Rewatching season 11 of The X-Files

[frelling_tralk]

My Struggle was just urgh such a bad way to start the season off unfortunately. Lol at the super unnecessary Mulder voiceovers, like you really don’t think you couldn’t have just shown him spotting that someone was tailing him, you have to have a whole voiceover of his inner thoughts to tell us what’s happening?! The car chase scenes felt weirdly

Comments

[frelling_tralk]

If anything I remember critics being fairly positive and getting my hopes up when they were talking about the first five episodes (other than the opener) being a real return to form, and the general vibe in the beginning was that it was a great improvement on season 10, but the cliffhanger at the end seemed to completely kill all that. Now you only hear it discussed in terms of critics dismissing the entire revival as a waste of time, and that still seems a bit harsh to me, but then Gillian Anderson herself also seems fed up and disappointed, and perhaps that fed into the general feeling of disillusionment as well? But I still say that most of the episodes weren’t that bad when you go back and watch them, although I agree that the hit to miss ratio is a lot more obvious when you’re dealing with a limited series, that was especially apparent with season 10 where the final two CC episodes really killed all momentum there. But for me season 11 has a decent enough mix, heck even Kitten is more about my personal taste as I’ve noticed that other people rate it higher than me, so none of the episodes in between My Struggle are *that* terrible. Well I guess that’s damming with faint praise lol, but I would also argue that there were two really terrific standouts with the Darin Morgan episode and the tech episode, so it’s not like you can say that the revival consisted of all mediocre/just okay episodes, they were clearly stretching and trying out different things with some of them

I found a lot of the mythology dull even during peak X-Files, so I agree that I think there’s definitely a case of rose-coloured glasses here. I can’t imagine imagine the tedium of Redux part one for example playing well today when it’s 80% voiceovers and exposition, but most viewers loved it at the time, so I guess that all adds up to the disappointment and bewilderment from some viewers at how much the mythology flopped in the revival. But if you go into it just wanting to enjoy some one-off cases with Mulder and Scully in the 21st century, I think there’s some worthwhile episodes to be found there.

ETA I guess the problem is these days there’s always the expectation of a show adding up to more than just one-off ‘filler’ episodes, and likely that’s why critics completely turned against it and could no longer appreciate any of the individual episodes even after the final episode ultimately didn’t tie the mythology together