The show doesn’t really get good until the T-1000 becomes a recurring character.
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Some of my favorite episodes are the ones where they got meta and had fun with the whole premise.
Bad Blood, where we get the same story told from Mulder and then Scully’s perspective.
How The Ghosts Stole Christmas, Mulder and Scully get unflattering armchair psych evals from ghosts.
X-Cops, which, yeah. They’re on Cops.
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holy crap how did I forget X-cops?
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One of my favorites is the baseball-themed episode “The Unnatural” written/directed by David Duchovny. The opening ice cream scene gets me every time.
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Absolute classic episode. Definitely in my top 5 All time episodes. Jessie Martin…ahem…knocks it out of the park.
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Wow, never saw that one, sounds amazing.
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It’s a kind of a mediocre MotW episode, but D.P.O. is memorable for having early career appearances by both Jack Black and Giovanni Ribisi, who turns in a pretty strong performance.
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From the wiki. I really like the story of him behind the scenes.
“The Unnatural” was the first episode of The X-Files that Duchovny wrote by himself. (He had previously co-developed the stories for the second season episodes “Colony” and “Anasazi” - both with series creator Chris Carter, and received teleplay credits for the third season episodes “Avatar” and “Talitha Cumi”.)[4] Prior to the show’s sixth season, Duchovny felt that he did not have the skills necessary; he said, “I didn’t have the surety, the confidence in my mind, that I could write a teleplay … It took me to the sixth year of the show to actually sit down and write one of my ideas.”[5] In late 1998, Duchovny eventually felt secure in his abilities and approached series creator Chris Carter about working on an episode; Carter agreed to the request, and a late-season installment was slated for Duchovny to write.[6]
While both Duchovny and Carter had wanted to write an episode about baseball for several years,[5] Duchovny first conceived the basic premise for “The Unnatural” during the home run race in 1998 between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa when he read a newspaper report about Joe Bauman. Bauman was a baseball player who, despite hitting a record 72 home runs during the 1954 season, never played in the Major Leagues. Duchovny immediately connected the story of Bauman, who played for the Roswell Rockets, with the 1947 Roswell Incident, saying “I just made the association … What if this guy was an alien? and I just started working on that idea.”[6][7] Duchovny later said that “these happy chronological coincidences” facilitated the development of the story.[8]
Inspired by the story of Jackie Robinson (who was the first black player who was accepted into the Major Leagues in the 1940s), Duchovny decided to make the lead character black and set the story before the integration of the baseball leagues.[5][7] After Duchovny finished his first draft, Carter added additional plot points, such as the inclusion of the Alien Bounty Hunter and retired FBI agent Arthur Dales.[6] Duchovny largely worked on his ideas alone—a fact that he was later very proud of.[5] The episode title is a play on the novel and movie The Natural.[6] The tagline that appears in the opening credits for this episode is “In the Big Inning”, which serves as a pun on the phrase, “In the beginning”.
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OP you won’t believe who really killed JFK.
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Season 1, Episode 6 - Shadows
Ghostly overprotective dad exposes dirty company secrets
Our first instance of RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM as a minor part of the side plot. Appropriately for the early 90’s the plotline involved a company selling arms to the terrorists under the table and hiding the evidence.
Season 1, Episode 7 - Ghost in the Machine
Guy invents Alexa, it murders him and is immediately acquired by the Department of Defense
Season 1, Episode 8 - Ice
Researchers find a parasite that maxes out your aggro buried in some prehistoric ice. Paranoia spreads among the crew.
This is one of my favorite episodes of the season so far. Featuring a stand out performance from Felicity Huffman before she delved into a life of crime.
Season 1, Episode 9 - Space
Somebody is trying to blow up the space shuttle again.
I’ll be honest I fell asleep before the end of this and didn’t feel compelled to go back and watch the end. There’s a mission control guy who is haunted by… a weird face?
Season 1, Episode 10 - Fallen Angel
Mulder gets arrested at a UFO crash site, meets a fan who is promptly abducted.
We get a cool reveal at the end of the episode when Deep Throat stops the FBI from shuttering the X-Files because he doesn’t want Mulder to talk. It gives an idea of the weight that Deep Throat has in the FBI, and also that he’s not as benevolent as he has seemed so far.
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YES! Ice is an absolutely standout episode. Great suspense and a nice take on the “locked up with the monster” trope.
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The last act of that episode is soooooooo good
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A fun bit of trivia is that the cigarette smoking man is based on the real-life Nixon flunky Howard Hunt, who wanted to be a novelist but failed so he wound up being a CIA officer. I think at one point the CSM mentions that he really just wanted to be a writer but couldn’t hack it.
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Season 1, Episode 11 - Eve
Creepy identical siblings go on a killing spree
This was a really fun episode - the kid actors were great. Side note: I’m really enjoying the twinges of 90’s nostalgia that I get watching this, and the scene where they ordered fountain sodas to go at the road side diner really tickled that spot for me.
When they show the girl’s cell labeled Eve 6:
Season 1, Episode 12 - Fire
A butler lights the wealthy on fire… with his mind
This episode really ramps up the sexual tension between Scully & Mulder with the introduction of Mulder’s old college girlfriend, but is otherwise pretty forgettable imo.
Season 1, Episode 13 - Beyond the Sea
Scully deals with the death of her father and a prisoner claims to be a psychic
Scully really gets to flex her dramatic chops in this one, and I’m here for it. The plot felt like it was a mish mosh of about 5 different movies from the 90s involving a charismatic prisoner.
Season 1, Episode 14 - Gender Bender
An Amish alien transmogrifies into a pretty lady to seduce men before murdering them
Hoo boy. When I saw the title I considered skipping it because I assumed the episode would be filled with transphobia. While the plotline of “guy disguises himself as a woman to trick unsuspecting men” is not great, the episode never felt like the gender switching bit was meant to be the scary part.
The plot to this one made absolutely no sense - our main villain can change between man and woman seemingly at will, but there are other Amish people who they bury and slowly transform from man to woman (and I assume vice versa), and in the end it turns out they were aliens the whole time? Or being shuttled around by aliens?. It was still entertaining as hell, though, because the Amish aliens were fantastic. Low key some of the best villains of the season so far.
Season 1, Episode 15 - Lazarus
After a bank robbery, the spirit of the bank robber possesses the body of the cop that he killed
Ok now you’re fucking with me, right? Because this was DEFINITELY already a movie where like a death row inmate’s spirit possesses the cop who arrested him. The Simpsons parodied it in a Treehouse of Horror episode. Anyway, this episode didn’t do anything for me. Moving on.
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They cranked out over 200 episodes in less than a decade. Plot lines were shamelessly derivative at times, but their take on time loops is one of my favorites (Monday).
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Just watched X-Cops and it’s as good a 90’s nostalgia trip as I expected, plus it’s a classic monster-of-the-week show, even though it’s from late in the series. The idea of a found-footage horror show was still a fairly fresh concept at the time, and watching Scully getting exasperated with the camera crew is too much fun to watch.
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Shot, chaser
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X-Cops written by Vince Gilligan. Well there you go.
Cop to Mulder: “With all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about?”
Scully to Mulder: “…are you aware that we’re on camera?”