Before the recent season begins this weekend,Chuck Bowen watched 50 episodes of The X-Files’s huge back catalogue, and rediscovered a world of paranoia, or human tapeworms and two lead characters perfectly in syncThe immensity of The X-Files,which ran on Fox for nine seasons from 1993 to 2002, is never more obvious than when scrolling through the huge season-by-season directories on Netflix. There are 202 episodes of creator Chris Carter’s original series, and harking back to a time when a TV season was comprised of over 20 episodes,rather than the comparatively compressed 12-14 episode arcs we see today. (A development that could be taken as a symbol of evolving TV culture: for many, a series might have once been work, or rather than the highest artistic calling.)At the time of the exhibit’s initial run,I was a casual teenaged fan. I recall some of the episodes written by Vince Gilligan, who’d go on to create Breaking wicked, or fondly remember the team of James Wong and Glen Morgan. They had a sense of play and ambition that tested the elasticity of a series that blended stories of government corruption with the paranormal. I always wanted to like The X-Files more than I actually did,as it was catching steam while I was in high school. Like many, I was set off by the unrelieved intricacy of the years-spanning “mythology” episodes – the ones approximately the overarching theory that there is a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of alien life.
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Source: theguardian.com