Doug on the X-Files

[Dave]

From the latest SFX:

Topic

[Ian Symes]

What was that series we wrote, “The Y Files”, do you remember that? About those two guys, Fully and Skullder? Fully and Skullder come in with some torches, and they never turn the lights on. 

[Flap Jack]

If I didn’t have the ability to check, I would refuse to believe that “Cigarette Smoking Man”, “Eugene Tooms” and “The Flukeman” were real villains from The X-Files and not joke names from a Garth Marenghi-esque pastiche.

[Dave]

If I didn’t have the ability to check, I would refuse to believe that “Cigarette Smoking Man”, “Eugene Tooms” and “The Flukeman” were real villains from The X-Files and not joke names from a Garth Marenghi-esque pastiche.

And that was the show’s golden era.

(In fairness, all of those were really good characters. I loved the first few years of the X-Files.)

[Warbodog]

Is he sure he watched it in 1993? Since it didn’t air until 1994 on either Sky (January) or the BBC (September, when I watched it). He could have watched a video or something.

The first couple of seasons have a great modest-budget atmosphere about them, then the next three are nicely filmic as Doug notes, then it gets kind of ruined when they move to sunny LA and the tone goes all over the place.

The Post-Modern Prometheus might be my favourite MOTW episode, but like many of them, it’s a biiiiiit rapey.

[Dave]

Is he sure he watched it in 1993? Since it didn’t air until 1994 on either Sky (January) or the BBC (September, when I watched it). He could have watched a video or something.

Or he could have seen it while in the US.

[Flap Jack]

Most likely he just remembered watching it from very early on, so he looked up when The X-Files started for the purpose of the piece, but didn’t realise that it didn’t start in the UK until months or a year later than the US.

But as it started after the filming of Series VI regardless, we can’t discount the possibility that The X-Files had a non-zero impact on the Grant/Naylor split. “Why can’t we have what Mulder and Scully have?!” I assume one of them shouted in a particularly heated moment.

[Moonlight]

If I didn’t have the ability to check, I would refuse to believe that “Cigarette Smoking Man”, “Eugene Tooms” and “The Flukeman” were real villains from The X-Files and not joke names from a Garth Marenghi-esque pastiche.

Cigarette Smoking Man is one of several monikers Mulder uses to refer to a villain whose real name is unknown, but he’s always smoking cigarettes. “Flukeman” as a name wasn’t actually used in the episode featuring the Flukeman, but he is a fluke who is a man so I can see why it stuck. Great episode.

Tooms gets away with it because Squeeze is also fucking fantastic episode, and he’s not a zombie or anything so I don’t think it’s a pun on tombs. Maybe.

I loved this show when I was a teenager and I’ve been going back and watching some of the classic episodes again recently with a friend who hasn’t seen the show before. We’ve been playing Mulder Bingo, a game I designed, and this seems like the perfect excuse to share it. Try it with your friends! One of the things you notice rewatching this show in 2025 is that Special Agent Fox Mulder is a bit of a maniac, and he falls into some common patterns. The rules are simply that any five squares you get (in any pattern) count as a Mulder Bingo, and they stack with each additional five squares. We got like sixteen of them on the second ever episode. The Crazy Like a Fox scale is ranking Mulder’s insanity out of 10. It’s very subjective but the higher end of the scale is reserved for when he’s either putting other people in extreme danger (such as bringing a radioactive alien artifact on a commercial airline knowing that a UFO is hunting for it) or, if not, has just totally gone off the deep end (such as hijacking a gondola at gunpoint). We gave Ice, an episode Doug mentions, an 8, because he pulls a gun on Scully like a fucking maniac.

Here’s a quick selection of things Mulder has done, presented completely out of context and often in a very misleading way:

He devoted FBI resources to investigating an alien autopsy tape he bought out of a magazine for $19.95

He tasted blood at a crime scene

He broke into a top secret airbase to see a UFO and got his brain erased

He went to a corn field and got attacked by thousands of bees

He got into a feud with the HOA

He hijacked a train and then it blew up 

He wore a tiny red speedo

He charged into a military facility like a shrieking jackrabbit, tailed by heavily armed MPs, because he thought he could see an alien for two seconds before he was gunned down

He tried to capture the loch ness monster

He looked at a drawing, went insane and collapsed on a stairwell

He hid inside a mulch pile and then burst out to stab a dude in a brain

He went to NASA and annoyed an astronaut until he killed himself

He punched his boss in the face at 9 o’clock in the morning 

He abducted a deaf child and then fell off a cliff

He stole scully’s car keys so she’d have to go into a haunted house with him

He shot a guy in the face with a shotgun at point blank in his own apartment, and then used the corpse to fake his own death for no clear reason

He arrested a worm

He got trapped inside a video game

He stole Scully’s ova 

He body swapped with Michael McKean and immediately watched porn

He went to an oil rig and then it blew up

He chased a teenager through the woods and drove a stake through his heart because he had fake vampire teeth

He kissed a woman without asking and then leapt into the ocean

He got cocooned by bugs

He went to the hospital, where his dad kidnapped him and stole his brain 

He robbed a bank in a dracula mask

He poured orange juice on his mailbox

He went on a drug-fueled rampage across the eastern seaboard, ended up in Arizona, found a train car full of corpses and then died in a horrible explosion 

He arrested Santa claus

[Moonlight]

I tried to fix some of the spacing and capitalization but G&T strikes again and my edit timer ran out.

(don’t worry Cappsy, I still love you)

[Warbodog]

Mulder, Rimmer, Richie, so many well-balanced male role models in my formative years.

[Flap Jack]

rimmer: *throws lister a file* ever heard of the bog roll alien

[Ian Symes]

[Nick R]

He went to a corn field and got attacked by thousands of bees

The sequel to Hundreds of Beavers?

[International Debris]

The X Files is one of those shows that started as one thing and subtly changed as it grew and the writers got to know the characters and setting better. What makes it different to others is that both of those versions are good. I like season 1 super serious owes more than a little to Twin Peaks X Files, but I like season 4-5 The Wacky Adventures of the Porn-Addicted Conspiracy Guy and His Uptight Sidekick X Files as well. 

Obviously the move to LA was a very bad thing, and a few episodes aside, the two-parter in mid season six is really where you should stop, but for five years it was such a brilliantly off the wall show that managed to be surprising, original, spooky, hilarious and frequently slightly too boring. 

[Flap Jack]

My only experience of The X-Files is the Simpsons crossover episode, which for some reason Matt Groening didn’t demand his name be removed from, unlike the crossover episode with The Critic. A lot must have changed in 2 years.

Actually The Springfield Files is probably in my top 10 most watched episodes, because it was on one of the 3 compilation videos I had as a child.

[Warbodog]

You’ve got the context to enjoy one of the fun ones like Bad Blood (Doug Naylor approved). Not that you have to.

[Spaceworm Jim]

Bad Blood is like an egg stain on your cheek. You can lick it but it still won’t go away.

[Ian Symes]

Actually The Springfield Files is probably in my top 10 most watched episodes, because it was on one of the 3 compilation videos I had as a child.

This one? Same.

[Dave]

This one? Same.

Me too. I think it was one of the first (if not THE first) of the official Simpsons VHSs that were available, so I played it to death.

[Warbodog]

The X-Files was such a big deal, they fast-tracked that season 8 episode to video release in the UK just 3 months after the US airing. The previous Simpsons videos were released torturously slowly and had only reached the start of season 3 (and they’d only recently started on the BBC too). As a terrestrial kid, they were the only Simpsons I saw for the longest time: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/The_Simpsons_Collection

[Warbodog]

[Ian Symes]

Well she introduced Rob & Doug to the word “smeg”, it’s only fair they kept up with her work.

[Flap Jack]

This one? Same.

Yep, that was the one! We were a Heaven and Hell, The Dark Secrets of The Simpsons and Too Hot For TV household.

[Unrumble]

Too Hot For TV, Bart Wars, Simpsons.com, and Love Springfield Style here.

Plus the Year One boxset, which was relatively slim, owing to it’s shorter episode run than subsequent seasons.

[sleepey]

[Nick R]

Better rake than never! 

[Dave]

[Nick R]

Getting back on topic…

[Dave]

[Unrumble]

[Dave]

[clem]

The only Simpsons video I had was Too Hot For TV but I could only remember The Cartridge Family, so I’ve just had to look up what other episodes were on it. Then I had to look up what the title Natural Born Kissers is a reference to, because I remembered that Stoke Me a Clipper was going to be called Natural Born Rimmers and I didn’t get that either. (For anyone as uncultured as me, it’s the 1994 Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers btw.) 

[Dave]

[Moonlight]

This is a very old meme but it’s relevant.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

[Rudolph]

The X Files is one of those shows that started as one thing and subtly changed as it grew and the writers got to know the characters and setting better. What makes it different to others is that both of those versions are good. I like season 1 super serious owes more than a little to Twin Peaks X Files, but I like season 4-5 The Wacky Adventures of the Porn-Addicted Conspiracy Guy and His Uptight Sidekick X Files as well. 
Obviously the move to LA was a very bad thing, and a few episodes aside, the two-parter in mid season six is really where you should stop, but for five years it was such a brilliantly off the wall show that managed to be surprising, original, spooky, hilarious and frequently slightly too boring. 

I’ve always considered the genesis of Mulder and Scully to be Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks and Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs.

Completely agree about the move to Los Angeles. The wet and miserable woodlands of British Columbia, and downtown Vancouver doubling for every major US city, is part of the appeal of the show. The sunshine and desert landscapes of southern California never quite matched the tone of the series.

The seventh season finale Requiem is, to me, the perfect ending. The show reaches it’s logical conclusion with Mulder finally getting abducted by aliens.

[Warbodog]

I stopped watching in early season 7, when the intriguing cliffhanger promising a new mythology direction about ancient aliens or something was abandoned for all the same, tired old shit. I’ve caught up since, but everything after that point still feels off and like optional canon to me.

I think the mythology’s compelling through the end of season 3, at which point it feels like we pretty much know The Truth. After that it’s largely memes of itself (Oil! Bees! Old white men! More dead family!), but I like the season 5 switcheroo with Mulder being disillusioned and Scully seeing aliens.

[Moonlight]

The sunshine and desert landscapes of southern California never quite matched the tone of the series.

Issues with the revival seasons aside, one of my favorite aspects of those episodes was the return to Vancouver and the wet Canadian forests. I’m usually not a fan of them always being in the desert in the latter half of the original run, although the episode Drive is very good and uses the setting to its advantage. I can’t imagine that story working as well if it didn’t take place in the Southwest.

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