Brightburn (2019)

Dull, predictable, frustratingly slow movie that asks 'what if superhero but bad' and then does nothing with it.

Rating: Bad.

Death to Smoochy (2002)

This film is trying hard to be a Coen-esque dark crime comedy, but it's just so flat. Norton and Williams are great, they're surrounded by a ton of fantastic character actors, and DeVito throws in a bunch of clever set-ups as director, but the script has no structure, it feels like most of the budget went on the (impressive) ice show finale leading to a lot of the rest suffering bland lighting and set-ups with little coverage, and even the score budget jars at times thanks to cheap synth instrumentation.

It reminds me of The Cable Guy - everyone's trying really hard, there are loads of great ideas, but it never coheres into a satisfying whole.

Rating: Frustrating.

Not Okay (2022)

Smart, full-throated satire full of great performances. A sharp insight into modern social media, the balancing act of empathising with people while also telling them to sit down, and knowing when to shut up yourself. The cavalcade of insta-reactions, bad takes and wrong-headed reviews about this movie from people who clearly either hadn't watched the movie or had been too busy typing into their notes app to understand it, only helped reflect and amplify the movie's points.

Rating: Great

Avatar: The Way Of Water (2022)

I went to see the re-release of the first one a few months previous and it's still awesome. Cliched as fuck yes, but it's pulpy fun, the story structure is solid, it looks fantastic, the score is great, there are lots of really strong performances, the world design is so cool, and Cameron's mastery is on full display with not a single shot or edit that is any less than perfect. I had long said that as soon as my 3D telly packed in, I'd never watch this movie again, but I'm starting to think that maybe I would watch it in 2D after all...

So now I've seen The Way Of Water and... I quite liked it. It felt like Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes to Avatar's Dawn: it does a lot of cool world-building and looks even more amazing, but it also feels a lot more franchise-minded, it's not as lean.

I thought the jungle was a great choice for 3D in the first movie, but I hadn't considered how good the ocean would be - loads of opportunity for different layers of focus with all the sea life swimming around, plus you've got characters who can swim in and out of the screen and vertical space to play with as well. I really enjoyed the amount of time it spent just getting to know these new surroundings, meeting the new characters, social structures, stuff like that. Honestly it only really started to sag when it was building up to the final battle, which didn't feel as epic or as tightly structured as the first movie's climax. I think it suffered a little from not really having any human characters, too.

I'd definitely watch another one, and I'll probably watch this one at the cinema again if I happen to be visiting friends in a city with a substantially better cinema set-up (say London for the BFI), but will I pick it up on 3D blu-ray? I'm not sure. Might wait and see if Avatar 3 manages to make this one feel a bit more vital in retrospect.

Rating: Pretty Good.

Disenchanted (2022)

Massively disappointing. This reeks of straight-to-video sequel, simultaneously overegging and misunderstanding all the strengths of the first movie in a contrived 'well, guess that happy ending wasn't so happy after all but here comes another adventure to bring it back again' story and with pedestrian visuals and even a bunch of crummy fade-to black scene-enders.

There are too many songs, now there 'just because' rather than their judicious use in the Enchanted, and they're all forgettably bad. Returning characters are mostly wasted or Flanderised and the new characters are blandly cliched in a way the first movie managed to avoid or play with. The glorious 2D animation of the original has taken a big step down here: it's fine, but noticeably less attractive and seems to be a mix of rigged puppets and cel-shaded 3D. The story is a convoluted mess that around half an hour in makes the bizarre decision to change all the characters and continuity to a confusing degree, and generally comes off as a less clever version of Once Upon A Time. And Alan Tudyk does an Ed Wynn impression again.

Amy Adams is good, of course, but doesn't have much to work with.

Rating: Dreadful.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)

The joke is 'it's a music biopic that treats him like a genius when actually he's a silly parody guy", but they *also* do it as a spoof of biopics, so it's double-cooked. If you've seen Walk Hard, Hot Rod, Spinal Tap etc, you've seen this, except a lot of it is run through an Epic Movie filter.

Rating: Not good.

See How They Run (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Lots of distracting decisions, like Rockwell's ropey accent, half the characters being real-life famous people but with elements of their lives changed, and many many instances of the 'we talked about this thing happening in stories and now it's happening in ours!' joke rammed down the viewer's throat. There was no way to guess the solution, though I spotted the red herring culprit very quickly, and it wasn't funny at all. Complete waste of so many comedy actors.

Rating: Bad.

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Cage is legitimately fantastic, Pascal is really good, and it starts out strong. But the story is muddled and the action is bland, and they both distract from the comedy and take over the film more as it goes. Also, there's barely anything surprising here at all, it even ends with the same gag as Get Shorty and Goldmember. The thing that really stood out was the Wogan Interview Cage alter-ego. Not necessarily the most original idea but it's such a specific use of Cage lore, executed really well and the one time they really go wild. It's a shame that, outside of some smart use of Face/Off and its imagery and themes, the rest of the movie took such little advantage of its own setup.

Rating: Fine but disappointing.

Morbius (2022)

Utterly hollow and dull, no structure, no one talks like an actual person, and when it finished I was surprised because I thought it had like another hour to go. 

Rating: Dreadful

Defendersverse (2015-2019)

Daredevil S1

First 15 minutes is pretty good! Pacy.

Really odd moment in ep 1 where a woman takes her shirt off in front of Matt, and there's a clear shot of her entire breast in bright lighting, but because of tv ratings or whatever they have to CG the nipple out so she looks like a Barbie doll. What a weird decision.

I'm enjoying DD so far. Still relatively pacy 3 eps in, and they have more of an episodic structure than the D+ shows. Though I remember getting to around ep 6 and giving up because I was so bored, so it may be that the next 3 just spin wheels.

The fights seem to be well-choreographed and performed, but the direction/editing of them is infuriatingly choppy. I did enjoy the Oldboy-style corridor fight in 2, though. I remember at the time I was a bit sick of those and I wasn't very impressed by it, but it was solid even if a lot of it happened offscreen.

I'm at around the point I gave up when it was first released, ep 6, and it's not as slow as I remember (probably my expectations for tv were still at regular levels rather than Disney levels), but I can see why I was frustrated - there's a large group of villains who do nothing but bicker amongst themselves, Kingpin has spent most of his time going on boring dates, Foggy and Karen are fixing people's plumbing. The Russian safehouses getting blown up has given it a bit of a shot in the arm, but we'll see how long that lasts.

One thing that's annoying is how they're handling his powers. First off, they haven't said anything about the stuff in the barrels that made him go blind having anything to do with it (which I'm pretty sure is the deal) so it just seems like they're saying any blind person could do this stuff. Then they do the same thing that the Affleck movie did which is to make his other senses so all-encompassing that he's pretty much only colour-blind, which makes it feel like a gimmick and also throws off the powerset balance - his blindness should be a hindrance that is balanced out by his amazing hearing etc. In this episode he comes into an abandoned warehouse and is able to tell that there's a toolbox twenty feet away with some flares in it! He's basically Superman at this point! But at the same time, they get lazy with it sometimes, like how if it helps the plot he just doesn't notice three cop-cars approaching with their sirens on, or a criminal tricks him into leaning closer so he can attack him, by talking quietly! Matt, you can hear someone click a detonator button from a hundred feet away through brick walls, you don't need to lean in to hear a guy speaking softly from three feet away!

Okay, finished DD S1. So, first off, the fight between DD and Kingpin was terrible. What a letdown. Overall, the show had some cool moments but it was packed with stuff that didn't go anywhere except as set-up for future stuff, the writing was mostly prosaic or cliche, and the action was... okay, but didn't really make up for it. I suspect some of it was budget as well, but in that case, cut your episode count and castlist in half - it would make the show better and give you some more money for fights. We really didn't need Gao, Foggy, Karen, Ben, Stick etc etc. Should have been DD making his way up the crime ladder and Kingpin in his prime. I have no idea why this Kingpin is thought so well of, actually - D'Onofrio's pretty good and the childhood flashback was cool, but he spends the entire season either absent, moping about his girlfriend, or apologising to his partners, and then he gets defeated! He doesn't feel like a threat at all. And I think he maybe is around even less in the next two seasons? Dunno.

Jessica Jones S1

JJ S1 is so strikingly better than DD. The dialogue is better and the acting, though it may only be because of that better dialogue, is better too. The fighting is a lot simpler, but it's also a lot cleaner and easier to follow so it's more impactful. The villain also takes a while to show up but he's already scary as hell by the end of the first episode. And the way they handle secondary characters is so much better - rather than a sense of obligation to give them all their own grinding subplots, they're used lightly, only as reflections on Jessica's character, until it makes sense to bring them forward. Hell, it's better than what the MCU movies managed with Hawkeye.

Finished JJ S1. Okay, it's not perfect - it does drag a little around episode 9/10 (could maybe have done with boiling down to 11 episodes rather than 13), there's what seems to be a silly coincidence in Nuke's involvement (though they ended up giving a feasible reason for what seemed like the coincidence of Luke being the husband of the woman Jessica killed, so perhaps if he ever comes back, which iirc he hasn't so far, they can say something like he was stalking Jessica anyway for IPH reasons and that's why Kilgrave happened to pick him to go kill Trish, but it's still a bit ropey), and Kilgrave gets tricked a bit too easily in the end (it reminded me of Death Note in that way - what they should have done was highlight the fact that Jessica needs to be within inches of him to kill him so he can't activate any failsafes, not have her suggest 'I love you' as a safe-word that she would never otherwise say to Trish, then have Kilgrave order her to kill Trish as a test and have her say to Trish 'I love you' then slam her in the chest, the trick being that Trish will realise Jessica never says that to her so it must be a safe-word, and thereby know to take the hit and play dead). BUT it's still really really good, and it's a shame that none of the other shows, afaik, got to this height again. I'm hoping that some of the ones I didn't watch actually got close though, and that the ones I gave up on are better on repeat viewing!

Daredevil S2

First ep pretty good. Pacy, good action, and the Punisher's already shown up, been established as a threat and has had a fight with DD. Dialogue's still pretty crummy - they're going for hard-boiled, but it's all over-worked and the actors stumble over it a lot. 

Watched the first 4 episodes, they were pretty good! They wrapped up the Punisher (for now) and then teased another new character, who I guess will also get a little 4 episode run. I think that's a pretty smart way of doing things; it's at least a solid compromise between proper episodic structure and just having the thing feel like a 13 hour movie. And the Punisher stuff was good - some well-staged brutal action, a strong performance, and they used him as a concept to interrogate the ethics of the protagonist (superhero 101 but it works!). Karen and Foggy are still basically pointless (she finds out about the Punisher when we're already getting that from the main storyline, and he goes to talk to Claire and maybe convinces her to help DD again but that isn't actually needed at this point and let's be honest she would have anyway), and it's hard to tell whether they're good actors stumbling over shitty dialogue or bad actors unable to elevate shitty dialogue.

One thing that really annoys me about DD is the way that every time Foggy or Matt is doing well in a legal conversation, it cuts away to Karen with a proud smile plastered across her face or hiding a laugh with her hand like she's a sorority sister, as if the audience would otherwise not be able to follow who's winning. Other shows do this, but it is so in your face here.

On episode 10 now, and actually they didn't wrap up the Punisher for a bit and move on, but they have got better at structuring stuff nevertheless. It's still moving along at a fair clip, they're dropping lots of cool Hand stuff, and Kingpin is getting more fun stuff to do with his rise through the prison ranks. Shame the first season was basically sacrificed to get to this stuff. It's still not up there with JJ S1, never mind something like Supernatural or Person Of Interest, but it's solid.

Okay, it kind of fell apart in the last three episodes. Kingpin fizzled out, the ninjas got boring, Karen and Foggy are just rattling around (Matt's done with them, so she can suddenly be, oh I dunno, a journalist who continues to get kidnapped about twice an episode, and he can suddenly be, uh, a partner at a prestigious law firm and their expert in superhero cases or whatever), and both the Punisher conspiracy and the Hand mysticism were over-complicated and dull and don't even have the benefit of getting wrapped up because everything's just setting other stuff up. It's wild to think how much a show like Lost or Game Of Thrones or whatever got done in 26 episodes, how much you cared about the huge ensemble cast and got on the edge of your seat over every plot strand, and this show hasn't even really got me caring about its three leads. I care more about the armourer Milton or scuzzy weapons dealer Turk or even booty call lawyer Marci than Karen or Foggy.

Luke Cage S1

Wow, that is such a strong opening episode. Adult, atmospheric, and such a strong handle on the tone. Much like with JJ, watching this straight after DD it's striking how immediately superior it is.

Everything up to and including episode 4 - the origin flashback ep - has been great. Episode 5 was a bit slow. Cottonmouth's thugs taking stuff off people, Luke going round and getting it back off them. I think maybe 'the first half is great' was a little generous on my part, but maybe 6/7 will be good again...

Episode 6 was better! The whole Scarfe thing worked really well, gave it some energy and structure. The villains are still stuck in a rut; perhaps Cottonmouth getting arrested will shake things up but iirc they get more boring if anything. I love Alfre Woodard but she isn't getting much to do here.

Episode 7 is where the big change happens - Cottonmouth is killed. I can see how they might have thought this would be a big wtf game-changer moment, but unfortunately the only things the villains have done so far is stand around saying:

Cottonmouth: I'm angry my stuff is going wrong!
Mariah: I'm angry your stuff is going wrong!
Shades: Diamondback is angry your stuff is going wrong!

So Cottonmouth dying and Diamondback coming in doesn't really have an effect on anything. Cottonmouth was blackmailing Luke with the possibility of getting him put back in jail, but Luke had already decided to ignore that. Plus it felt really rushed - all in the same episode we learn Mariah was raped by her uncle as a kid, Cottonmouth says some shitty victim-blaming stuff, then Mariah kills him. So now Diamondback has arrived and has shot Luke with the alien bullet Judas that they've been going on about for like 3 episodes now, and it really feels like they only had Cottonmouth in there as a placeholder to give Luke something to fight against before they brought the real villain in.

Well, at least Luke can now get injured, so there are some stakes going on.

Watched 8 and 9 and wow this really slows down to a crawl. Plus they've given up on episodic structure now, it just trundles on from one to the next.

Jesus Christ, Luke Cage has thoroughly fallen apart. Also, they have now twice had characters talk about what an awesome person Mike Tyson is. Oof.

They just did another rushed flashback exposition thing (after the one about Mariah) about how Luke and Diamondback are brothers and why DB resents Luke, and it was so rushed I couldn't even follow it.

Finished Luke Cage. I genuinely don't understand how the series fell that far. With stuff like Daredevil, I can at least imagine what the writers room is going for, but at so many points in this I was shaking my head thinking 'why have they done this?' Anyway, it finally fizzled out with Luke Cage defeating a man in a supersuit who can absorb all his punches, by... waiting until he was out of breath and then punching him. Big Climax! Then twenty more minutes of irritating plot contrivances and it's done. I'm almost looking forward to Iron Fist and its stupid-ass zombie kung-fu. 

Iron Fist S1

On ep 3 of Iron Fist. Very slow, it hasn't really moved on since the first episode. Also, Danny is pretty unlikeable (whiny, temper-tantrums) and he never says the obvious most helpful thing. Like, when he confronts Ward in a restaurant in front of Joy, instead of saying "you sent a guy to destroy my hospital records and he would have killed the clerk if I hadn't got there", he goes on about how Ward was like his brother. What? He physically and mentally abused you through your childhood and he's tried to kill you like three times since you got back. I suppose it makes sense that Danny would still be acting like the 10 year old he was when his plane crashed, but it clashes with all his Buddhist meditation stuff and his warrior monk thing and also it's just really irritating. 

Also, seems that Madame Gao is part of the Hand now? I thought they were Japanese and tied in with the Yakuza and Nobu, and Madame Gao was a crime-lord adjacent to all that.

Another thing about Danny: he's fucking useless in a fight. He needs to get hit a few times before he can build up energy, and then one super-punch wears him out.

Finished episode 9. This one actually felt like it had a good amount of story progression in it. If they'd got here by episode 4, this would have been pretty enjoyable (by MCU standards, anyway - it doesn't stand up to, say, Legion or a mediocre episode of the X Files). The fights aren't too bad, they just feel a bit floaty and patched over with editing (a combination of Danny's flowing fight style and not enough prep time to get it looking good, I'd guess), and all the acting's pretty good. Danny's nigh-intolerable but at least it seems somewhat intentional - his big character flaw is lack of control. And the dialogue isn't bad either, it's just... functional.

It's just a damn shame that some higher-up didn't come in at the writing stage of these shows and say 'right, you've got the same amount of time and budget but you've got to tell this story in half the episodes'.

Finished! It picked up a little bit towards the end but was mostly drudgery. The climactic fight was just the usual melee combat in an office building, and the baddy was an old guy with a gun (who's immortal unless you kill him then chop his head off or incinerate him or whatever in the next few hours so he can't come back). The Hand aren't particularly interesting either - these shows putting all their villain chips on Madame Gao is so far a pretty bad decision as, outside of the occasional Yoda/Pycelle moment where she drops the cane act and shows hidden physical strength, she's pretty dull.

Defenders

First episode was almost exclusively 'what have they been up to' exposition. Interesting to consider how much Avengers got done in the same amount of time, while here they've essentially wasted 50 minutes.

Episode 2 was also slow as fuck, but at least they got the lead characters to meet at the end of it (two hours into this team-up show!) and had a fight between two of them (the very basics of what you'd expect from Luke Cage vs Iron Fist, but it was fine and the super slow-mo shot of Luke getting slugged in the face was cool).

Episode 3 finally had some momentum, and an awesome team-up fight at the end of it (it wasn't executed perfectly but it was well-choreographed and really hit those 'oooh another hero just arrived and joined in!' moments). If this had been the first episode, it would have been incredible.

Finished episode 6. There are a decent amount of fights, decently done, in this but it's still so damn slow. And the choice to reveal the leaders of the Hand and then have them be squabbling crime bosses no different in practice to the ones in Daredevil S1 is so unimaginative. Plus this whole black sky thing doesn't seem to make any sense. What's special about it? What was with all the blood transfusions and infected kids? Can there be multiple black skies or not? It's all very messy and unsatisfying. Plus, they've had 5 hours of runtime and still pretty much nothing of import has happened.

The ending of this where the entire New-York-destroying plan turns out to be that they dug a very deep elevator shaft to dig up some dragon bones is painfully underwhelming. I'd misremembered it, in that the show doesn't promise a live dragon; it's just that when it gets down there and goes 'OMG it's a dragon skeleton, look!' the immediate viewer reaction is 'why not a live one though?' And the entire Defenders plan is 'go down there, have a bit of a fight in a cave, take Danny back up, then blow up the building'. Also, the fights are terrible in the finale, and the dialogue is worse than usual.

When a show like Sense8 manages at short notice to satisfyingly wrap up its series in two hours, dealing with EIGHT protagonists and all their sidekicks and sub-plots as well as a complicated main story with a bunch of villains and allies, it's embarrassing how poor a job was done here.

The Punisher S1

Started it! First ep is solid. Nothing unpredictable, but pacy with good nasty action. I like that they're carrying over the idea of how messed up Frank is, that this isn't normal or healthy - he spends 8 hours a day on a building site hammering down walls then everyone goes home and he stays there doing it for another few hours until his hands bleed. Niggles so far - he had Mandalorian-level luck/plot armour in getting fired at from ten feet away and both shots missing him while he just stands there waiting, and Shohreh Aghdashloo is in this with her stupid Jerry Stiller line delivery. Also, I guess the Clancy Brown conspiracy stuff from DD S2 is going to come back but it was so muddled I can't remember even after a few weeks what the deal was. Hopefully Frank will sum it up in a couple of sentences when the time is right.

Second ep was better! Like, Reacher level good. Forgot to compare it to the other Defender shows but so far this is probably second best, after JJ S1. Maybe LC S1 first 4 eps nudge it for being a little more interesting...

Oh, and they cleared all the conspiracy stuff up plus moved it on a bit, which was really smart. Basically, in Afghanistan, Frank was in a squad that was doing some dark off-books CIA-tied shit. One of the squad (presumably) leaked an incriminating tape to an NSA analyst, the squad thought it was Frank and created the whole NY gang warfare drug deal shootout thing at the public park just so Frank would get killed during it and it would be assumed that he was just a random civilian casualty. (It's a bit clunky that they knew he'd be there at this exact time and managed to get this shootout to happen just at the right time in such a way that would definitely get him shot, and also I don't know if they're going to explain why the squad assumed Frank was the leak - perhaps he was the least dirty of everyone on the squad - but at least everything's been recapped and streamlined.)

So now I guess he's going to want to Punish this new higher level set of people who were involved in his family's death. 

Ep3 was really good too! Cop plotline is the only bit dragging - Madani's not needed by the story yet but I guess they felt the need to bring her in on ep 1 so she's just dragging her heels, not learning anything we don't already know etc. Plus this is the Aghdashloo plotline, as she plays the mum. Incidentally, is it just me, or do female cops in genre shows like this have 'relationship with supportive law-adjacent parent' subplots a lot more than their male counterparts? Ana Lucia in Lost, Beckett in Castle, JLo in Out Of Sight. Only male ones I can immediately think of are Sense8 (but that show actively plays with gender roles, plus it's kind of combative rather than supportive) and apparently Peacemaker (though I gather that relationship is combative).

Speculation: Madani had to get over her trust issues to work with her new partner; he is therefore going to turn out to be dirty. 

Just watched ep 4. Still good! Action is awesome, people are acting in psychologically believable ways, and Madani is finally into the main story. Also, Turk! Love how Claire is the obvious Nick Fury style connective tissue for all the shows, but they've also got this slave-trading weapons-selling scumbag as their low-key overlap character. And Tony Plana, aka Manny Calavera, shows up! The PTSD soldier kid story feels a little loose at the moment, like he's connected to the story via Frank's ex-squadmates but that's about it, otherwise it feels like they're just slowly building up a secondary villain to bring out around episode 6.

Speculation: Russo was the one who leaked the tape to Micro. I can't think of a reason for Agent Orange or Clancy Brown to have done it, so assuming Frank didn't then it's pretty much got to be Russo (or one-leg guy but I don't think he was in that unit?) unless it's one of the barely characterised guys like the Bible guy. Annoyingly, I just googled to check Russo's name and found out something about where his character is going.

Ep 5 still good, so this is officially the second best season of all the Defenders shows! Even though it's got boring old Karen Page in it.

Re. previous speculation: turns out it was Bible guy! I hadn't realised it was a secret tape. That makes it weirder that they would think it was Frank that leaked it seeing as he's in it. Did they think that it was Frank plus one other person but they didn't know who the other person was? Or did they not know who was who under the balaclavas? It kind of makes sense that they'd guess at Frank seeing as he was a vocal opponent of a lot of stuff plus maybe there was some spite on Agent Orange's part after he lost his sight in one eye thanks to Frank's super-punch, but kind of weird that they didn't go after anyone else. Also, why does Agent Orange need Madani's list of who was in the room when that dude got shot? Surely he knew who was in there with him? Hopefully they'll explain all that at some point.

More cool casting: I forgot to mention Chappelle from 24, and now we've got Mary Elisabeth Mastrantonio! Less showy Cameron-alum casting than Weaver...

Speculation: Agent Orange has Stein wired, not Madani's office - him overhearing Gunner's name is misdirection on the writers' part.

Ep 6 - more plot confusion! Who called the cops about Gunner's body? Was it Micro, trying to give him a proper burial? Seems out of character for a guy who panics and gives Frank shit at the merest hint of shedding any more light on themselves? Or was it Agent Orange? I guess he had to pick up his team's bodies, so why did he not only leave Gunner's but also call the police? Is it to try to shake the tree, give the police leads in case that brings Frank out into the open?

Anyway, this ep was fine but a little slower. I forgot these shows have 13 episodes, I keep getting stuck in D+ mode and expecting 7-9. Bearing that in mind, the pacing has been pretty impressive so far, hope it doesn't stall now...

Watched ep 9, and it definitely picked steam right back up again after the slight lull of 6. I was wrong about Stein, but I was right about Lewis! If I'd known it was 13 eps in total, I would have got the episode where he came into play correct, too! So yeah it is a bit loose how he was just building up in his own subplot pretty much unconnected to the main story until it was ready for him to come in and provide a threat, but at least it bolstered the themes of the season (war is shit, basically) and had a bigger impact on the story than just giving Frank someone to fight for a bit - it causes Micro to go to Madani.

The action really is very well-executed (lol) on this show. Just in this episode, there's a great shot where Frank throws a rock at a cop, hitting him in the head, runs up to the cop car and slides over the bonnet, slams the other cop with the car door then gets in and peels off. It's all done in one shot with Bernthal doing it all. It's not a big showy Oldboy-style oner, and in fact I almost didn't notice, but it's pretty impressive.

Episode 10 was amaaazing! Even Karen Page got to be awesome! It's just a shame that the writers have decided she has to be righteously indignant about something in every scene throughout the entire franchise, whether it makes sense or not. It's irritating, and it doesn't help with the 'kid playing at being a lawyer/journalist/whatever' feel. Tiny quibble: it feels very off that Russo would miss that head shot - when stuff like that happens, I wish directors would go out of their way to show that the target noticed the shooter just in time to move a couple of inches, or even just turns around at the right moment out of sheer luck. Just something to alleviate that plot armour.

Finished. Wow, that was great! Can't believe how good that was. I think I'd say it was better than Reacher, and it's very nearly as good as Jessica Jones S1 but that show nudges it thanks to Kilgrave. I'm a bit gutted that it's likely all downhill from here!

Jessica Jones S2

Watched the first three episodes . I'd forgotten how damn slow this season is. In three episodes all we've got is IGH made other supers, and we pretty much could have inferred that anyway. Also the dialogue is fucking terrible, every conversation reads like it's between two chatbots where nothing follows on from the previous line. Also, they've got a British guy with the most New Yawk dialogue ever and it sounds ridiculous.

Weirdly, they're now allowing characters to say "Captain America" and wave action figures of him around. Has some legal restriction changed, or was all the euphemism up till now just a terrible creative decision?

I also realised that now these are (presumably) officially canon, Jeri Hogarth was the first gay MCU character, beating that anonymous guy in Endgame by 4 years. (If Agents Of SHIELD ever becomes canon, they've got this beat by a couple of months with Joey Gutierrez.)

Finished JJ S2 - a pretty good idea on paper to go with Jessica's origin, but they did it in a reeeeally slow and boring way. This was like three episodes of content stretched out to 13, and it suffers for not having a Kilgrave. Really sad to see the best series go to pot so soon and so suddenly.

Luke Case S2

Have got about halfway through, and it basically has the same problem. All the villains are boring as hell, and it's really slow. There are a fair few periphery characters I'm really enjoying and it was frustrating to not spend more time with them - Misty, Colleen, Commanche, Scarfe, Piranha - but spend sooo much time with Shades (exacerbated by the fact that he says every single sentence the same way), Mariah (I still don't believe their romantic relationship, it feels so arbitrary) and - fnarr - Bush Master (who feels like pretty lazy writing - another villain who has motivations to do with family history and lots of Stoakes-related whining, plus he has powers because... magic.. Also, I liked the social commentary in the first season, but here they wedge it in like a He-Man epilogue. Every now and then you get a completely superfluous scene which may as well have 'SOCIAL COMMENTARY' flashing across the screen in big letters.

Also, a couple of characters across these two seasons who started acting like jerks without much motivation - Trish and Luke. All this empty space in the shows and they couldn't believably build-up to their darker moments? It's not as bad as the GoT finale but it reminded me of it. 

Ep 10: Turk turned into a legitimate pot vendor just in time to give Luke a tip on a grow house! It's funny how this guy started out as a sex slave trader and now he's basically Huggy Bear and I cheer whenever he shows up. Retooled 'chill Danny' is a lot easier to handle, and it's cool seeing him team up with Luke again. The action isn't amazing, but there were some cool combo moves in there, like the patty-cake. Mariah finally did something proper nasty where I felt like she was a scary villain - I think the only other time she and Shades have been this effective was with Candace. They're also still doing this 'Luke needs to handle his anger' thing but they occasionally remember to tell us while never showing us how or why it's true. Its like it got written on the writers room whiteboard as a story beat to hit but they never actually worked it up past that.

Luke Cage S2 was dreadful. I'd say it fizzled out at the end, but the whole thing was barely a fizzle. Bushmaster just gives up and goes home, Shades loses his nerve and rats out Mariah so she goes to prison and then promptly gets poisoned. Just no tension or excitement at all, it's bewildering! And then they've given up on the 'Luke is angry' thing and instead have swivelled to 'Luke is Michael Corleone' except again they don't actually show us how this is the case. He told the remaining crime bosses that if they stay out of Harlem he'll leave them alone. And then he inherits a club and plans to enforce the unwritten laws of crime as a diplomatic figure. So what? Why is this an issue or really any different to what he's been doing the entire time? Just awful writing.

Iron Fist S2

I'd heard this was quite fun, but then I'd heard Luke Cage S2 was good, so...

Ep 1: some solid fights, and lots of boring 'catch up' storytelling. Danny continues to be a lot less irritating, but he's still pretty drab.

Finished. About the best thing I can say about it is that it was only 10 episodes long. Just lots of meandering story, unconvincing heel turns, muddy motivations and intentions, underdeveloped characters. Some fairly good fights but they were still all a bit too choppy. Dialogue was just about fine, acting was solid. If they'd boiled all these two seasons down into 10 episodes it might have been pretty dope.

Daredevil S3

Two minutes in: fucking WHAT. Matt survived being trapped miles underground in an explosion and having tons of rock fall on him, by... getting knocked into some water that carried him up to a pipe at ground level and spat him out on a riverside? There had better be some mystical explanation coming up.

Well, despite that, some legitimately good writing in this ep! Okay, so Matt surviving is silly, and his sudden recovery is silly, but he's still only half-recovered and kind of suicidal as well. All the stuff with the nun is good. And the set-up for Ray is really sharp - a great catch-22 to put a character in to build motivation and audience empathy. And then dovetailing two plotlines into a tantalising cliffhanger! It's not classic tv or anything, but it's good. I doubt it'll keep it up for very long, of course...

DD S3 is surprisingly good! The action is terrific - the fight where he's stuck in a carpark with no weapons surrounded by a bunch of armed agents and he has to stealth-fight his way out was a really fun 'how the hell is he going to get out of this?' set-up, and the prison sequence was fantastic, really smart to move away from Oldboy a little and into something more like Children Of Men's oners. The pacing is a bit odd. It's not exactly dragging its heels, stuff keeps happening, but the lack of episodic structure makes it feel slower than it is. Karen and Foggy are still a drain on the show, though.

Holy shit, DD S3E6 was amazing. The whole newspaper office sequence was incredible, plus this is what I want to see Kingpin doing, and Bullseye is also great. Is getting rid of the Hand just what this show needed? Even if this crashes and burns now, I am so glad I decided to catch up with the seasons I missed. Punisher plus this were well worth it. It's just a shame so much of the rest of it has been so crap. I bet you could get a pretty good fan edit out of it all, though - it'd be a huge undertaking but it'd be pretty neat for MCU viewers who want to stay on top of all canon stuff but don't want to watch 150 hours of wildly varying quality, to be able to get the best version of it.

DD S3E8 - still very good, but parent/family member back from the dead/surprise return again?! I bet they were planning on doing this with Iron Fist's mum too...

Finished Daredevil. That was really good all the way through! It maybe dipped a tiny bit around episode 10, but whatever. They even got good stuff for Karen and Foggy to do! The threeway fight between Kingpin, Matt and Dexdevil was amaaazing. A shame that The Punisher S2 (reportedly) and Jessica Jones S3 (iirc) aren't great, but I'm glad that I've finished with a good taste in my mouth for Daredevil in case those characters get properly used again.

The Punisher S2

I enjoyed E1! Felt quite Reacher-y (Punisher comics came first and they're both drawing on similar sources, obvs). Only weak spot was the '24 hours earlier' cold open, so lazy and quite clumsily done. Would have been much better to start with the torture guy scene, then off the girl track through the bar and come to a stop on a reveal of Frank enjoying the band. Or, y'know, it's a streaming show, you don't have to do a cold open at all if you don't want.

Ha, they did the same escape through a motel wall gag as Reacher!

I really enjoyed the first three. It's a different speed to the first season but it's still done well.

S2E4 - it has slowed down now they've got to New York. Even though Russo is now back out in the wild, he's directionless and Frank isn't pursuing him so that feels like wheel-spinning. Yet Frank hasn't really done anything about whiny teen (can't remember what she said her real name was, and don't want to google in case some big reveal is spoiled for me. Hatty? Molly?), they're holding off on her backstory, and ex-Nazi Christian Preacher guy is off the radar, so this has felt like an episode of nothing. Hoping this was just a brief pause and everything starts ramping up again now... 

S2E7 picked back up again with the robbery and all that. Jigsaw's got stuff to do, Frank and chums have got a mission. But the other story is on ice, apparently. That's the problem this season is having, is too many plates to spin. It started off well for the first 3 episodes on story A, then slowed right down for a couple of episodes as soon as it brought story B in and tried to keep them both going. Now it's temporarily put A on hold and got B moving at a good clip, it's working again.

Speaking of Jigsaw, I wish they'd gone like 20% more with his make-up. I don't expect the full-on cartoonish patchwork quilt of Warzone, but this is almost Ready Player One territory.

What I like about it is that it took the set-up from the end of S1 and ran with it - Frank finally showed some sort of mercy or restraint one time and now that's kind of turned out to be a bad thing. I like how that turns the standard character arc/moral lesson on its head. But Ep 7 was the first time that actually worked for me, because finally all the characters are making their decisions about how far they want to go, whether they want to step over the line into vigilantism (which I don't think was really a question for them in S1), plus you've got Jigsaw in the streets having shootouts with Frank and the cops, so he actually feels like a villain. 

Up till now this story has felt pretty aimless/wheel-spinning.

Some nitpicks: too much mumbling, I regularly have to skip back and put subtitles on to pick up an important line; playing "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" over a scene of someone not knowing what to do with themselves is terrible; CG blood splatter is always shit.

Ep9 - it's crashed again, probably because it's brought story A back in and suddenly neither story is doing anything. Also it seems like we'll never get 'Rachel''s backstory properly, and there's not really time for the Schultzes to become actual characters (despite casting Annette O'Toole for some reason). The hitman (apparently his name is John Pilgrim, though I never caught that) gave a tiny bit more backstory but nothing that hadn't already been implied, and I suspect that's all we'll get about him too.

Oh, also, it should be 'fustercluck', not 'flustercluck', ffs.

Good to see Kevin Chapman show up, though! 

One thing I haven't mentioned in case it sounds creepy, and I hope it doesn't, is that after two seasons I still can't get over how lovely Madani's face is to look at, it's like she was designed by a Disney artist. It's a really nice contrast between her tough character and also Frank's 'rocky road'. 

It's pretty funny how Russo and Castle are wearing hats in all their flashbacks to cover up them having the wrong hair length.

Some of these lines of dialogue are like adventure game puzzles and the subtitles are a walkthrough.

Russo: "If you follow me then I'll have to sell mumble mumble [opens door loudly]"

Subtitles: "If you follow me then my men in the stairwell will kill you."

Me: "Glad I looked that one up, how the hell was I supposed to get that?!"

E10 came out really well. I was a bit annoyed at first by the time-jumping narrative. They felt like they were gimmicks being used to tart up a dull episode. I almost thought they were going to forget about that 24 Hours Earlier thing. But then it paid off really well right at the end. It is kind of silly and cheesy that Russo has an evil psychiatrist as his girlfriend, but this was the first time I cared about her - such a nasty, sneaky way to trick Madani into betraying Frank. I do feel like that flashback to the initiation and then the flash-forwards to Frank getting slashed muddied the water - it would have been cleaner to only flashback to Medina and the doctor. I guess they were trying to hide the reveal, but I don't think it was worth it. They should have come up with a way to reveal their conversation was a flashback right at the end (I can't immediately think of a good way of doing this, but off the top of my head have Frank getting tipped off about the warehouse at the start of the episode, then at the end have the doc tell Russo to make that happen. But, like, a more elegant version of that.) 

E11 - my enjoyment of E10 kind of dissipated after a couple of minutes as I realised that of course they're not going to have Frank kill three women, they're going to pull the punch, it must have been a set-up. (Which the show revealed within about 20 minutes, which is very Rise Of Skywalker 'Chewie's dead! No, wait.') And so, suddenly the ending of E10 doesn't have half as much resonance - their plan to send Frank to his own perosnal hell isn't quite as shockingly devious and cruel when it's going to fall apart after a few hours as soon as anyone looks at the bodies or even thinks to themselves 'wait, why did Russo have three secretaries up in that little office in this abandoned warehouse where nothing happens except a bunch of criminals partying?' Apart from that, the episode was a bit bleh - the hospital antics were all fine, Pilgrim at least gets his story moved on a bit and Annette O'Toole does some amazing vein acting, but really not much happened considering there are only two episodes left to go and presumably a fair amount of that is going to be (speculation) Frank going to that town to take out the Schultzes and reams of henchpeople. Also, weird that they didn't use the foodie morgue guy again. Was this a different hospital or could they just not get the actor back? Ed did say something about the MD not being around...

E12 start - so Pilgrim is still trying to kill Frank! His entire story has meant nothing, he's just a terminator. Also, slapping that heavy metal track in felt pretty clumsy and it was Marilyn Manson so... OOF.

Oh come on! Mahoney is in the front of an ambulance when it falls thirty feet nose-first into concrete and he has, what, a sore leg and bruised ribs?! At least show me a bone poking out of his leg or something!

Also, Pilgrim stole Madani's car and she didn't put out an APB on it or track its GPS or whatever?! Maybe she thought she wouldn't have the pull with the bureau after Mahoney caught her helping Frank escape but that's a bit of a stretch. Or maybe she's distracted by the other story and there's going to be a scene soon where she suddenly thinks about her car a bit too late (this would be terrible)? 

ALSO, Madani a trained federal agent with a gun, almost got her ass handed to her by an unarmed physically unthreatening psychiatrist?! Come on writers, at least give the doc an unfair advantage, like have her throw boiling water in Madina's face or something! Just glaringly stupid stuff in these past couple of episodes. 

E13 - okay, the Madani/Russo fight was pretty cool (and she held her own better than against the brain nerd). I really liked the ending to it. But another logic hole (unless I missed something) - why did Pilgrim leave in the car? He had a shotgun in the trunk, he knew Amy was nearby, and Curtis didn't have any particular advantage. I wondered if he just gave up and decided to go back to his hotel, pack and go home, but that seems pretty odd. Has this show always been this full of plotholes and I just didn't notice them because the writing was better, or has it just gotten really sloppy this last few episodes?

Finished. Ugh, just a big mess of stupid and inconsistent character decisions that I can't be bothered to list out.

This wasn't the worst season of the Defenders shows, it had some high points and even when it was badly written the action was pretty good and there are some strong performances in there, but it really did get very slow/sloppy overall.

Jessica Jones S3 

I feel like I've typed this sentence out for almost every second/third season, but: first episode is fine but slow, all 'catch up' stuff.

Ep 2 - this one was a bit better. Even though we had already inferred pretty much everything it told us, doing a 'now here's everything from this other character's perspective' episode is still always an easy way to get a satisfying one. And it was fun seeing her first few rubbish attempts at being a vigilante hero, complete with the standard 'mock the original comic version's costume/name' scene.

4 eps in. Could be moving faster but it's fine. Definitely better than S2. The baddy this time is a Moriarty type who crossed paths accidentally with Jessica and now has her in his sights. It's a little random (unless it turns out Asshole Radar hit on her in that bar specifically so he could get protection down the line, but that doesn't quite match up) and a little Kilgrave Mk 2, but it's working well enough so far.

 

Couple of other things: I thought it would have been cool if Trish actually hadn't got powers at all, she just caught a phone with her foot one time then thinking she had powers gave her the confidence and drive to train up to actually just become a regular human with awesome fighting skills and balance. But it seems like actually she can do big jumps and stuff. Also, no question as to where Asshole Radar got his powers? Everyone else so far has either been IPF or ancient magic training. I guess Daredevil never actually stated that anything other than getting hit by some random chemicals caused his special abilities, so maybe there are trucks of ooze barrels driving all over New York splashing on people. 

JJ S3 continues to truck along being fine but not particularly enthralling. I like that there's a prominent trans character in this season, without it ever being mentioned that she's trans. Also that the villain starts referring to Jessica and Trish as "feminist vindicators", telling his lawyer it'll play well to the base. Also, he has incel vibes. Cool that this kind of stuff is back in there, feels like more of a S1 vibe. 

The rest of S3 was okay, pretty bland. This article has a good take on it, though it feels like it's talking about a more interesting version of the story than what actually got put out.

I think it would have worked better if they'd focused on Hellcat a lot sooner, and kept Sallinger as a secondary plot device rather than a joint big bad. It's a shame as well that they didn't get to do a big wrap-up.

Ginger Snaps franchise (2000 - 2004)

CHARACTER SURVIVAL SPOILERS BELOW

First one is quite cool, some good effects considering the budget, but it's too long and slow and the Heathers style atmosphere slides into Idle Hands territory too often. It also really feels tv movie cheap thanks to some pretty bland direction and lighting and a crappy synth score.

Second one is surprisingly good. It's one of those fun cult horror sequels that pays a lot of attention to continuity. Emily Perkins is great and really evolves her role, it's a fun new set-up, it's a more manageable 90 minutes, and Ghost is up there with Newt in the pantheon of awesome kid characters. I was thinking to myself what a good actor the girl who played her was - turns out it was Tatiana Maslany, playing about ten years below her actual age! Maslany is a total chameleon. KNB are doing the effects now, so they're a bit better. I genuinely would love to see Maslany come back for a sequel twenty years later.

Third one is part of that bizarre mini-tradition of genre franchises going back to cowboy times for the third or fourth one and just having the same actors play their characters' ancestors. It's admirably ambitious and the KNB effects are good again, but it's really tropey and it drags a lot. I ended up skipping through by the end.

Starship Titanic (1998)

I seem to remember this being wildly difficult and being incredibly impressed that Dan completed it himself, so I doubt I'll make it very far through, but I want to check out the opening and the atmosphere at least. I remember the text parser being really accomplished some of the time and classically limited at other times. Like, talking to the bomb and realising you could make it lose count and start again was such a fun moment. Doubt I'll get that far, though!

It's a great opening, very Adams. Quite meta as well, the first thing you get told to do when you get onto the Titanic is go to the plinth and push the button, and when you get to it the plinth says "push button for opening credits". Very Stanley Parable! I haven't actually done anything else yet, I'm popping out for a bit then I'll come back and brave the stupidly difficult puzzles!

Ah yes, I remember, this is really hard to navigate through and also full of Myst type puzzles. Also, I set the bomb countdown off, so I've got to go back there every 15 minutes to reset it! Which is funny but also kind of a pain. Met the Terry Jones parrot and it followed me around for a bit commenting on stuff which again was funny but in a slightly obnoxious way. I finally found my way to the rooms, but I don't know how I'm supposed to work out which one is mine from the weird barcode thing I was given. I think I'll have to read the manual.
So far, very nice atmosphere and fun characters, but it's all a bit irritating as well. I think it could really benefit from a remake - keep the comedy and the visuals, but do it all in lovely hi-res full 3D and soften off all the rough gameplay edges (it's mainly the navigation issue so far, which would be improved by changing to 3D space, I think, plus maybe a few signs or something - although maybe feeling lost is intentional).

Ah. The manual is actually just a fictional in-flight magazine with no actual helpful information in it! I think the pattern here is 'good comedy and atmosphere, bad game'. Time for a walkthrough! 

I've looked at a couple of walkthroughs (needed two because this game is so impenetrable only one isn't enough) and fucking hell I can't believe anyone ever completed this. It must have taken a saintly amount of patience. Take the bomb thing, for instance: there's a bomb with a button saying 'press to disarm'. This is a trick and actually arms the bomb. Okay, so you might guess that in a ship full of malfunctioning robots, and it's quite funny. But then you do have to keep using the crappy navigation to go back through dozens of rooms to reset the countdown every fifteen minutes at least otherwise it's game over. And the puzzle is: if you try to blindly enter passwords for no reason (it's a thirty character password, so there's no reason to think you could guess at it) the bomb will sometimes pick a random dialogue bark. One of these has the password in it, though it isn't highlighted and doesn't stand out in any way. I remember being there when Dan guessed this and I'm still flabbergasted, frankly.

I can't be bothered to follow these walkthroughs the whole way while struggling with the navigation UI, so I'm done with this!

(Also, I take it back that this would be great for a remake!)

Rating: Red

Blade Runner (1997)

Much like Last Express, I suspect this will be one I admire rather than enjoy, and get frustrated with very early on, but we'll see. I think it's got like dead ends and RPG elements and what have you in there...

If nothing else, the CDs are really slick. Plain black background, white wireframe version of the title, and close-ups on great-looking hi-res character models (disc 4 has two - Tyrell and Rachael!).

I've gone with the 'restored content' version on SCUMMVM as it doesn't seem too major - some optional meetings, extra NPCs etc - and it's all content found on the original discs, it's not fan-recreated or anything.

Just watched the intro, this is awesome. Reminds me of Alien Isolation, the way it perfectly captures the film's atmosphere and puts you in a very similar situation on a very similar point in the timeline. They've got all the retro UI stuff, the noir stuff, even bits that are more from the novel about electric animals. Shame they didn't get M Emmett Walsh, though, and just said his character's off sick. I probably would have preferred a soundalike tbh.

Seems the gameplay is heavy on detective work - the UI has different tabs for crime scenes, suspects, clues etc. I'm definitely going to have to read the manual for this!

Ohhh boy, okay, I remember now, This has shooting mechanics, it's in real-time and characters' agendas change per playthrough (most pertinently who's a replicant, I guess). Also, NPCs might pick up evidence themselves if you miss it, there are a bunch of little mechanics you have to learn like how to do the V-K test, the photo enhancement stuff etc (and which the manual warns you require patience!). Sooo, seems like it has lots of cool ideas that might all just end up being inpenetrable and annoying. OR it might all be really cool and I'll end up doing multiple playthroughs!

Okay, so far this is really cool. I'm going around picking up clues, talking to witnesses, and finding stuff round corners in photographs with my magic tech, then I'm going home to pet my (electric?) dog and stand on my tiny balcony while floodlights sweep past and Vangelis fades in. The UI is really tidy and intuitive and it's keeping all my leads comfortingly well-filed. The animation/character movement is a little janky, but that's fine, overall it looks great. But unfortunately the ESPER photo analysis tech mechanics can be janky as well (one thing that I really should be able to check out is apparently of no interest, whereas it took a long time to cajol it into looking at a car properly - I knew what I wanted to look at, I just couldn't figure out the exact grid squares to select). Also, there's a guy with like five incriminating (if circumstantial) bits of evidence but it seems I can't talk to him or arrest him or Voight-Kampff him or anything. So I'm stuck now, and I don't know if it's because I've missed a clue or a mechanic or what. I'm going to check a walkthrough but I'm guessing they'll only be so much help if everything's randomised per playthrough...

Anyway, this is getting less engaging! Turned out I hadn't zoomed in on one photo enough to notice a girl mostly concealed behind a pillar. Once I'd done that, I could go to my suspect and show him my hard copy of that zoom in, then he ran. That still didn't give me anything to work with, so I went home, and turns out that was the right thing to do because he showed up on my rooftop and tried to kill me, so I retired him. Now I'm onto the next case. So, okay, progress, but I had to use a walkthrough and it was all a little fiddly, and now I'm stuck again, just bouncing back and forth between the same few locations hoping something will shake loose. I'm getting flashbacks to all those immersive sims where I felt like an idiot bumbling around not knowing what I didn't know, but there's also some of the irritations of point and clicks.

I went to a fair amount of effort copying all the files over from the 4 CDs to get this going, so I'd like to try to get more out of it before I give up, but the game isn't really helping me out!

Okay, so one issue was that a new location had opened up on my map and I hadn't noticed the tiny blue square. The other is that I didn't click on the same thing enough times to get my gathered clue to have an effect, which is really fucking annoying. Oh, and apparently it's random as to whether my lieutenant is in his office to get me an interview with Tyrell or not, which seems like a pretty big deal to just maybe miss out on!

This game is such a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's very atmospheric and full of really cool stuff, and when things are flowing it's great. But, having initially been impressed by them, I now feel like the UI and mechanics are intentionally getting in the way sometimes; I could really do with some more hand-holding here. Like, Chew tells me that some other guy didn't meet him for takeout today. This takes me like three listens to parse, and even then I don't know who that guy is or why it's important, but my dialogue runs out, so I go to the location across the street and there's a guy chained to a bomb so I run straight out again and narrowly avoid getting blown up. Apparently that was the guy, so now it makes sense why he didn't meet with Chew, but I only know this because my character somehow knows this. So it's a pretty cool series of events but I feel like it's happening to me by accident.  It's that immersive sim disconnect.

Also, it's really cool to be in the same timeframe as the movie, hearing about Holden getting blasted, getting to talk to Chew (the eye manufacturer played by a returning James Hong) and stuff like that, but on the other hand it has this Ghostbusters The Game feel where you're meeting everyone and going everywhere that Deckard did, presumably at a very similar time. Like, I went to JF Sebastian's place at the Bradbury, smashed up his shelves and used them to climb up onto the roof just in time to get overpowered by a philosophising replicant, exactly like Deckard is presumably going to do in about a day from now!

I'm going to take a break now, I think. I'm at the start of a new bit, so I've got fresh stuff to come back to. I got captured by the Nexus 6s, who are acting like a family unit, and I'm having weird dreams (again, very Blade Runner but also too Blade Runner!).

I took a very long break due to life changes, and I can't bring myself to start on Blade Runner again. Too many fiddly UI things to remember and then struggle with for the sake of probably giving up twenty minutes in anyway. So, loads of great atmosphere but also I felt like I was struggling against the game a lot plus the fan service often got a bit much.

Rating: Orange

Nope (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Boring. The slow-boil build-up goes on for way too long, a huge amount of narrative energy is given to a pointless character backstory, and the twist about the nature of the UFO is briefly interesting but ultimately turns this into a movie about people trying to get a photo of a big sky-horse. All the characters are fairly irritating and seem to emote and act at random, for example getting annoyed at electric equipment turning off when they knew it was going to do that, or wordlessly coming up with plans on the fly which are so arbitrary as to be unfollowable. This, combined with the fact that the UFO's thought processes are intentionally fairly unpredictable and unknowable, and that other basic and crucial information like 'did they get the shot? Is the film safe?' is left ambiguous (possibly intentionally, but if so it's a bad choice), means that the action scenes are rather uninvolving.

It does look nice, the performances are all strong (even if they do mostly fall into the camps of 'annoying idiot' or 'emotionally closed off') and the creature design (and the slow reveal of all its elements) is cool, but this stuff can't rescue it from its flaws.

Rating: Meh.

Kate (2021)

Utterly unoriginal and predictable, but looks good, great action and Winstead and Martineau are great.

Rating: Good.

Lightyear (2022)

It looks quite nice and the action is well-directed and everything but I just did not give a shit about the story or the characters the entire way through - the script feels like a wiki plot summary for some franchise's pointless origin novel.

Rating: Meh.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Didn't enjoy it very much. It never gets around the fact that it's a prequel based on a single goal which we know from New Hope is achieved, and it also makes the same mistake as Force Awakens of being far too complicated - too many characters, too many locations, too many things going on in a single sequence so things have to be constantly explained throughout - he has to press this button and they have to shoot that shield and we have to get that disc and then broadcast it from that dish. Films like New Hope and Back To The Future know that you need this shit set out beforehand so when stuff goes wrong the viewer immediately understands with no explanation.

It reminds me of the Marvel movies that want to be a spy thriller or war movie or whatever but don't have the balls to step away from the standard franchise beats, so everything gets diluted. Here we have to watch the same rebels vs star destroyers battle that we've seen so many times, and the stuff like the Empire bureaucratic wranglings, Alliance politics and team-gathering don't have any time to breath and end up feeling very mechanical.

Also, too much Tarkin and Vader (and their voices are both way off, it's very odd). That last scene with Vader was fucking magnificent and pointed to the movie I was hoping for - Rebels scrabbling around in the face of this terrifying and brutal regime, snatching small victories by the skin of their teeth. Too much fan service in general, same as the Ghostbusters cameos - stopping for 10 seconds to gaze at the droids or Ponda Baba and Dr Evazan does not serve the film at all, and they wouldn't do it for unknown characters. No restraint.

Rating: Meh.

The Grey Man (2022)

Very slick and tons of fantastic action, but there isn't a single moment in the entire film that isn't a tired old trope. Even Chris Evans' acid-tongued sociopath, while fun, feels like a carbon-copy of a '95-'05 John Travolta character. The rest of the performances are solid but unenergetic and similarly derivative.

Pretty much worth watching for the action, and possibly for the fun of shouting out which film is being stolen from at five seconds intervals, but it'll drop right out of your head afterwards.

Rating: Fine.

Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

Where the previous entry felt more like a Resident Evil movie, this one feels more like an Uncharted movie. It takes about 80 minutes to actually get a character into a wild environment with dinosaurs in it - until then it's jetsetting espionage with sexy bounty hunters and spending far too much time getting all the current and legacy characters to the dino factory. This wouldn't be an issue if they had gone all in on the 'dinos have taken over America' angle, but this is mostly done in montages and the one time they do ask 'what would an action scene with dinosaurs be like in contemporary America', the answer is basically 'they'd run fast down streets at you'. They're hobbled by the fact that the set-up only involved a handful of dinosaurs escaping from one mainland location and they never come up with a way to get around that.

Meanwhile. the writing is dreadful, the fan service is lazy and clumsy, the action is badly-directed, there are big logic gaps, and characters make stupid decisions every few seconds.

Truly embarrassingly bad.

Rating: Awful.

Thor: Love And Thunder (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Makes so many of the typical action/comedy sequel errors seen in MIB2/Blade 2/Anchorman 2/Toy Story 2 etc. Jokes are brought back from the previous movie and stretched into tedium, the careful tightrope-walk of tone tips over into distancing cartoonishness, heavy slabs of pathos are dropped into a film that can't support it, and modified versions of certain elements are ported over without success.

Instead of Thor smashing up hellspawn to Led Zeppelin, he's doing a Bugs Bunny act through owl aliens to Guns N Roses. Instead of Jeff Goldblum funnelling his persona into a vain cruel despot, we have Russell Crowe doing the same, except he's playing a children's book Zeus with a terrible Greek accent and a tacky cartoonish lightning bolt symbol as a weapon. For the British actor as the main villain with an indirect grudge against Thor, in place of Cate Blanchett's arch performance there's Christian Bale giving a straight dramatic rendition of a grieving father.

There are some big wasted opportunities - Thor with the Guardians is binned ten minutes in (I appreciated how much cruft Waititi swept away at the start of Ragnarok, but this felt like something he could have actually done a lot with, especially considering how poor the alternative turned out to be), and most egregiously they bring Natalie Portman back and give her an interesting set-up as Mjolnir-powered Jane then mostly waste it by giving her cancer and killing her off, with most of her time before that spent negotiating her romantic relationship with Thor.

It doesn't have the stylistic flair of Ragnarok. One of the few new jokes is that 'screaming goat' meme that was popular about ten years ago, and is repeated constantly. A lot of the logic doesn't hold up. Valkyrie doesn't get to do much, nothing new is done with Korg and arguably he's overused.

If I had to watch one of the three non-Ragnarok Thors again, I genuinely am not sure which one I'd pick.

Rating: Bad.

The Protégé (2021)

Gave up on this one halfway through (I didn't even make it to any of the twists that Prime managed to ruin in their 20 second trailer). The writing is abysmal - as one example, the words 'sarcasm', 'funny' and 'like' are misused within ten seconds of dialogue (which comes across as instant dislike but apparently was supposed to be flirting) - all the characters constantly make stupid decisions, hails of bullets magically pass through the lead character, there's no specificity to anything (example - who is this biker gang, why do they have knowledge of some rando CEO's security, why does it matter when all they're used for is pulling up by his car and pointing guns at him?). What little action there was in the first half of the movie was competent but perfunctory.

Rating: Very Bad.

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

I was really hoping to like this, but it manages to mess pretty much everything up on every level.

The basic story beats are rote and messy, like the writers sat next to someone reading Save The Cat once (it starts with a drawn out unnecessary voiceover prologue instead of organically revealing the one or two salient points, the 'estranged friends' arc continually resets and wobbles along on unconvincing motivations, and the 'franchise-milking is bad/prioritise friends over business' theme starts muddled and utterly falls apart by the end credits).

Most of the jokes get fluffed (they literally go to the wrong side of the tracks except both sides look equally bad and there's a sign saying "the wrong side", the cops say "get the battering ram" and then it cuts to TWO cartoon rams, the ghetto called The Uncanny Valley is not a valley, Scrooge McDuck is seen at a spa just sitting in a jacuzzi of money throwing it about instead of, y'know, swimming in it which is his whole thing). There is one great gag that they do pull off (although they still could have executed it a lot better by having them say something smarter and having them all do the laugh at the same time), where Seth Rogen's character runs into Puumba and a bunch of other Rogen-voiced toons.

The references are shoved in your face over and over (Ugly Sonic would have been a great background detail, but here he's like the fifth biggest character and he's only got the one joke about his teeth, the whole bootleg bit is great the first time, then it turns into the entire villainous scheme and is utterly flogged by the end of the movie), show no understanding for the thing they're referencing (He-Man and Skeletor don't have Filmation style animation, the issue with Zemeckis mo-cap eyes wasn't that they pointed in the wrong direction, it was that they were soulless, and those characters never looked as good as they do here - the rendering, detail and animation is way off), and simultaneously miss opportunities (why are so many background characters generic CG models? Why isn't the scary snake Kaa, or at least Sir Hiss? Why is one of the henchmen just 'a bear'?).

I understand that they may not have had the budget to hand-draw their main 2D characters, but the cel-shaded fakery here often slips, and regardless their animation is stiff and dull to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it was automated in some way.

The rules don't seem to have been thought through (some toons age, some don't; some act just like their 'characters', some don't; some characters like Lumiere who got a 3D update don't appear in that form (and apparently redesigns don't count); they can take the standard infinite toon damage except sometimes apparently they might die from drowning or getting shot with a cannonball, one of the bootlegs is a remake of Aladdin with an unchanged Peg Leg Pete, Captain S. Putty refers to silly putty as a thing that he is not).

The whole thing feels more like a tacky commercial than a loving well-crafted movie, and it doesn't do itself any favours with the early Roger Rabbit cameo, reminding us of how well this concept can be done.

Rating: Terrible.

Candyman (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

The original movie was a masterclass in atmosphere, an art horror that didn't resort to jump scares. This cheesy lore-heavy sequel plays more like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and it has so much stupid shit in it that it regularly slips into Scary Movie territory. There's the sassiest 'sassy gay friend' I've seen in a long time, people shout Sonic Hedgehog memes as they're getting murdered, the protagonist does a Marx Brothers mirror routine when he's getting possessed, he walks around with half his body turned to necrotised, honeycombed flesh and no one tells him to go to a hospital (when he finally does of his own accord, they put a bandage on his arm), four victims trapped in a bathroom walk one by one into a blind spot behind a cubicle and get slaughtered, the others either not noticing or not quite finding the words to warn their friends in time, the many many lore dumps are told via Deathly Hallows/Golden Army style shadow puppet scenes that sap what little tension there is, CG Tony Todd looks like one of the I Am Legend mutants, the murders are mostly done by flubbering people around the place and one of them goes far enough that it looks like a Pixar slapstick sequence, the protagonist's girlfriend sensibly tells him to fuck off and gets the hell out of there as soon as he starts acting crazy and it seems like he might be killing people but then once he's turned into Freddy Krueger she's suddenly doting over him, Candyman is an embodiment of racial violence through the last century but only racial violence against men with hook-hands and sugar-related origin stories apparently, and the whole 'cops kill Black people without justification' theme is undermined by the fact that in this movie they only do it to Black people who are living in the walls offering candy to children or Black people who are literal monsters.

Rating: Very Bad.

The Last Express (1997)

This is a critical darling which I like the idea of, but I suspect I'll get frustrated with it quite quickly as I gather it's all in real time and requires replays.

-

Had to fiddle with the DOSBox config to get it fullscreen, but it still looks quite nice. Shame the transitions between animation frames are so low-res, it would almost look like a modern game otherwise.
I've started a playthrough and am already pretty confused - I immediately had no bearings of where I was on the train, I don't have any particular goal (except 'solve a murder', and I guess I know that a suspect is on the train or something?), I don't seem to be able to do much and I already got a game over because I annoyed someone by clicking on them so they got me thrown off the train, I think?
I'm going to see if I can find a manual, hopefully that will help me get started...

-

Ah, I'm supposed to be finding my friend. I should have figured that out, I guess!

-

Hmm, okay, so I talked to the guard, found my friend dead in his compartment, hoyed him out the window, swapped my bloody jacket for his and then talked to that guy whom I annoyed in my last playthrough but this time pretended to be my friend and got some details about a dodgy deal. So that was all pretty cool, but now I'm back to wandering up and down the train again. I guess I'm supposed to just wait until interesting stuff happens, and then click on people to talk to them when it lets me? It's all a bit vague. Also, the control system is a little fiddly...

-

Okay, yeah, I took a quick look at a walkthrough and I don't really have the patience to endlessly replay the game wandering up and down a corridor in order to try and catch stuff that happens incredibly briefly whether I'm there or not, in the hopes that it might help me do something somehow. It's a lovely looking game and a neat idea, but far too abstruse for my tastes!

Rating: Orange

Teenagent (1994)

Bit ropey so far. Not very attractive, and not particularly funny. But I've only played the very opening.

-

Gave up on this. The entire story so far is 'gold is disappearing, the secret service choose you, a random teenager, to help them solve it because an algorithm told them to. Do some training.' The translation is awful, the comedy is bad, the puzzles are a mix of banal and nonsensical with a bunch of pixel hunting, the music is excruciatingly irritating and repetitive, and it looks hella ugly.

Rating: Red

Death On The Nile (2022)

I enjoyed the second half of this movie a fair bit, certainly more than Orient Express. There are lots of twists and turns, the fake accents get in the way less than in the first movie, the characters act like humans and Poirot's deductions mostly seem reasonable. Unfortunately, the first half exists, with a pointless Poirot flashback that aims for drama but lands on Last Crusade levels of silliness (he has two ridiculous reasons for his moustache!) and a lot of contrived, overlong set-up and padding amongst some Jumanji-esque cartoonish CG backdrops. Perhaps COVID can be blamed for that last one, at least. If only they had spent that first hour on the boat, developing all the characters more, this could have been a stand-out murder mystery.

Rating: Alright.

Murder On The Orient Express (2017)

I haven't seen (or read) any versions of this before, but I did know the solution. It all felt very rushed to me - we barely get to know the characters or see them interact with each other, there's a murder and then a flurry of information, and Poirot seems to pull most of his deductions out of thin air. The revelation leans heavily on emotional drama, which doesn't really work as we haven't spent any real time with these characters and some of them are only revealing their truths for the first time in the same moment that we are being asked to care about any of it.

I have no idea how this weighs up against the original story or other adaptations, but taking it as a film on its own merits, I felt like it either needed fewer characters or more time.

Rating: Meh.

The X-Files

Note: these are mostly pasted from forum/IRC re-watch posts, so can be a little disjointed.

S01E01 "PILOT"

It's great seeing all the iconic stuff again, but what struck me most was how adult it is compared to a lot of modern genre telly. It's sincere and deliberate and procedural with a gentle wit, it's not covered in a layer of post-modern snark, it doesn't feel the need to do a recap every two minutes, it's even comparatively a little slow and uneventful.
The framing, colouring and all that seem fine in the HD remaster, too. Certainly not noticeably bad.

S01E02: "DEEP THROAT"
I like this episode, it's got a great atmosphere of this small town next to a huge secretive military base, full of people who either try to pretend weird stuff's not happening or who just accept it as a fun quirk, and I like all the UFO iconography and visuals. But there's not much structure to it, it's just 'they go looking for weird stuff, see some weird stuff, but get screwed over and leave frustrated". It almost feels like a 'dramatic reconstruction' show. I like how tantalising that is, though. It's like, Mulder isn't just going to crack this thing after a few tries, he's just scratching at the edges of a massive entity and he's going to keep getting shut down. Even his informant isn't actually telling him anything!

S01E03 "SQUEEZE"

It's great. I really enjoy the '(at least?) 100 years old' part of it, it gives them some supernatural historical detective work to do and reminds me of LOST a little (which Hutchinson was also in, a couple of years before that marriage). Duchovny is getting better at delivering the purple dialogue (like the millstone line or the cool exterior line) in a way that makes it seem like he just came up with it in the moment, and it's great how the Scully-Mulder dynamic is growing - he immediately and unbegrudgingly says 'you were right' when proved wrong, she's first to tuck her gun in her trousers and climb into the monster's den, and they do some awesome co-op work in the Tooms fight to get him handcuffed to the bath.

It's wild how early this show was setting out its stall and bringing out its big hitters (to mix metaphors) - there's the alien abduction pilot, the Roswell-related government conspiracy episode, then the first Monster Of The Week episode which is also considered iconic and one of the best. Mulder & Scully are pretty much fully drawn now, and we've already met CSM. The only major elements left to be introduced are Mulder's sister and Skinner.

S01E04 "CONDUIT"

It's got some cool imagery but it's mainly just a grab-bag of abduction phenomena, and the conduit stuff/Mulder's obsession don't pan out to much.

I do like the continued 'historical pattern' thing, though. Pilot, Squeeze and this one all touch on it. Like, is it just because the mum took her kids to the same lake, or are the aliens abducting people within the same families through the generations for some reason?

Also, the Samantha thread is introduced here, so just Skinner to go!

S01E05 "THE JERSEY DEVIL"

I enjoyed it. It's nice to get a break from alien stories (even if this one also has a conspiracy angle!), and I liked the gang of kooks that Mulder amassed by the end of the episode - shame that homeless guy couldn't have tagged along too! I also liked the little touches - the mirroring of Mulder looking at pictures of naked ladies in Hanky Panky at the start of the ep, then later on at a female bigfoot and finally the photos of the dead Jersey Devil, the kids running around in primate masks bashing each other, the cut-out newspaper comic strips on the acquisitions desk.

S01E06 "SHADOWS"
I really like this ep too, it's a solid 'unfinished business' ghost story, with the nice 'psychokinesis' fake-out (that Supernatural would later do the reverse of in one ep) and X Files wrapping to keep it fresh.

S01E07 "GHOST IN THE MACHINE"

Not too much silly tech stuff, outside of some fudging with Scully's modem phone line and a bit of dialogue about "data travellers, electro-wizards, techno-anarchists". The wonkier stuff is on the production side of things - the ADR is so bad in first scene, two stalwart character actors and their performances are rendered terrible. And I swear they played a bit of footage then reversed it to get a guy to look at Scully then away again in a single shot. Also some goofy contrivances, like them just happening upon an evil AI case without even going through the X Files. It's also a bit weird to have Deep Throat show up to help Mulder with a bog-standard MOTW. I guess he is DOD, but still feels too easy, like he's Al from Quantum Leap of something. I don't even know why they did it, seeing as Mulder could have pretty easily guessed or researched the info DT gave him.

Still a cool episode overall, though. Solid evil AI stuff, I like Wilzcek, and it's nice to see someone from the bureau who likes Mulder, even if there's still some antagonism there.

Oh, also, the air vent sequence is terrible! A rare instance of the show biting off more than it can chew.

S01E08 "ICE"
They do a lot of 'here's our take on [trope]' on this show, but they're not usually so unashamedly close to one specific example of it! Still, it's a solid cover version, with a good selection of character actors.

S01E09 "SPACE"
The scenes in the control room are effectively tense and Mulder's child-like enthusiasm is fun, but this is a thin premise executed clunkily. Outside of the fact that they clearly didn't have the resources to portray all this stuff convincingly, it's almost half an hour before we even get an idea of what's going on and even then it's just 'a Martian entity possessed this guy and is sabotaging the mission'.
To rub salt in the wound, this is one of those one-off phenomena that could and perhaps should tie into the arc mythology but never does. I want to know what the alien invaders think of these Mars ghosts!

S01E10 "FALLEN ANGEL"
I really like the episode overall! It makes a lot better use of its budget than Space did, and it's got a load of cool stuff going on. I love Max! Deep Throat is back to being cool, too.
I thought the FX were solid in this one. They do use some cheap effects like over-cranking and white-outs and stuff, but nothing as glaringly bad as Space and I thought the invisibility effect was fine...I thought I recognised some of the actors in the second scene (as well as Marshall Bell), checked their imdb pages, and I don't think this is where I remember them from but it turns out they played husband and wife in an episode of Supernatural where the gang get trapped with some people in a location while there are evil worms that get into people and make them go homicidal!
(I recognise Marshall Bell, of course, from Starship Troopers as the admiral who has been trapped in a location with other soldiers who went homicidal after bugs got into... haaaang on... Is everything just a rip off of The Thing?!) 

S01E11 "EVE"
Loved this episode! It's a cool set-up, the girls are creepy as hell, Harriet Harris is amazing, and they unravel the mystery at just the right pace. Also, I just realised this episode that the end scene with Deep Throat in "Fallen Angel" means that him popping in for MOTW episodes doesn't feel weirdly benign any more, because it's now framed as him ingratiating himself with Mulder.
The only thing I don't like in this ep is the contrived way Mulder realises what they're doing with the soda, just happening to forget his keys then seeing a great big mess of foxglove on the table. Would have been much better if he'd heard Scully mention the diet soda was syrupy and suddenly realised what was going on. All the set-up's there, to the point where I wonder if they rewrote it because they didn't think viewers would be able to follow Mulder's thought process. Him forgetting his keys and then the fact that she's dumped half of it on the table for some reason - so contrived. If he'd realised from a comment she made and then was a bit more subtle about stopping her drinking, but they realise he knows and disappear anyway, would have worked a lot better to emphasise how smart both they and Mulder are. Ah well. Excellent episode otherwise.

S01E12 "FIRE"
This one was a real cheesy clunker. I had to force myself to get through it.

S01E13 "BEYOND THE SEA"

This is a great ep. It's got the investigation, the paranormal and the character stuff all working together. Dourif is fantastic, too.

It's cool to have Scully seeing the paranormal stuff this time, and I like that she fights against it so much, too. "I'm scared to believe" works well as a general justification for how stubborn she always is in the face of paranormal evidence. It's set up as a contrast to Mulder's "I want to believe". (It's also pretty funny that as soon as Scully reverts back to finding logical explanations for everything, Mulder is suddenly like "but maybe he is real, why won't you believe, Scully?!")

S01E14 "GENDERBENDER"

 It's got some effectively creepy atmosphere but it's quite muddled - it's essentially just a collection of weird stuff. These people can sex-shift (all of them at will or just Marty?), and exude pheromones, and they've got a white goop that allows them to regenerate, and maybe they can teleport, and they've got a spaceship and they're probably aliens.

It's interesting that just a year before Species came out, this episode had a female shape-shifting alien hunting for male sexual partners then killing them, associated with HR Giger imagery.

As for problematic elements, well, I'm not the best-placed person to judge, but to my mind: while it's not explicitly about transgender people, it does have some typical transphobic imagery and themes - a woman who seduces men, only to turn out to be a man in disguise, plus he uses a form of date-rape drug and also the men die from having sex with him. It's certainly not as forward-thinking as Duchovny's portrayal of the explicitly trans Denise Bryson in Twin Peaks 4 years earlier.

S01E15 "LAZARUS"
Allport is the strength of this episode. It's a cool enough idea, but they don't take it very far.

S01E16 "YOUNG AT HEART"
I really enjoyed this one! Cool idea, the reveal of info is well-paced, I like the reappearances of Deep Throat and more subtly the cigarette smoking g-man from the pilot. I like that the villain is just a malicious bloodthirsty scumbag. The only things I didn't like were the cheesy choral chanting on the score, and the fact that it came immediately after another 'resurrected criminal' episode.

S01E17 "E.B.E."

Great episode. I love how they make it feel like you've seen everything and nothing at the same time. Scully and Mulder's belief levels meet more in the middle as well - she starts to buy into it (at least in this episode!) and by the end of it he's cynical about the whole thing.

Cool to see a young Roger Cross, too!

S01E18 "MIRACLE MAN"

I just found it dull. It picked up a little in the second half but not much...Aaaand it crashed again. Yawnsville.

S01E19 "SHAPES"

Another slow one. I enjoyed this more than Miracle Man, but that's probably mainly because werewolf Native Americans are inherently more interesting to me than Southern faith healers. Cool to see Michael Horse from Twin Peaks, though.
The line at the end about the sister having left because she saw something she wasn't ready to believe in or something like that was clearly a reflection of Scully's attitude. She knows what she saw, she's just not ready to admit it to herself yet. Mulder's always jumping in headfirst, Scully's always dragging her feet!

Like, a massive hairy arm bursts through the door at her, then she and Mulder are both looking straight at the creature when the sheriff shoots it and it turns into the guy. Come on Scully, you know full well that wasn't a mountain lion!

S01E20 "DARKNESS FALLS"

Pretty good! The guest cast are all strong, the bug effects are mostly effectively creepy, and it's a cool idea. It peters out towards the end, though. Also, Scully's nineties cagoule is hideous. 

S01E21 "TOOMS"

Excellent ep! It's got a returning baddy, proper horror thrills, investigative stuff and an action ending. Also, a relatively big ep for the show going forward - it introduces Skinner, has CSM talk (I think this is the first time we actually hear him?), and starts pushing the 'X Files closure' thread.

Bit weird how that old detective knew exactly where the body was, though - was there something that I missed that suggested how he came up with that, even if it was just another hunch?

S01E22 "BORN AGAIN"
S01E23 "ROLAND"

These were ok, though I felt like you get told what's happening about halfway through and then there's not really anywhere to go. I preferred Born Again of the two, that had some cooler stuff going on.

S01E24 "THE ERLENMEYER FLASK"

This is great. Just so much stuff suddenly thrown at you! (Sidenote: Scully refers to the previously unnamed 'deep background' guy as "this Deep Throat character"!)

S02E01 "LITTLE GREEN MEN"

Really enjoyed it. Again, some big reveals - greys! Mulder's senate backing! Skinner and Smoking Man's working relationship! - plus the abduction scenes are incredibly atmospheric, some cool actiony stuff, and splitting Mulder and Scully up and giving them different stuff to do works well.

S02E02 "THE HOST"

The Host is great too. This season's Squeeze/Tooms, just a wonderfully gloopy, weird, darkly funny monster story.

It feels a little like they're trying to have Scully see more stuff and become a little more open. Like, she saw the alien foetus, then in Little Green Men, when the room starts to shake she simply asks "is it them?" and now she gets to see a radioactive worm monster. Currently feels like a bit of a character arc happening - can't remember in any detail where it goes from here, though. I really think in the movie they should have let Scully see all that alien mothership shit at the end - that would have gone a long way to making the movie feel momentous, and at that point it was getting pretty silly. I wonder if that was actually the original plan, as I think around that time they were planning to do another movie or two and wrap it up. Ah, if only they'd done that. Or at least done one more season then one more movie.

S02E03 "BLOOD"

Another strong ep. Really good at building tension. I like the ambiguity at the end of whether there really were people putting out messages onto the devices or if Mulder's fear of government conspiracies made him see those messages on the phone...

Sanderson is terrific.

S02E04 "SLEEPLESS"
Solid. Good idea, well-executed, and the Krychek twist at the end is cool. It doesn't feel like it does all it could with the main concept, but it'd probably need a movie to take it to its extremes.

S02E05 "DUANE BARRY"

Really good ep. Strong concept, well-directed (love that opening with the dog), very tense. The guy playing Duane Barry is great, CCH Pounder is as good as ever.

S02E06 "ASCENSION"

Really good, too. Good use of Red Right Hand by Nick Cave, before that became a little tired. Feels like maybe the first time the show has used licensed music in this way, too - not truly extra-diegetic but close. I love the sweaty, squirrelly vibe Lea gives Krycek when he's not playing boy scout for Mulder, and like Bucky said Skinner's 'always-fair hardass' routine is great. Pretty funny to watch the episode wring as much tension as possible out of Mulder taking an aerial tram ride.

Interesting that some of the exterior shots were lower definition, even flipping back and forth in that scene near the end with Scully's mother. I guess maybe they didn't have access to the original rushes from those camera set-ups and had to do the best they could with previous SD scans...
I love that they took advantage of Anderson's pregnancy to get a cheap special effect with the 'inflated stomach' shot!

One thing that I remember bugging me at the time (requires knowledge up to season 8 or something like that) is that CSM's justification for not just killing Mulder is that it would make him a martyr, turn his mission into a crusade (I think he says this again later), but then when Mulder does ostensibly die, none of that happens! The Lone Gunmen et al don't rise up and take down the conspiracy or anything! Maybe other reasons are given as the Mulders' involvement in the lore backstory gets more complicated, I can't remember.

S02E07 "3"

A mess. I've watched it at least three times over the years and I still find it hard to follow.
It's pretty funny that as soon as Mulder is let back on the X Files without Scully around, his horniness gets him in trouble. Also, "Frank Military" is a nicely ironic actor's name for this show.

S02E08 "ONE BREATH"

Enjoyed this one. I'm glad they at least take an episode over Scully's return, it's cool to get a fair chunk of Scullycentric stuff with her family and her faith, as well as some cool conspiracy shit with Mulder. This is the episode that I referred to a while back in spoiler tags about the writers clumsily trying to coin "Cancer Man" as the nickname for that guy, when Smoking Man or CSM actually works way better.

S02E09 "FIREWALKER"

Bit meh, this one. Another riff on The Thing, taking slightly different elements from it than Ice did. And, as far as I could tell, it was never explained what cast the shadow on FIrewalker's footage - it seems to be something completely different to the parasitic fungus deal that most of the episode dealt with. Cool to see Leland Orser and Bradley Whitford though.

S02E10 "RED MUSEUM"

Nice slow-burn episode with lots of creepy small-town atmosphere, then a left-turn into conspiracy arc territory more fully than the one in Blood. Always good to see Mark Rolston, and the return of Crew Cut Man (here 'The Cleaner') was cool too.

S02E11 "EXCELSIS DEI"

This one is a messy drudge. So it's all down to these mushrooms, which cure Alzheimers and increase physical strength and unleash ghosts and allow you to see ghosts, but if a certain one of you nearly dies then the ghosts go away? And I guess one of the ghosts smells and feels like one of the living residents but the orderly was mistaken and the ghost wasn't actually him. And this idiot Gung is giving it to all the old people but also doesn't seem to be able to keep them from just stealing piles of them and overdosing?

S02E12 "AUBREY"

Terry O'Quinn's first appearance! Wooo!

I really enjoyed this one! The mix of Mindhunters-style 40s serial killer hunters and modern day psychic stuff worked really well. I thought it was about to dip when we found out the explanation, but then BJ becoming Cokely while killing Cokely was such a great, creepy scene.

S02E13 "IRRESISTABLE"

This is a pretty strong episode, but it suffers a bit from coming straight after another serial killer ep. The shape-shifting thing is pretty cool when you know the reasoning behind it (apparently some of Jeffery Dahmer's surviving victims said that he shape-shifted when he was holding them hostage), but without that it feels a bit like a tenuous attempt to stick some paranormal element in there. It would be fine if it were just Scully seeing it, but the funeral home guy does too.

Also, in season 7 he comes back and they just full-on make him a monster.

S02E14 "DIE HAND DIE VERLETZT"
Great episode! Despite the campiness and dark humour it also is genuinely creepy in a lot of places, it's well directed and all the guest performances are great.

S02E15 "FRESH BONES"

Pretty bad. Directionless, confusing. Reminded me of 3, especially as I still didn't really understand what had happened by the end of it. That car scene was pretty cool though.

S02E16 "COLONY"

Great stuff! I love how they're adding more specific, unique stuff to their mythology (or at least solidifying it) with the green blood and the clones and the bounty hunter, it's not just 'aliens abduct people'. There are a lot of big series moments here, including Samantha and the Mulders coming in. Also satisfying to have Scully see even more stuff right in front of her, and then that great cliffhanger.

S02E17 "END GAME"

I also really enjoyed this one, but I don't have much new to say about it after the first part. Again, I like how everything is starting to feel more cohesive - Skinner meeting X is fucking great. 

I've realised though that this doesn't definitively tie into the ongoing abduction stuff yet, unless we assume the clones and the bounty hunter are telling the truth about knowing about Samantha's whereabouts and well-being (and I don't think once the female clones reveal themselves that they ever say they're clones of Samantha, so maybe these aliens just listened to Mulder's hypnotherapy sessions..!).

S02E18 "FEARFUL SYMMETRY"

I strangely enjoyed this one. It's pretty slow, but it's got an enjoyably weird premise and that cold open is great. It's full of effective pathos too - with the kids by the dying elephant, one sobbing and the other gazing into its eye, Sophie's near-human emotions and communication, and then that gutting ending.

S02E19 "DØD KALM"

A very slow, passive version of Ice, Firewalker etc. It's hard to get past the make-up effects, and the lack of explanation at the end is frustrating.

S02E20 "HUMBUG"

Fantastic episode. Genuinely funny, well-directed, lots of great performances, and a cool twisty-turny whodunnit.

S02E21 "THE CALUSARI"

It's a pretty loose episode, but atmospheric and effective. Really nicely shot. It's like a serious, arty take on Die Hand Die Verletzt. And yep, still very cool to see and hear that distinctive actor from Grim Fandango. I really like the creepy "it knows you now" ending - I kind of want the show to also have a demonic series arc as well as the alien one..!

S02E22 "F. EMASCULATA"

Cool. Good gore effects and the two plots of prison quarantine conspiracy and ticking clock manhunt played off each other well. It might just be the score for this one, but it felt quite Cameron-y.

S02E23 "SOFT LIGHT"

I enjoyed it. The story is a little flimsy, but it's a cool idea, Shaloub is good, and seeing X have his own CSM epilogue was cool too.

S02E24 "OUR TOWN"

This one is a little slow, and Mulder & Scully don't have much to do, but it's pleasingly gross/creepy.

S02E25 "ANASAZI"

Great! So much exciting lore stuff (Mulder's dad is involved! Krycek returns! Scully's abduction is connected!), cool concepts, big budget, Even the subterfuge stuff is really well done, with all the hints towards Mulder's water being spiked.

S03E01 "THE BLESSING WAY"

Really enjoyed this ep. It's like a nice companion piece to that one where Scully was in the hospital, but it's got extra intrigue to go with the floaty afterlife stuff. All the stuff with Scully's sister works really well, a real gut-punch. It's cool seeing CSM out and about and getting vicious and panicky, as well as Skinner getting more to do and Krycek returning. We meet the consortium and the Well-Manicured Man. And they continue to develop the repercussions of Scully's abduction, and tie Samantha into the ongoing conspiracy somehow. (Future spoilers: of course, they completely fuck up the Samantha stuff down the line, which was incredibly frustrating.) They really packed a lot in here!

S03E02 "PAPER CLIP"
Oops, no notes. Probably liked it!

S03E03 "D.P.O."

I enjoyed this episode, good guest cast, and it's got a very 90s pulp feel, especially Jack Black's death scene. Feels very much like a Final Destination movie or something when it does those jump-zooms in on him standing on the roof as Hey Man Nice Shot plays! (And it's good to see that Hey Man Nice Shot has been retained on streaming, unlike with some shows cough Supernatural cough)

S03E04 "CLYDE BRUCKMAN'S FINAL REPOSE"
Still brilliant. Love how he gets the genuinely funny comedy but also nails the creepiness and procedural aspects of the best X-Files.

S03E05 "THE LIST"
Less boring than I remembered it (maybe I was mixing it up with that voodoo one) - it's atmospheric, it's got a strong roster of character actors in there and the list gives it a good structure that they add some nice complications and diversions to. It does suffer from the semi-frequent X Files issue of Mulder and Scully not having any effect on the plot, though, plus it starts to get a little repetitive by the end, and the ghost isn't particularly cool. I'd say this is a mediocre episode overall.

S03E06 "2SHY"

This one is okay. Feels like a bit of a re-tread of Squeeze and Irresistible, though. I was happy to see the fake-out ending where it turns out that Mulder isn't the guy who gets to have the showdown and instead Scully holds her own in a pretty brutal fight. And then she gets rescued but again it's not by Mulder but the female would-be victim with goop still dripping off her face, that was cool.

S03E07 "THE WALK"

I quite like it. We've seen psychic/demon/ghost killers before, but the reflections/phone calls are creepy, the deaths are all cool (that swimming pool one is great Spielbergian horror), the guest cast are good (especially Rappo), and I love how it turns into Nightmare On Elm Street at the end. Again, a shame that Mulder & Scully have zero effect on the story, and they could have built up the tension at the end a bit more (maybe have it seem like Mulder's about to get knocked into the boiling water, or drowned or something, and have Scully trying to bring Rappo back to consciousness but his astral projection jumps between the two locations and knocks her out or something like that). Solid.

Also, some clever amputee effects - I genuinely wasn't sure at one point if the actor was really an amputee or not.

S03E08 "OUBLIETTE"

Strong episode. The supernatural element is relatively low-key and simple, but it's mainly there to support the character work, and that balance pays off really well.

S03E09 "NISEI"

Really good! Really well-directed, really fun escalation from a seemingly cheesy back-pages autospy vid to international conspiracy, and some exciting action, plus the creepy abductee stuff. I feel like some of the details are a little floaty, but perhaps I'm getting muddled with rewatches or just not following (like, has Scully really never had a look at her implant before? Or mentioned it to Mulder? And whom did he get the info about the second train from? Was it all from Matheson?)

S03E10 "731"

I enjoy this episode. It's not as high octane as the first part, but it's cool how it suddenly narrows down into this tense situation in a small enclosed space. Also, on the one hand it's kind of frustrating that there's a bullshit explanation for everything and Scully just immediately buys it, but on the other hand that does help us empathise with Mulder and it's better than the whole thing unravelling too easily.

Bit weird that the implant had a manufacturer name on it, though! I guess they weren't expecting them to ever get into the hands of a top FBI tech whizz who would discover it plus have access to all the databases etc, and so they didn't bother manufacturing different anonymous versions of their tech for this?

I don't mind all this stuff being a bit messy and hard to fathom now, as long as at some point the series ties it all together and explains enough that everything else can be inferred. Hopefully it will do that over the next 8 seasons! I know I go on about Lost, but that's another thing that the show gets overlooked for - it really did answer like 90% of everything that needed answering.

S03E11 "REVELATIONS"

I really like this episode! I love that it's just full-on 'agents of God and the Devil fighting each other on Earth', The Prophecy style stuff. There are loads of cool scenes and the guest cast is great. Some irritations: they just skip giving Mulder a reason to pick this case (I guess sometimes he just wants to hunt kooky-yet-not-spooky serial killers?), or to show up at the school (maybe they asked to be notified of all hand injuries in the area, or someone actually reported Kevin as having stigmata?); Mulder slips to easily into the Scully role of obstinately refusing to believe something odd is going on, even though he's personally witnessed ghosts, demonic possessions etc. Also, would have been nice for Scully to, like Mulder usually does, a) get to see something concrete and b) get to have a bit more active participation in the climax. I guess this way is a bit more Christian? More pacifistic and requiring faith?

I do wish that Mulder had at least come up with some theory about the guy being a mutant who can super-heat his hands or something!

Also, I wish that at some point this series while satisfyingly tying up all the alien lore had also tied it into all the Christian and monster lore as well. That would have been immense. Like some aliens work for the devil, others for God, and bigfoots are neutral or whatever.

Anyway, overall really fun and cool. I also thought the police sketch of Owen was hilarious - why was he pulling a Muppet expression?! It's like the art department asked Michael Berryman for a headshot to trace over and he only had wacky ones left!

S03E12 "WAR OF THE COPROPHRAGES"

A really fun episode! I can't find anything about Scully being at home for the first half was production-motivated, but I think it works well as a jab at the show's formula - Scully is so well-practiced at providing rational explanations for everything that she can now do the job from home!

S03E13 "SYZYGY"
It's a shame this one comes right after War Of The Coprophages, it doesn't hold up against it too well. It feels like Chris Carter trying to do a Darin Morgan but not having enough subtlety to pull it off so it just devolves into silliness. It's not awful, though, and the silliness is kind of fitting for the X Files' "astronomy did it" episode. It's interesting as well that where Morgan pokes fun at the Mulder-Scully relationship while simultaneously strengthening it, here Carter just makes them mean. It kind of fits in with the 'best frenemies' theme of the episode, and it makes sense that they'd sometimes just get pissed off at each other (Duchovny and Anderson certainly did!), but it's not as much fun to watch. 

S03E14 "GROTESQUE"

A solid serial-killer-with-ambiguous-demonic-element-thriller, looks really good, and some fun layering of red herrings.

S03E15 "PIPER MARU"

Great episode! Skinner getting his own little noir subplot, return of even-sweatier Krychek who then gets upgraded to supervillain, black and white flashback, lots of cool intrigue, and an entire video village of tv crewmembers caught in a mirror!

S03E16 "APOCRYPHA"

Really enjoyed it. Cool intrigue, well-done action, lots of returning characters like Krycek, Well-Manicured Man, Luis Cardinal. I love how CSM seems to be playing his own little game within the conspiracy. Essentially being buried alive is a suitably nasty end for Krycek, too. And I noticed the 1013 easter egg for the first time!

The stuff here about the WW2 diesel oil being a handy medium for the alien entity iirc gets dropped later and it just becomes 'the black oil alien'. Perhaps Mulder misunderstood, though. Re. Krycek, it's cool that they bring him back after this and he gets his hand chopped off and shit, though I vaguely remember his end being a little underwhelming. This would have been a little cooler. As for the conspiracy episodes, I still really enjoy them for the promise they hold, even though it never gets resolved. What I find really frustrating is that right up to the end it was still totally possible to tie all the disparate stuff together into one cohesive thread and then tie it all up, and they had several chances to do that but threw every one of them away.

S03E17 "PUSHER"

Enjoyable, though I didn't quite understand the climax at first - what was the significance of the mirror and the fire alarm? Or wasn't there any, and it just came down to Mulder being too strong-minded for Jedi mind tricks, like Skinner?

I hadn't seen the fire alarm in the mirror, perhaps if I had I would have put it all together! Watching it again, I think it gets a little muddled by Pusher making Mulder point the gun at Scully at the same time, and then when the fire alarm goes off Pusher looks at Mulder, his concentration doesn't seem to break. But maybe it's Mulder that's 'woken up' rather than Pusher getting distracted, and Pusher knows that. I feel like they could have made it a little cleaner.

The sketch on the tabloid cover is of the flukeman from The Host in S2. It says "He's Back!" and that he washed up in Martha's Vineyard. Love this, it's a really cheeky way of binning that episode's cliffhanger ending where the half-flukeman wakes up. Also very cool that they acknowledge this is one of the few monsters in the X-Files world that was just recognised publicly as a thing that exists.

Also: Roger Cross, yay!

S03E18 "TESO DOS BICHOS"
Ugggh, this one sucks.

S03E19 "HELL MONEY"

Another weak one. Both very S1-filler type episodes.

S03E20 "JOSE CHUNG'S FROM OUTER SPACE"

My opinion remains pretty much unchanged on Jose Chung's From Outer Space - lots of fun ideas, callbacks and moments, but by the end it doesn't all hang together very well. I prefer the other Darin Morgan episodes a lot more (and even the Jose Chung episode in Millennium).

S03E21 "AVATAR"

Skinner is centred in this one, and it's a bit weird to think of him as a sexual entity rather than a guy in a suit who occasionally kicks ass. In the cold open it is definitely a shock when we've only ever seen him as an uptight suit and then it abruptly cuts to the sex scene and suddenly we get Skinner sucking face, his naked thrusting back, his o-face and then his sweat-drenched hairy chest all in rapid succession.

A return of the series' callous attitude to sex workers that we've seen before. Scully says something like 'if a normal sane person decides to see a prostitute, they're probably having a mental collapse so severe that they're probably capable of murder too'. Geez, Scully!

But outside of that, a pretty good episode. Some neat twists and turns, and outside of the sweaty sex scene it's good to get another glimpse beneath Skinner's outer shell. I love how he almost always speaks in official, professional language but you can tell from his wording and slight changes in tone exactly what he's actually saying.

S03E22 "QUAGMIRE"

Really good ep. It's Darin Morgan's straightest episode, basically just a regular MOTW with very good writing. Nice eye for continuity too - as well as the return of the druggy kids, bringing the dog back and tying it in with Scully's Starbucks nickname.

S03E23 "WETWIRED"

I enjoyed this. Definitely Blood Part 2, but enough changed to make it worthwhile.

S03E24 "TALITHA CUMI"

Good episode. Cool how it pivots from a seeming MOTW into the serialised stuff and fits everything in smoothly. I am getting a bit lost over how much we and the various characters are supposed to know, though - I should have taken notes as I went through!

S04E01 "HERRENVOLK"

Good episode! Even though, much like Mulder, I feel we're getting shown little pieces of something without any real idea of what it is, still lots of cool ideas and imagery and what have you. ABH is always cool.

One thing I thought was weak, unless I missed something, was how they smoked X out (not "Mr X!"). They plant information to see if it makes its way back to Mulder and if it does they know X is the leak. But the information they plant is "Mrs Mulder is in danger" and the proof this info got out was that... Mulder went to the hospital? What?

S04E02 "HOME"

Fantastic. It's trying to gross you out (and it does a great job), but it's also effective horror, a dark satire of modern America, lean, well-directed and it's got a streak of cruel humour running through it (that Elvis gag is fantastic). It's like the dark version of Humbug.

S04E03 "TELIKO"

Felt rather by-the-numbers and, yeah, very reminiscent of Squeeze. Also, there was one moment where you could see the dialogue didn't match the mouth movements of the actor only just in frame - they may have shot this 'widescreen safe', but they didn't edit it that way! Funnily enough, I also noticed an instance of that in the widescreen version of a Seinfeld episode yesterday.

Anyway, at least it had Carl Lumbly in it, and I liked the warehouse showdown, especially the directorial flourish of getting the actors to sweep their flashlight beams across camera for nice edit points.

S04E04 "UNRUHE"

The cold open is so scary and well put together. The whole episode is great, in fact. So tightly written, directed and edited, and effectively creepy in a bunch of different ways. Really pacey as well.

The wikipedia entry mentions a few critics complaining about Scully getting captured again but, y'know, it was Mulder's turn last episode. I think it's just one of those things that is going to happen a lot in this kind of show where they need a ticking clock but they can't often do bombs or whatever.

Also, Pruitt Taylor Vince really working that eye thing!

S04E05 "THE FIELD WHERE I DIED"

I like this one. It's very gentle and vague, but it's also nice to have such an emotional episode.

S04E06 "SANGUINARIUM"

Good episode! Fun, pulpy horror with some scary concepts. Interesting that after Die Hand Die Verletzt, this is another episode that lets the witchy/satanic villain escape. I guess they've either got to do that or kill them, if they put them in handcuffs at the end of the episode it robs them of their effectiveness.

Also, bold choice to start the episode with what looks very briefly like a massive bum crack.

S04E07 "MUSINGS OF A CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN"

This episode is very weird. I think I come down on the side of not really liking it, because it's so over the top. If it's not canon (hinted at by the last line of Frohicke's about him having just found this all in some magazine and needing to verify it, and also by a lot of it being so cartoonish), or even only partly canon, then who cares? If it is, then it's pretty goofy for a relatively serious part of the mythology.

I think I would enjoy much more a version of this where Frohicke has managed to find like one scrap of information about CSM (did anyone notice the name of the countermeasure Frohicke used?), and then we get a more serious, more canon-feeling origin story via CSM's reminiscence, and then CSM kills Frohicke because even that one tiny scrap he found is too much to get out.

S04E08 "TUNGUSKA"

It's a lot of set-up, feels like act 1 of an episode. Cool concept for the cliffhanger, though - Mulder in some weirdo Russian gulag/lab where they infect people with the black oil. And now it's got him!

Kind of weird that Krycek got let loose from an alien-ship-containing missile silo by terrorists and they let him join them, and also weird that the alien stuff is still black oil when originally they said that it had used WW2 plane oil as a conduit. Maybe it was always black and oily and it just happened to use black oil that one time?

S04E09 "TERMA"

Found it a bit frustrating - the refusal to say anything outright makes it really hard to follow! I wouldn't mind that so much if they'd done anything new with the iconography or the mythology, but they didn't.

S04E10 "PAPER HEARTS"

Good. Tom Noonan does great banality of evil, and there's loads of great imagery. It's a little undermined by the fact that we've seen a village of Samantha clones, plus the previous maybe-psychic serial killer that Mulder tricks with a fake bit of evidence. Still, always cool to see early Vince Gilligan scripts.

S04E11 "EL MUNDO GIRA"

The mould stuff is cool and grody, and I like the whole chupacabra life cycle thing and how it kind of loosely ties in with greys iconography, but most of the drama was pretty bad. Cool to see Raymond Cruz, and Hurley's mum from Lost, though! 

S04E12 "LEONARD BETTS"

I enjoyed this one! It has the classic X Files skill at taking a cool yet outlandish concept and making it feel as convincing as possible, at least in the moment. And yeah, I like the tie-in with the ongoing Scully arc. Also, it was cool that she got the action ending with the monster and got to off it in a cool way.

S04E13 "NEVER AGAIN"

I really like this episode. The concept sounds like it could be a cheesy combo of Blood and 3, but the tone of it is such an interesting mix of maudlin and manic and it's directed so well, plus getting to see this side of Scully is so inter4eting, that it really works. It's kind of a shame that they feel the need to explain what's happening with the psychotic drug thing - I thought at the end that they had undercut it by saying he didn't have enough in his system to hallucinate, but Wikipedia reckons that was only referring to Scully.

Interesting that the episode broadcast order swap makes this feel like a reaction on her part to the cancer thing, rather than just her life getting subsumed into Mulder's world of conspiracies (and maybe just how silly that whole chupacabra thing was!).

S04E14 "MEMENTO MORI"

I enjoyed this one, it's an interesting mix of 'quiet, sad' and 'lore-heavy action' episode types. Not huge amounts of new info with the series arc plot, but a few drips at least, plus the stuff with CSM and Skinner is great.

S04E15 "KADDISH"

This felt like a season 1 MOTW where we know what's happening and it just kind of plays out while Mulder and Scully observe from a step behind. The transformation VFX were really well done, and I liked the mirroring of the Nazi shopkeeper also creating monsters with words without realising the ramifications of what he was doing, even if I'm not sure what the message is there, if any...

S04E16 "UNREQUITED"

Forgot to take notes for this one. It's pretty cool, but there's not much to it and the flashback structure feels like unnecessary padding.

S04E17 "TEMPUS FUGIT"

Really good episode! It doesn't really do anything new, but it's so pacy. I love the cold open, where it starts on a typical forest shot, then pans up to the sky to catch a plane in flight, then cuts to inside that plane, then shows us Max, then shows us he's going to get assassinated and then before that can happen aliens show up! And it never really slows down the entire episode either, it's great.

Plus it brings back some secondary characters like Max and Pendril which is cool, and it's ace to see the classic triangle ships and greys again.

S04E18 "MAX"

A bit slower than the previous episode, but the two plane sequences were awesome. It was cool going back to Max's trailer again, and there's a really nice personal feel to this one.

S04E19 "SYNCHRONY"
This was a fun episode. I don't think the ending quite works, though, because Mulder suggests that the future can't be changed, whereas we know for certain that it can be, because old Jason killed young Jason, that photo won't happen, the Japanese doctor won't be the one to solve vitrification etc. I was happy, in fact, that they didn't go for the 'you can only facilitate the past' route. It would have worked better if Mulder had said something more along the lines of 'destiny finds a way'.

S04E20 "SMALL POTATOES"

Fun! Duchovny's really good in it and the Gilligan script is deftly written. I like as well that we're at the point where Mulder is saying to Scully "We've seen this before" and Scully's response is "yes, but it might not be that this time"!

S04E21 "ZERO SUM"

Cool. Great to see Skinner getting pulled further in and confronted with the depths of the devil's deal he's made, also cool to get more bee stuff and a twist with whatshername. Fun that (seemingly) we've had a nice informant with Deep Throat, X the reluctant and grey-moralled informant, and now a full-on evil fake informant. Can't remember what happens with her, though...

Amazing that this is another Skinner episode where they suddenly surprise us with a Mitch Pileggi cheesecake shot. I really didn't need to see him looming over me in his tighty whiteys... 

S04E22 "ELEGY"

Felt like it didn't end up serving either the MOTW element or the Scully element well in the end, they both fizzled out a little bit and didn't feel like they'd done anything new. It was a nice idea to have the theme of Scully coming closer to death and having to deal with that literalised with her starting to see ghosts, but they didn't do a lot with it, it was jostling for attention with the old X File standards of 'creepy serial killer' and 'people with severe mental health issues'.

S04E23 "DEMONS"

I enjoyed Demons, even if it's a little frustratingly ambiguous about the veracity of what little new information we got about CSM and the Mulders. Piecing together the missing time so circuitously was an effective way to slowly reveal how risky and obsessive Mulder will get in his search.

S04E24 "GETHSEMANE"

Great. Even though there's no way with all we've seen (and the ramifications for the show) that it could be a hoax or that Mulder would kill himself, it's still fun to see how convincing they can make it and all the gritty espionage stuff works great as usual, too.

S05E01 "REDUX PART 1"

Part 1 was very talky, lots of voiceover and montage and exposition dumps, but we did get to see Mulder find that iconic Know Your Exits location, and a cracking cliffhanger - hopefully part 2 will ratchet things up again. I hope they don't drag this 'hoax' thing out for too long. Is it actually true and part of the lore that some things are hoaxed (like the abductions of women) but all the other stuff isn't? I can't remember. I know that Carter pulled out the 'it's a hoax' thing again for the terrible season 10.

S05E02 "REDUX PART 2"

The issue with these episodes is that it feels at the time like lots is happening and it's all very exciting, but then you get to the end and think 'wait, has anything changed at all?' Okay, so Scully's cancer arc has been closed off, but the hoax stuff, Samantha, CSM's status, Skinner's involvement in the conspiracy, it's all left dangling. Blevins is gone, and it was cool to see him again but it's the first time since S01E04 and we're not shown how this might affect the conspiracy - presumably not at all. (It's pretty damn funny that Mulder just guessed the right person like he's playing Guess Who, though!) I don't mind them not answering everything, but I need something to get my teeth into. Again, LOST got this so right and doesn't get enough credit amongst all the meaningless yells of "mystery box!" - even though they held off on a bunch of stuff right till the final section of the show, they were always revealing something, peeling one layer back even if it revealed ten more questions to be answered later.

S05E03 "UNUSUAL SUSPECTS"

This feels of a piece with Musings OF A CSM to me - it's fun, but it's also far too goofy for my tastes. It feels very comic-booky - rather than these guys just being three conspiracy nuts who met on the internet and started a newsletter which brought them to Mulder's attention at some point, there's this big action adventure they all just fell into because they happened to be at the same computer show and then they turn out to be the ones to tell Mulder about the government conspiracy. It's all a bit too silly for my X Files tastes.

S05E04 "DETOUR"

It's fine, very season 1. I like the Ponce De Leon thing even though it's a little silly, (and does it mean that the other mothmen he talked about were also super-evolved conquistadors?), and it was a cool idea to have them getting hunted by something super-smart and tactical although it was a bit annoying that they fell for the divide and conquer trick after just talking about it and that the mothman died because Scully just happened to fall into his den then he decided to charge straight at her.

Oh, also, it was pretty funny that half the time they were chameleonic digital effects and the other half they were blokes with tree make-up on!

S05E05 "THE POST-MODERN PROMETHEUS"

Fucking terrible. Chris Carter again trying to do a comedy episode and again having zero subtlety. Yeah, we get it, Frankenstein, well done. Then a happy ending for the rapist I guess?

S05E06 "CHRISTMAS CAROL"

I enjoyed it! An intriguing set-up, great cliffhanger, and it's good to get a Scully solo episode with some investigative meat to it as well as some character development.

S05E07 "EMILY"

Enjoyed it, though the two-parter really switches gear a lot. Scully's ghost sister mostly disappears and doesn't really get discussed, and Mulder shows up in the 2nd episode and suddenly it's all about him chasing shape-shifting aliens while Scully's relegated to the hospital. If this were to motivate Scully to go chase down the conspiracy, it'd work, but it's a weirdly downbeat ending. I love that the evil alien child-murdering conspiracists were considerate enough to leave Scully her necklace in the coffin, though.

S05E08 "KITSUNEGARI"

Fun, lots of twists and turns, but overall it doesn't do much new with the premise and there were some pretty big stretches in there too - Modell got shot in the head, was in a coma and was likely to die very soon from his tumour two years ago, but now he's still going strong, Mulder clocking Linda as a pusher because she used the word 'brush' (to be fair, there's also her oddly timed marriage to the prosecutor and the overshare by her husband, but those don't seem to be what tips Mulder off!) and the whole 'secret twin with exact same tumour' thing. (Also, Mulder is stupidly reckless, considering his awareness of pusher powers, but that is somewhat in character!)

S05E09 "SCHIZOGENY"
Another mediocre S1-ish MOTW episode that bites off more than it can chew effects-wise and ends up looking a bit goofy. It didn't even really make much sense by the end - what was causing the blights, why did stuff only just start happening again now, why did her father's body get pulled into the cellar three years ago?

S05E10 "CHINGA"

Ten minutes in and really enjoying it!

Kid with powers AND a spooky doll, nice.

The nice switcheroo where Mulder's going on about a case and then it turns out Scully's the one in the middle of the actual MOTW.

The Stephen King credit coming up and suddenly realising 'oh, this is why we're doing psychic kids in New England!'

The reverse 'War Of The Coprophages' set up where Scully is on her own on a case but desperately trying to stay out of it and Mulder is on the phone to help but offering only the silliest explanations.

That was a really fun, goofy episode! I like how Scully just gave in and went 'okay, clearly this is a possessed doll and since Mulder isn't here I'm going to have to do what he would do' and then comes back to the office totally spaced out.

S05E11 "KILL SWITCH"

What an excellent cold open! Written by Gibson and Maddox, it just drips cyberpunk without actually being set in the future. Love the grimy 50s diner crammed into a burnt out warehouse, all the different criminal gangs, the scope of it, even the score that sounds dystopian without being literally so.

The shipping crate sequence was great! Wow, what a top episode. I remember the second Gibson one being really silly, had forgotten how good this one is (so far).

Finished Kill Switch, that was excellent! Perhaps didn't need that final Nebraska epilogue, the BITE ME one worked well enough. It got a tiny bit silly with the VR bit, too, but I like the idea that the AI checked out Mulder's credit card history and because of all the porn purchases decided sexy nurses was the way to go. It was a lot more fun than Ghost In The Machine, anyway - this felt like the Die Hand Die Verletzt (?) of evil AI episodes.

S05E12 "BAD BLOOD"

Looking forward to Bad Blood, I remember it being a fun one.

Another amazing cold open!

Very fun and funny episode, good old Gilligan. I was a bit disappointed that it seemed to drop the Rashomon thing halfway through and yet stay very goofy, and surprised that Scully definitely met a vampire, but then the snap to Skinner's office fixed both of those thigs very neatly!

S05E13 "PATIENT X" & S05E14 "THE RED AND THE BLACK"

Watched the first episode. While it's getting a little wearing seeing the same stuff over and over - the shadowy men in suits annoyed about stuff, older female abductees murmuring in softly-sunlit rooms about their experiences - there was some cool new stuff here like the CE3K style group gatherings, the sealed-face people, the fire weapon. It's bloody impossible to follow, though!

Also, very frustrating to see Mulder still on his 180 'it's all faked' trip, especially when he now shows such disdain for anyone who still believes in aliens. Also doesn't feel natural for Scully to suddenly be all in on it. It all feels very much like a writers room deciding to flip characters' personalities to keep things interesting, rather than an organic development. Maybe Scully was feeling that homing instinct despite not having her chip any more and that's why she was immediately more open to Cassandra, and also how she made her way to that bridge (I don't remember any other explanation). Well, hopefully they'll flip them back again soon enough!

Watching the second part (decided to count them as one for our loveathon, so I won't do spoiler tags.

So even when they switch Scully to the believer role, if she sees a UFO then they have to give her amnesia! C'mon!

Oh wait, Scully has that new chip type thing now, right? From the little vial of water from the Pentagon. So that does explain a lot of stuff, including the amnesia, though it's still all a little unsatisfying and murky!

Also, the chips being able to wipe memories does makes sense with standard abductee amnesia.

The hypnosis session was awesome. It's pretty funny how petulant Mulder is in Skinner's office, when all these people he's been trying to convince for years now believe in aliens just as he stopped! I think if we interpret Mulder's sudden conversion as a refusal of the call, like he's tired of always searching for the truth and it always just slipping through his fingers so now he's clinging onto this new 'cover-up' thing as an excuse to stop, and he's frustrated because deep down he knows he still believes and he doesn't like all this new evidence and support being thrown at him, then it works a lot better.

That Krycek scene in Mulder's apartment was great too. It's really fun seeing Mulder put through the belief wringer - his mortal enemy is just straight up telling him this wild story of galactic rebellion with absolute sincerity, it's kind of hard to resist flipping back to a believer. Hilariously, Scully then walks in and says 'Hey Mulder, I've become a sceptic again'. So silly.

Yeahhh, Mulder's back to jumping onto high-speed vehicles carrying alien prisoners!

I assume the bounty hunter was there to kill the rebel for the colonists. Funny how they didn't just beam him up or zap him or whatever. Also, I have no idea whom Mulder was shooting at there! Seemed like the second rebel, but why?

Anyway, overall very entertaining and intriguing even while some of the mytharc stuff feels nonsensical. So, typical X Files!

S05E15 "TRAVELERS"

Enjoyed this one! Not much meat to the story, really, but it's fun to have it jump back to 1990 and then back again to the 50s. Cool to have the Nazi scientist stuff come back, and also to see Mulder's dad and J Edgar Hoover involved in the conspiracy even if it's a bit goofy. Does it make sense that Mulder didn't speak to his father about this stuff when reconciling with him in earlier seasons? I'm not sure, but never mind! Was great seeing the origin of the X-files, too. Really good guest cast - Fredric Lane, Garrett Dillahunt and Darren McGavin!

S05E16 "MIND'S EYE"

Watching it now, enjoying it. It's intriguing. Plus, Lili Taylor (and also Blu Mankuma who was awesome in that one episode of Supernatural)!

Slowed a little in the middle when we knew what as happening but waiting for it to resolve, but overall a nice chill little episode.

Also, interesting that horror franchise Chucky had a plot point where a killer stabbed a pregnant woman and that gave the child a disability and then they confront each other in later years.

S05E17 "ALL SOULS"

Promising start - great cold open, Emily Perkins, Glenn Morshower in the opening credits, and what seems to be a religious episode (always like these because suddenly you don't have as strong a handle on what the show's going to do, plus Scully often gets the limelight)!

Excellent episode, I love it when mundane details all combine into a big religious mythology thing like that. Only negative is it's a shame the angel face looks a little goofy. Surely they could have done a better job than that, or at least covered it up with effects a little more! I guess this was '98 so people were mostly still watching on small CRTs, so the show makers not only could get away with more stuff but even had to make it less subtle so people could catch some detail.

S05E17 "THE PINE BLUFF VARIANT"

I love that we're so invested in the Mulder-Scully relationship now that 'Mulder lies to Scully' is a huge cold open cliffhanger!

I didn't think that much of this one. It's fine as a cop drama and a bit dull as an X Files episode.

I don't even really follow the conspiracy logic here - were they going to kill millions of Americans with the money just to do a further test? Surely not, so was the spray on the money fake? Because neither Leamus nor Bremer did anything to stop it - if Scully hadn't figured it out the whole plan would have gone ahead! So if it's fake, why bother? Just to string the terrorists along and stay in with them so you can maybe use them for more tests in the future?

And was Leamus actually trying to get Mulder and/or Bremer killed? Why? If not, why put Bremer's alias in the records? Were Leamus and Bremer communicating so they knew the latter could get out of it with the recording of Mulder so they went ahead with it to try and seem convincing while getting Mulder out? But that let Mulder know the guy was a mole. So Leamus didn't care about being found out because he was confident enough that Mulder wouldn't whistleblow? It's all very jumbled, unless I'm being super thick here. 

S05E19 "FOLIE À DEUX"

This is a really cool episode. Really nightmarish and Kafkaesque, and the slightly goofy creature effects somehow add to it rather than take away. I love the scene at the end where Scully just cannot bring herself to say to Skinner "I saw a zombie and a big bug monster."

S05E20 "THE END"

It's a cool idea but it gets a little swallowed up by all the series arc and film set-up stuff. What's weird is how much energy they put into stuff that (iirc) doesn't show up in the movie - Spender, Gibson, Fowley, Krycek. And what's happened to Mulder's sudden scepticism? Did discovering Gibson wash it away? I remember he's in a low place at the start of the movie, maybe he turns back into a believer again in that. Also interesting, though, to see them put certain stuff in place for it like ancient astronauts, CSM being back, the end of the X Files (again!).

THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE

It's... not great. It's essentially a mid-season arc episode but with lots of high-budget bits stuck in. It doesn't move anything on for the series and even as a story in itself it's pretty flat. Mulder and Scully don't really get to do anything - they fall into the story at the start via a series of flukes, and then they get handed information and follow it around passively. Mulder is "revitalised" by the end of it, we're told, though it's hard to tell seeing as he barely reacted to finding himself inside a gigantic alien spaceship and then wanted to give up at the end because nothing had changed (too right it hadn't!) but was maybe talked into continuing by Scully? I know they were flip-flopping over whether to just stick to movies or carry on with the tv show or just end the whole thing, and I guess pre-MCU there would have been a lot of 'but what about people who haven't seen the show' nonsense, but they really mismanaged the whole thing. The show should have been a clean build-up into the movie, and then the movie should have if not ended the whole thing at least made some big irrevocable changes to revitalise the show and make it feel important.

S06E01 "THE BEGINNING"

It's funny how this episode title is basically saying "okay yes we thought we were wrapping things up, but now uhhh fuck it who knows?!"

I enjoyed it but it's definitely a plot thread management episode! Lots of revelations but nothnig done with them (yet?).

S06E02 "DRIVE"

Drive is great! Really smart and intriguing and well structures. Great how the Mulder and Scully threads both work on their own and with each other. And that final line is killer.

S06E03 "TRIANGLE"

I think this one is a fan favourite, but it's too silly for my tastes. It's just 'Mulder has a goofy dream' but also in the real world Scully starts talking like it's the 30s and kissing Skinner for some reason. The whole thing has a self-indulgent 'Christmas episode' feel about it, and the worst thing is it really drags in the middle.

S06E04&5 "DREAMLAND"

Watched Pt 1, really enjoyed it! It's a fun episode with lots of cool effects and explosions and just full of clever little touches. The only slightly jarring thing is Mark Snow overdoing the comedy music as usual - it feels like playing Day Of The Tentacle in some sections!

Finished part 2. It's still fun, though it struggles a little to justify an entire second episode. Lots of great moments, though, like the scene with Morris and his wife, or the Area 51 colonel eagerly asking Mulder if aliens exist.

S06E06 "HOW THE GHOSTS STOLE CHRISTMAS"

I like the idea of it, ghosts trying to send them mad and get them to kill each other, and lots of the tricks they play are really creepy. But when it gets into Death Becomes Her territory, and the ghosts are chatting to each other, it's just too far into goofy for my tastes. Another Chris Carter comedy episode with too little self-restraint. Not as bad as I remember it, but it does also start to drag in places with all the long monologues. - they'd probably work better if you weren't 100% sure they were ghosts, but as you are you're just waiting for the episode to get to the fireworks factory.

S06E07 "TERMS OF ENDEARMENT"

Amazing cold open, and Bruce Campbell is great, a perfect mix of cheesy fake human sincerity and real demon sincerity. I like the little nod to Scully's past when she reminds Mulder to be sensitive around such matters.

The stuff with Spender was fun, though this whole 'the X Files are shut again but 'Mulder snuck onto this one and Scully is irritated' every time is getting a bit wearing. Also, Mulder believes in demons now? I thought he immediately dismissed stuff like that! 

Wow, Mulder really didn't listen to Scully about being sensitive, geez.

What a great ep! Love the twist, love the scene where Mulder is racing Wayne, love that final scene. That was a better demon episode than anything Millennium managed in its entire run.

Really good use of Garbage!

S06E08 "THE RAIN KING"

Really enjoyed The Rain King. Just the right side of silly and sweet for me, the spot that Chris Carter often aims for but can't hit with his comedy episodes.

S06E09 "S. R. 819"

Skinner episode! Was hoping we get another jarring smash cut to him making sweaty naked love but no such luck :(

This is a pretty cool episode, fun intrigue and action and such. But a) I'm generally not a fan of nanobots in fiction, it always feels like a line being crossed where suddenly everything is possible and magic and solvable and yet impossible to defeat, and b) it's a bit annoying that Sen. Matheson is suddenly a corrupt cowardly baddy. (Looking at the wiki, I guess he actually would sometimes protect himself rather than help Mulder, but still this feels like a leap). The Krycek thing is potentially cool, but as always it depends what they end up doing with it!

A general thought about seasons 9/10/11 that I've probably said before, with vague spoilers about the show - they had THREE opportunities to tie everything together and wrap everything up, all this stuff could have retroactively been elevated, but they absolutely bollocksed it. Raymond J Barry was still working as of 2021, they could have got him back in, done some cool stuff with him! But nooo, this is the last we ever see of him.

Side-note: they never explained Skinner whispering to the doctor and her just deciding not to try to revive him! Was that just him saying "do not resuscitate" and her being like "yep, that's how it works, seeya!"?

S06E10 "TITHONUS"
Watching this now. Enjoying it, but this was very annoying:
Scully: finds photos that show the guy hasn't aged a day in 30 years
Mulder: "Hey Scully, I found proof that this guy is over 100 years old"
Scully: "That's impossible, I met him, he looks about 60."
CONNECT THE DOTS, SCULLY.
Finished. Cool episode! Another great one-off casting choice, and a cool idea that doesn't really require detective work, just Scully to confront her belief systems.
Incidentally, this is where Scully becomes immortal, explaining why when she asked Clyde Bruckman how she dies, he says "You don't."

S06E11 "TWO FATHERS"
Watched this. I understand the impulse to get the whole arc plot boiled down and moved forward, but it all feels too easy, too simplistic. The whole six seasons of intrigue summed up in a couple of sentences in narration scenes that don't really make sense (surely whatsername already knows most this, CSM isn't telling her for the first time?), and pertinent information just handed on a platter to Mulder and Scully. Best bit was that scene with Krycek and Spender over the alien corpse, really creepy performance by Nicholas Lea.

S06E12 "ONE SON"
I enjoyed this episode a lot more, it gave me basically what I wanted the first part to be. It's still massively rushed, though, and maybe I'm dumb but I feel like a lot of the motivations and stuff just don't make sense. It's a damn shame that they didn't spend a good season working through this stuff and then pay it all off with the movie.
Also, those little waddling aliens look goofy as fuck, they should have gone with the creepy tall wiry ones. And what was with the changing of the shape-shifters to having silly Mission Impossible masks? But then they also had bounty-hunter/Jeremiah Smith style shapeshifting abilities?
And how did the Syndicate get away with stalling for so long? Why are they the ones doing the work and not the aliens? Why have we stopped talking about how it was all a con and actually humans are just going to get used to hatch big scary aliens?
I'm sure we could come up with explanations for this stuff, but it would have been better if the show had taken a bit more time over it and provided them itself!

S06E13 "AGUA MALA"
I enjoyed this one! Cool monster and rules, solid 'motley collection of archetypes under siege' set-up, and a bunch of likable characters/performances. Only problems really were that it takes a bit too long to get all the pieces in place, the latina character is dreadful, and the very last two lines of dialogue are dreadful.

S06E14 "MONDAY"
I forgot to post my thoughts on this apparently, but iirc I really enjoyed it, it had some nice little twists on the time-loop thing, with little differences each time and people starting to have persistent memories, and the ending suggesting that this person got stuck in the time-loop because she was 'supposed to' to sacrifice herself to save a bunch of people.

S06E15 "ARCADIA"
I enjoyed this one, it's good fun and it's got a The Burbs vibe in places. It did slow down a little towards the end once we'd finished having fun with Mulder and Scully as a married couple and we had a good idea of the tulpa set-up.

S06E16 "ALPHA"
I thought this was fairly rubbish. Very slow and none of the characters were particularly interesting or made sense. Plus Scully was written a lot sourer than usual.

S06E17 "TREVOR"
Mediocre ep. Cool monster power-set but otherwise it's all very rote. Also, bit of a weird ending - feels like Mulder is telling her off for killing this murderous kidnapping psychopath :/

S06E18 "MILAGRO"
I really enjoyed Milagro, very atmospheric and a cool Stephen King style twist that didn't get too cheesy. Plus a double-whammy of great guest stars - that one scene with John Hawkes and Nestor Serrano was great!

S06E19 "THE UNNATURAL"
This has some fun stuff in it, but it's pretty self-indulgent and I suspect you need to like baseball to really enjoy it.

S06E20 "THREE OF A KIND"

Enjoyed this one, a fun but tightly written little diversion!

S06E21 "FIELD TRIP"
Fantastic episode!

S06E22-S07E02 "BIOGENESIS" & "THE SIXTH EXTINCTION"

I enjoyed Biogenesis, lots of cool stuff happening. But it's basically all set-up, no pay-off or really anything happening. I decided to watch the S7 opening two-parter straight away as I felt it might all work better watched together..

The Sixth Extinction It has that late-series myth-arc thing of showing you loads of cool stuff and making story progression, which is great, but it all happens so fast and easily to or around Mulder and Scully without them really doing anything that it doesn't feel earned.

S07E03 "HUNGRY"

This one was cool but it loses a little something once you know what the deal is. Cool to see Mark Pellegrino ten years before he showed up in Lost or Supernatural.

S07E04 "MILLENNIUM"
I appreciate the effort to give Millennium a finale one way or the other, but this comes out as a very odd, cheesy episode of X Files and I imagine felt like such a rushed finale as to not even be worth the bother for Millennium folks, especially as it didn't really deal with the two show tentpoles of conspiracy and actual demons. (See my 'previous re-watch' notes below for my thoughts on the Millennium episodes I watched before this one.)

S07E05 "RUSH"

A cool idea though fairly similar to a few previous ones, and they didn't do much with it.

S07E06 "THE GOLDBERG VARIATION"

A fun little reverse-Final Destination (complete with bus moment) but not much to it. Mulder and Scully getting their own signs didn't actually contribute anything, which was a shame.

S07E07 "ORISON"

I love this episode, it's pure genre + fan service, done incredibly well. A new X-File tries to manipulate a classic X-File but underestimates him at the cost of his life and suddenly the episode flips to a rematch. Mulder gives in and acts on the divine signs, Scully has some kickass fight scenes (in which she totally would have kicked Donny's ass if not for a couple of tactical errors - going for the gun then the phone without enough time to do so) and then a huge 'grey hat' moment.

Cool to see a young, non-moustachioed Emilio Rivera, too.

S07E08 "THE AMAZING MALEENI"

This is a fun one. Takes a little while to get going but once all the twists and turns kick in, it's very enjoyable. I love how Ricky Jay is always the go-to guy when some show is doing an episode around magicians.

I think the ending is perhaps hampered a little by the writers not being able to let the con artists get away with the final gambit, as Mulder would have been completely screwed; might have been a little more dramatic at least to have Mulder reveal his deductions and confiscate the card in front of their faces, though.

S07E09 "SIGNS AND WONDERS"

Fairly weak. Barely anything to it, the twist was incredibly obvious, and all the snake stuff was either goofy vfx or not-that-scary shots of regular snakes. The birth scene was effective, though.

S07E10-E11 "SEIN UND ZEIT" & "CLOSURE"

As I wrote some years back when I did my previous watch through (see italicised stuff at the bottom of this post):

I just watched the episode Closure and FUCK YOU THE X-FILES. After seven seasons of drip-fed info about Samantha Mulder's alien abduction, it turns out she was actually on an air base being experimented on until she ran away and some nice ghosts killed her to prevent her from getting re-abducted. This contradicts so many things previously established, introduces loads of new nonsensical details and is overall just the most frustrating, hippy-dippy bullshit resolution they could possibly have pulled out of their arses. I really would have preferred if they had never answered it. FUCK.

S07E12 "X-COPS"

A really good episode. You can't take it very seriously, seeing as it's a crossover with an existing cop doc show, but it's all really well executed (the camera setups and the 'as live' performances never feel fake) and the central idea is really cool. That flip from werewolf to Freddy Krueger is such a brilliant wtf moment. The gay couple are a little painful to watch, but I think it's supposed to be 'the kind of colourful people you see on these cop shows' as you'd never see something like this on a regular episode, even one of the comedy ones.

S07E13 "FIRST PERSON SHOOTER"

Bad cold open - some guys play a badly-designed (and badly art-designed too) video game and a couple of them get shot by enemies, how is this intriguing?

Why is no one saying "the paintball haptic feedback chestplate thing clearly malfunctioned and shot a bit of metal into his chest, making it look like a bullet wound"?

The response to "There's a modeled, AI-coded NPC in our unreleased game that no one put in there" should be something along the lines of "Oh shit, we got hacked, maybe they hacked the chestplate to malfunction somehow?" Not "Huh, weird. Let's send a pro player in to kill it." This episode is very oddly written.
I won't post point by point, but this is awful in so many ways. Embarrassingly bad. Nonsensical, tacky, unimaginative and really just very dull. It did have Randy from Lost in it, though.

S07E14 "THEEF"

This one's a solid but unremarkable MOTW. I like that Scully is finally dropping some of her scepticism, and that she's still being pragmatic to anyone but Mulder about it ("regardless, this guy believes he has magic powers") so she doesn't get labelled as Spooky Scully. Also, cool to see James Morrison (24) and Billy Drago (Tremors 4).

S07E15 "EN AMI"

This is a weird one. Davis is great in it, I love his "who, me?" act as CSM conning Scully. I like that Scully never really trusts him but also is tempted in by such a huge medical breakthrough dangled in front of her and maybe even some real glimmers of humanity that CSM allows through. I also like the idea of CSM kind of being at a loose end now that the whole Syndicate thing has (kind of?) fallen apart, and potentially being an ally, neutral party or wildcard. I think really the whole thing is undermined by the vagueness of the arc plot and the episode itself (is he really sick? Did he really bin the research? If so, why, and did he save himself first?). If this were a Sloane-centric episode of Alias it'd be great, but as it is it's just... tantalising.

S07E16 "CHIMERA"

Pretty fun one, lots of twists and turns, even if they are easy to stay ahead of what with there basically only being three characters. (Shame to get so little of Wendy Schaal.) Interesting that they found a reason to keep Scully out of the main story because there was no space for her, feels like a War Of The Coprophages move but for structural rather than comedic reasons.

S07E17 "all things"

Title not in caps as usual, to reflect its unusual all lower case presentation.

I love that Anderson clearly decided "I'm getting a chance to direct an episode, I'm going to make an Art Film!" It's not subtle and there's not really much of a story there, but I prefer it when the X Files does a sincere artsy episode to when it does a bog-standard MOTW. I think I preferred this one to Duchovny's The Unnatural, anyway!

I also find it funny that up till now, Scully is cynical not only of any alien theories or folklore that Mulder puts forward, but also of any permutation of faith that doesn't exactly match her own. Maybe, now that she's coming around to Mulder's lines of thinking (unless he's doing something daft like taking a trip to Stonehenge to wait for crop circles), this is her also opening her mind to the kinds of faith that her sister believed in.

S07E18 "BRAND X"

I enjoyed this one! A bit slow, but passive smoking/big tobacco is a great MOTW, all the gross-out stuff was incredibly effective, and I enjoyed the use of Morley after it being CSM's ciggy of choice for so long. Good guest stars in Dennis Boutsikaris and Tobin Bell, too.

S07E19 "HOLLYWOOD A.D."

Disappointing. Spends half the episode on a comedy concept which is normally a slam dunk ('a movie/show/play is being made about the lead characters') but wasted here on a bunch of overcooked self-indulgent bits, and the other half on a vaguely intriguing MOTW concept in a way that doesn't make sense and fizzles out. When X Files is careful with its comedy, it gets gold like War Of The Coprophages; when it's not, it gets something like this.

S07E20 "FIGHT CLUB"

Wow, another comedy episode? And I think the upcoming Je Souhaite is very light as well. Makes it feel a bit like no one really wants to be making The X Files anymore...

Well, that one was a real slog. Very reminiscent of Syzygy - a Chris Carter penned-and-helmed comedy episode about two similar young women causing unexplainable havoc, trying to be a Darin Morgan episode but overcooking everything to a grating level, and a shrug of an explanation.

S07E21 "JE SOUHAITE"

A good comedy episode! A very gentle, fairly standard genie story, but it's enjoyable, with lots of interesting 'monkey paw' twists and fun performances.

S07E22 "REQUIEM"

This is such a typical late-X-Files mythology episode - it's full of loads of cool stuff (tying in the pilot episode to the ongoing lore, the return of a bunch of characters, CSM as a dying old man desperately trying to fix stuff while he can), but all a bit rushed and shallow and still confusing! I genuinely would not have minded an entire episode leading up to this one of Mulder explaining the lore to the accountant guy while he bemusedly flips through all the files and brings up plotholes for Mulder to explain. Still would have been better than Fight Club. And then Duchovny wants to leave anyway, so just spend a few episodes clearing up any loose ends and wrap it all up in a big movie. Of course, they really could have done that back in season 5, and we'd only have missed out on, like, ten or so really strong S6/7 episodes, but never mind.

S08E01 "WITHIN"

Pretty good. Doggett's introduction is pleasingly ambiguous, even though he gets an FBI badge in the title credits so we know really that he's going to be a goody. And it moves fairly quickly throughout, with an exciting cliffhanger. Maybe not the crash bang 'don't worry, we'll still be great without Mulder' season opener one might expect them to aim for, but solid. 

S08E02 "WITHOUT"

Pretty much the same opinion on this one. It's solid, well-made, and I like Doggett, but we've seen it all before.

S08E03 "PATIENCE"

Boy, Doggett got an easy first case, didn't he? Victim had big bat bites, there are big bat prints on the floor and big bat claw marks in the rafters and there's an old newspaper article about a big bat creature in the area with photos. Otherwise there's just the silly 'it's been waiting for revenge for 50 years and it kills anyone who touched anyone who touched one of the guys who caught it' thing to tidy up.
And yet everyone's arguing the whole time - I understand that it would be weird for Doggett to instantly slide into a harmonious working relationship with Scully, but every character here is arguing with every other character and none of their stances make sense!
So yeah, a very basic monster episode with some manufactured character tension while they try to figure out exactly how Scully and Doggett are going to react to any given paranormal case now that they don't have the Mulder believer Scully sceptic structure to lean on.

S08E04 "ROADRUNNERS"
Very effective. Captures the creepiness of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no modern conveniences, and uses the paranormal element to heighten that feeling - being at the mercy of a bunch of strangers who not only don't approve of your fancy modern ways but also worship a weird parasite thing. Good choices not to over-explain the thing, and also to use the contrivance of Doggett's absence as a character arc beat.

S08E05 "INVOCATION"

This one's pretty bland. It manages to keep you guessing (time travel? Fairy changeling?) but only because the actual answer is 'unusually corporeal and persistent ghost'. Doggett having a 'missing child' backstory is far too close to Mulder's missing sister and it's a little exhausting watching the writers still trying to find a good repeatable dynamic between him and Scully. 'Pragmatic about solving the case to the point of ignoring all the supernatural stuff happening right in front of him' isn't working either. They should have him just instantly become a believer now he's directly seen all this stuff already, and both him and Scully investigate on the same level but with their distinct police detective and medical doctor approaches.

S08E06 "REDRUM"

I really enjoyed this one! For what seemed like a fairly lean premise, it kept me guessing enough to keep me interested - they tease but forgo the 'turns out he did do it' or the 'you can only facilitate history' endings for a more character-based one, and even the title is a clever mislead. Morton is great (fun to see him onscreen with Patrick after no shared scenes in T2) and it's always good to see Trejo (who probably did share scenes with Patrick in From Dusk Till Dawn 2, but I can't remember!).

S08E07 "VIA NEGATIVA"

So the latest attempt to figure out the Scully-Doggett dynamic is to remove Scully! It works quite well, actually, with his straight-laced dogged detective persona fitting perfectly into a Carpenter-esque story as the regular cynical guy going slowly mad in the face of otherworldly horrors. Patrick is fantastic in that scene with Skinner where he doesn't know if he's dreaming. Lots of cool visuals and concepts, too (even if the reverse dream talking feels a little cheap!). It's just a shame that the story gets a bit muddled at the end and then just stops. 

S08E08 "SUREKILL"

The supernatural element is a pointless gimmick here - you could easily lift it out and barely change anything. Unfortunately, you'd be left with a rather dull low-key scuzzball crime drama that puts little effort into running through a few standard tropes. It's hard not to continue looking at this season through a metatextual lens, wondering if the issues with this episode are down to the writers' efforts to provide some regular crime stuff for Doggett to solve, so Scully can hesitantly suggests a supernatural cause and he can pragmatically ignore it.

S08E09 "SALVAGE"
Another bland story with an MOTW gimmick thrown in. Metal man kills a few people, that's about as far as this one goes, outside of some cuter Terminator references and a good Arye Gross performance.

S08E10 "BADLAA"
This picks up in the second half when Doggett has the truth forced in his face and the two kids fight back against the MOTW, but otherwise it's another fairly forgettable and frustrating Scully-and-Doggett episode. In fact, as my group rewatch has lost steam, I may well give up here. I know it's all downhill from here (see previous rewatch notes below!) and it's not going to be any fun if I don't have people to pick the show apart with me!

Some posts I made during a previous rewatch:

Just finished season 2.  I forgot how many of my memories of the show are in these two seasons - I'm not sure I got much further than this originally, although I definitely went to see the movie.  I'm enjoying all the arc stuff, especially because it breaks the MOTW mould of 'weird thing happens, Mulder and Scully arrive, Mulder nails it immediately, Scully scoffs, they investigate pretty passively until it kind of burns itself out'. I'd also forgotten how much shit Scully sees really early on and yet stays almost pathologically sceptical.

I'm onto season 7 now, and it's still surprisingly good overall. Even the mythology episodes are still good - all they need to do at some point is tie the disparate strands together and wrap it all up, and all these episodes will retroactively become very satisfying instead of just cool and tantalising. I don't know if they touch the mythology in the new ones at all.

I'm just about to watch the episode "Millennium", which apparently is a wrap-up crossover episode with the cancelled show Millennium. I'm wondering whether it would be worth finding a top ten episodes list of that show and blasting through them before watching this ep.

Oof, the Millennium series is definitely not worth even skimming through the "best" episodes, and I gave up about 6 episodes before the end of my skip-list. It has some cool conspiracy arc ideas, but everything else about the show is so slow and maudlin it's really not worth the wait. (Also, obviously, it got cancelled before it could get anywhere with it.) The show's worst sin is probably that it actually manages to make Lance Henriksen and Terry O'Quinn boring.

I just watched the episode Closure and FUCK YOU THE X-FILES. After seven seasons of drip-fed info about Samantha Mulder's alien abduction, it turns out she was actually on an air base being experimented on until she ran away and some nice ghosts killed her to prevent her from getting re-abducted. This contradicts so many things previously established, introduces loads of new nonsensical details and is overall just the most frustrating, hippy-dippy bullshit resolution they could possibly have pulled out of their arses. I really would have preferred if they had never answered it. FUCK.

The season 9 finale (and therefore the series conclusion for a good few years) is weak. Bizarrely, it mirrors the Seinfeld series finale, with most of it taken up by a trial with appearances from characters from throughout the run. Instead of moving the arc plot on or giving it some closure, it summarises it (offhandedly revealing or clarifying a couple of things as if they were already established) then pretty much ends. The stuff with CSM was pretty cool but also completely pointless.

The second film is poor. Mainly Mulder and Scully having relationship problems, while not really doing any investigative work. It feels like a season 1 episode.

Just watched the first episode of the new miniseries (S10) and it was dreadful. So clunky and empty, in every aspect - the acting, cinematography, dialogue, editing, mythology...

Well, I finally dragged myself through S10 and it is utterly atrocious throughout. Muddled mythology-plot that attempts to cram a good season's worth at least into a couple of episodes and then ends on a cliffhanger with a load of plot-threads dangling, and no good MOTWs to back it up.

Season 11 will likely air early next year, and will a lot less likely make up for the godawful season 10 by being brilliant whilst wrapping up the mythology arc in a wholly satisfying way.

Just watched first episode of season 11 and it was atrocious. 40 minutes of people in rooms spouting painfully clumsy exposition at each other, David Duchovny with an increasingly unconvincing lack of a single grey hair (appropriately, given Mulder's futile hunt for greys) and an unbelievable cop-out from the previous season's cliffhangers: the whole episode was a (psychic) dream!

tldr - S1 to S7 are good, everything past that is shit