighter, alongside a less oppressive horror tone. They even add a lot of comedy episodes which are actually pretty good, so I can't complain, but it doesn't match that feeling from the original series.

Season 1 is my favorite. Not the best season but pure 90s nostalgia feels. Long shots of not taking, just Mark Snow’s haunting synth score like this.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=JixoIauqpZM

You’re right about horror. Season 1 used a lot Stephen King stories. Tooms, a dude lives in a sewer and hypernotes after eating livers is just Pennywise. Also early episode with little girl with telekinesis which just Carrie

Mulder had supporters in the government like Deepthroat who supposedly wanted to come clean and disclose information about aliens, but it was later implied that he was one of the syndicate conspirators and fed him bullshit to mislead him about the blackoil conspiracy. The syndicate didn't give a fuck about colateral damage done to other government conspiracies.

For me it's the soundtrack, it absolutely terrified me when I was watching it home alone after school back in the days.

The show filming style aped same style used in Silence of the Lambs which obviously was a major influence on the show for obvious reasons.

The temperate Vancouver weather, where's it's raining about 25-33% of the year also definitely contributed to the mood.
Once they moved to LA and it's all sunny desert weather it was jarring.

Mark Snow’s score is very underrated. I’d get CDs back in the day hoping get more of the score but always limited shit. Glad it’s available now on Youtube. This one is a fave
m.youtube.com/watch?v=QnaCrQWsg7M

I should rewatch millenium

S1.E8 ∙ Ice

Fri, Nov 5, 1993

Mulder and Scully are sent to investigate when a team of geophysicists stationed at a remote Alaskan outpost are killed by a parasitic alien life form.

They ripped off THE THING as well.

S1.E20 ∙ Darkness Falls

Fri, Apr 15, 1994

A group of loggers working in a remote forest unearths thousands of deadly insectlike creatures that paralyze and cocoon their victims. Scully, Mulder and a few others end up trapped there.

I want to say this another take of The Thing from the same season, but going in another direction. Isolated group of dudes uncover an ancient predator that is killing them.

The longer the aliums storyline went on the bigger a cancer it was because it was written as they went. Bleh.

Yeah, I liken the earliest seasons to a horror anthology show with limited if not existant continuity where each episode is treated as a mini-movie of the week. I think they should have just started buying the rights outright to pulp sci-fi and horror stories and adapted them directly. I think a lot of Lovecraft and horror comics would make nice episodes.

Darkness Falls

i randomly caught this one on tv as a kid and it spooked me big time, didn't see the show until years later but it always stuck with me

I feel dumb since I just forgot: where is the series supposed to be located? Is this the FBI office in Los Angeles? It feels more like Seattle because its show in Vancouver.

Yes, the score is the score of a horror series, and it sells the mood.

Silence of the Lambs

Thank you. That's why the early seasons felt so cinematic and moody. Silence of the Lambs, Twin Peaks, and Twilight Zone, seem to be the biggest influences on the show.

They are the FBI so they investigate cases.and they classify them in their archives. Normally you have the M for murder, the R for robbery, etc, but there are cases so weird that they couldnt classify and archive properly, so they put them in the X section, simply because there are very few cases that start with the letter X and it has more space.
That is the origin of the 'X' files. They are not trying to research just unexplained stuff, they research everything, and some of that stuff is hard to explain.

This is with 20/20 vision and planning obviously, but they should have treated the series more akin to Columbo where it's a Movie of the Week. Completely give up on having a central mythos, and just have Dana and Mulder investigate something new each week.

Less episodes a season so they don't burn out, and 90 minute run times. It's obvious that 24 eps a season they're gunna run out and burn out quick which is why seasons 1-3 are so golden.

where is the series supposed to be located?

Well, Mulder & Scully work out of FBI HQ located in DC and they both live nearby. Their cases take them all over America and occasionally the world.
The first 5-6 seasons were filmed in the Vancouver/BC area. I live there and one of my favorite parts of the show is identifying where a scene is filmed.
They really got good use out of the North Vancouver industrial docks.

And were they open about said research or did we only find out about it decades later?

What early season episode had some kind of native american folklore fairy creature? I remember some kind of park ranger or something was their guide, and then the twist is that they learn there was no actual agent by that name, and it was some kind of imposter creature? The ep ends ambiguously, and I think it's leering at them from hiding as they leave.

I'm officially reopening the X-Files

The problem with that and having a "monster of the week" episode every week is that it allows people to miss an episode every now and then and they haven't really missed anything.
An ongoing plot, multi-episode situation or shakeup makes it easier to plan seasons and keep people invested.

2 bad monster of the week episodes in a row and most people would tune out and not bother.

some kind of native american folklore fairy creature

Go into more detail about the creature I might be able to figure it out.

Should have had sexier monsters

Is there no ongoing monster of the week show? Why did foreign countries never pick those up. Chinese Supernatural could be fun

tfw no timeless Scully gf

The xfiles existed already its just that no one gave a fuck about those files. Mulder was allowed to pursue them because of his prior success.

Retarded faggot.

FBI located in Washington DC. They spliced stock shots of the Hoover building in. Kind of fun thing about the show is they travel all over the country but joke is always looks like Pac Northwest

Shapes?

This episode of SG1 would definitely not get made today

trust the experts, the vaccine is safe and effective, don't you believe in science?

oops we accidentally sterilized your entire race lmao

>S1.E16 ∙ Young at Heart

Fri, February 11, 1994

Opens with a mad scientist who his colleagues call Dr Frankenstein and his practically dead patient on a table missing a limb which we find out later attaches salamander hand to. Enclosed with his experiment blinking Experiment escapes and reeks havoc

Searching on duckduckgo, the episode is probably "Shapes". Native American folk-lore, shape shifter. One character goes missing and then says "see you in 8 years". I think I caught the tail end of the episode?

I remember trees, park ranger, a bunch of cabins.

I live in Kansas and the one episode where they go to Kansas (weatherman that controls the weather with his emotions) made me chuckle. When they're outside there are mountains in the background in some shots. If you can see mountains you are not in Kansas.

Sounds about right. There were White ranchers who were in a territory dispute with the local tribe and one of the natives or perhap several of them were able to transform into some werewolf-like creature.
I don't remember a fake agent though.

Feminine behavior. Your dad absolutely gaped you

I don't remember a fake agent though.

I think it's because I only watched the tail end of the episode and I was not sure who was called who. According to the synopsis, a character goes missing at the end, named Gwen, and i think I must have thought it was the native park ranger guy for some reason. It's implied Gwen is yet another shape shifter monster.

Never got around to finishing the show and I feel like I just had an atom bomb dropped on me learning that the drama involves TWO secret father reveals

So this happens time and time again: I get exposed to a piece of media, and it's fresh and exciting and well executed. Then years and years later I find out it's rather brazenly ripping off past media.

Here X-Files was copying sources such as the Thing, Stephen King stories, and Silence of the Lambs, rather brazenly.

It's a halfwit faggot zoomer realises there's nothing original episode.

Silence of the Lambs

Scully was deliberately based on Clarice Starling.

Twin Peaks

FBI agent investigates the supernatural circumstances of a young female victim's death. There's no way X-Files would get made without Twin Peaks.

Silence of the Lambs

Clarice is the model for Skully, and the show's visual tone is taken from the film which is why it's a dark cinematic look in the early seasons in contrast to a lot of TV shows of the era. S1 ep "Beyond the Sea" is the film's plot with a supernatural twist.

Twilight Zone

Anthology series about horror/fantasy/scifi stories often with a twist

Any that I'm missing?

Steven King

Many early seasons are just ripping off some King storyline.

The Thing

Not just one but TWO separate episodes in S1.