The X-Files Review

Split the series in half and the verdict is easy. The standalone hours are frequently magnificent, and Home, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose and Bad Blood are as good as network television got in the nineties, with Darin Morgan writing comedy the show had no business being able to sustain. Those episodes work because Duchovny and Anderson found a rhythm of dry mutual exasperation that could carry any premise at all. The mythology is the other show, and it is a mess by construction, adding syndicates, hybrids, colonization dates and black oil faster than it could resolve any of them, then contradicting itself whenever an actor left.

Anderson's Scully is the more difficult part and the better performance, required to disbelieve every week without ever becoming stupid. Mark Snow's score and the Vancouver rain give the early seasons a specific damp menace that the Los Angeles years lose completely. The eighth and ninth seasons are a different program, and the revival is worse. Enormously influential, wildly inconsistent, and best navigated with an episode guide.