Tag: the x-files

Direct beam comms #8

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TV

The X-Files

I feel like the first episode of The X-Files mini-series got a bad rap last week. A lot of people complained that it just wasn’t very good. I think some of that was just series creator Chris Carter balancing a whole lot of things in the plot in a limited amount of time which made the show feel a bit rushed. In 45 minutes he needed to; reintroduce the characters that haven’t been on TV together in 13 years AND introduce these characters to a new audience who’s never seen them before, introduce a new story/conspiracy to hang the new series off of WHILE AT THE SAME TIME telling some kind of actual contained story in this episode.

Which is a whole lot to do. Which is why a lot of pilot/first TV series episodes aren’t very good and aren’t necessarily indicative of where the series and future episodes are headed.

And in fact without this baggage the second episode was a much improvement over the first and felt much more like a return to form for The X-Files.

Episode #1: “My Struggle” – B-
Episode #2: “Founder’s Mutation” – B+

The Expanse

The two hour first season finale of The Expanse is set to air on SyFy this Tuesday evening. From what I can gather this season ends about two-thirds of the way through the first book of the Leviathan Wakes series of which The Expanse is based on. Just last fall I was thinking that I couldn’t remember the last really good sci-fi with spaceships series on TV — it was probably Battlestar Galactica. And just weeks later The Expanse with its cool visuals and great story swooped in to fit that bill perfectly.

The Expanse is my new favorite series of the season and is an early contender to appear on my top TV shows list of 2016.

Fawlty Towers

The cast of Farty Towels
The cast of Farty Towels

Our local PBS station began airing episodes of the classic TV series Fawlty Towers at the start of the year. It’s probably been a decade since I originally saw the show — I came to the series after watching the British The Office and hearing about it in discussions on that show — and watching it again today Fawlty Towers is still a great show!

Movies

Mr. Holmes

In Mr. Holmes Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen), the world’s greatest detective, is 93, living in a post-World War II Great Britain and has one more case to solve yet is slowly losing his mind to age. Or is there really a last case and is it just as Holmes memory fades certain things get mixed up in his mind? Is it just a mix of ghosts from his past?

By presenting Holmes at the end of his life rather than at the beginning of his career as a detective, Mr. Holmes is an interesting counterpoint to other Sherlock Holmes related TV series like Sherlock and Elementary. – B

Batman vs Superman

With all the lead up to the upcoming Batman vs Superman movie, officially Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it kind’a feels like Warner Bros has been promoting this movie forever. Batman vs Superman was announced ’13 with an early ’15 release date, then was pushed back to March of this year after it was decided that hitting that date wasn’t realistic. And since it was pushed back so far it seems like we’ve spent the last two and a half years getting a constant stream of marketing from the movie.

Is there anything new left to see by actually going to see Batman vs Superman? It’s been so long since that original San Diego announcement that in between then and now Marvel’s released FOUR movies to DC’s none.

Batman vs Superman might be the first movie in history to feel like a re-release on its initial release.

Direct beam comms #6

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TV

The Man in the High Castle
I recently finished Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle series and I liked it a lot. After I watched the pilot last winter the first thing I did was to subscribe to Prime so that I’d be able to see all the episodes of High Castle when they were released, and the second thing I did was to read the Philip K. Dick book of the same name just to see where everything in the show was headed.

The thing I liked most about the book is that there was really no central story. Not to spoil anything, but the book’s a glimpse a very intense few weeks of life of the characters living in this world where Japan and Germany won the Second World War. That being said, the idea that no story is story could kind’a be frustrating at times.

The Americans Season 4 TV poster
The Americans Season 4 TV poster

So when the High Castle Amazon series was announced I wondered how the creators of the show would handle all this since I couldn’t imagine something like a TV series could embrace the “no story is story” mantra of the book. And they didn’t, which I think is a good thing. Instead what they did was to take many of the elements of the book — mainly that in this alternate world someone is producing works of fiction where the Allies won the second world war — and to build a story with these characters around this.

It also helps that my favorite part of the book, what happens to one of the Japanese characters at the end of the novel, is still present in the TV series. B+

The X-Files
I thought I’d written more about The X-Files over the years but I guess I really haven’t. Which is surprising since I originally started this blog in 1998 when that series was at its height. Then again when I started Dangerous Universe only really covered movies so that would explain things. Regardless, here’s a few pieces I’ve written on the show over the years:

The X-Files and the steamroller of pop-culture – 01/15/16

The X-Files, one of the greats, turns 20 – 09/20/13

I Want to Believe in The X-Files – 07/04/08

Movies

So, the movie Lifeforce (1985) is just an update of the Quatermass and the Pit (1958) story, yes? (I know I’m coming to this realization 31 years after the release of Lifeforce but no one ever said I was fast.)

Toys

Out in March the Lego set for the classic TV series of Batman is pretty amazing. It features Wayne Manor, the Batcave, the Batcopter, the Batcycle and the Batmobile along with a whopping NINE figures including Batman, Bruce Wayne, Robin, Dick Grayson, Alfred, Catwoman, Joker, Penguin and Riddler. Which is impressive, but this all comes at a very impressive price of nearly $270!

Hiya Toys is set to release a series of 3.75″ tall figures based on the movie Aliens, starting with Hicks and Hudson. These figures might be small but they have a big price at almost $25 per figure! Both are due out in March.

But if price is a factor, checkout the Aliens Vs. Colonial Marines Army Builder, a set of 35 “green army men” scale figures of Colonial Marines vs. Aliens out now.

On the Horizon

I’m working on columns about having watched most movies on VHS growing up and have started gathering content for my yearly summer movie preview column out this spring.

The X-Files and the steamroller of pop-culture

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It’s surprising just how fast the TV series The X-Files went from one of the cornerstones of pop-culture to being crushed to gravel on the entertainment super highway in just a few short years. Literally The X-Files went from tens of millions of people watching each new episode in the late 1990s to releasing a failed feature film not many would see within a decade.

Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson
Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson

How does this happen? There was a time that The X-Files was everywhere; on the covers of magazines, on all the big TV news shows, parodied on The Simpsons, being talked about online when that was a rarity and even fans being hurt in a crush when too many showed up for signing events to meet the starts of the show.

All this in just a few short years to the series not even running in wide syndication is astonishing.

To be sure, The X-Files didn’t start as a popular show. In its first season the series aired in the dead-zone of Friday nights and it didn’t get great ratings for that time. What started as a series watched by about 8 million people would dip to a little over 5 million before eeking back up to 8. Its second season would start off a bit better but about the same. Then something amazing would happen — by the end of the second season 10 million people were watching the show. By the start of the third a whopping 20 million were tuning in.

The X-Files wasn’t a show anymore, it was a phenomena.

Kolchak the Night Stalker
Kolchak the Night Stalker

And these ratings would grow to the high of the nearly 30 million who watched the ’97 post Super-Bowl episode. And it’s not like today when ratings take into account people watching shows days later on their DVRs or on-demand. Those 30 million people were watching the same show on the same night.

All of which makes me wonder; why was The X-Files forgotten and discarded so quickly?

Well, I suppose the fate of being forgotten is what awaits all TV series, even the successful ones. And it’s only because I was a huge fan of The X-Files that I noticed that it was slowly turning from “phenomena” to “footnote.”

The X-Files didn’t spring from the earth fully formed. Series creator Chris Carter was building a foundation on series that had come before The X-Files. Shows like Twin Peaks and Kolchak: The Night Stalker are all in the DNA of The X-Files in one way or another. Twin Peaks was another phenomena where 20 million people were watching each new episode and the original Kolchak TV movie that came before its series was the most watched TV movie in history.

But this kind of popularity can’t last. Twin Peaks lasted two seasons before being cancelled for low ratings while Kolchak was all but forgotten by anyone but the most ardent fans after the series that came after the TV movies was cancelled after just one season. Like The X-Files, those series went from the highest of highs to mostly forgotten in the span of a few short years.

The X-Files 2016
The X-Files 2016

Thinking about it now, being mostly forgotten is actually probably a normal thing for popular shows like Twin Peaks and Kolchak and, yes, The X-Files. We’re always on the lookout for new and different series. If we weren’t we’d never checkout new and different shows like The X-Files since we’d still be watching The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy.

I guess what’s different about shows like The X-Files is that why they may seem to be mostly forgotten, their DNA lives on in other TV series today. Without The X-Files we’d never have shows like the CSI franchise or Lost or Sherlock or The Walking Dead and on and on and on.

Now comes a renewed and updated The X-Files with the original creator, writers and cast in place for a limited six episode run starting Sunday, January 24 on Fox then moving to Monday nights. Will this new The X-Files be as good and as influential as the original? Only time will tell.