Like Ex learned, enjoying something is value enough. Mulder, hearing the story in the present, keeps trying to connect it to the bigger alien conspiracy, but in this tale finding a hidden meaning is not the point. Ex's love of baseball, a stand-in for all the "useless but perfect" things that make life worth living, is poetic and just a touch bittersweet it's an affair that's never meant to last. But as corny as it is, it's also charming and sincere in a way few X-Files episodes are. "The Unnatural" plays like it honestly believes "not seeing color" can solve racism, and its folksy 1940s treatment of Blackness leans hard on stereotype. His talent earns him enough attention that he's assigned a protective detail in the form of a cop ( Fredric Lehne) he winds up befriending. Ex wears the face of a Black man so he's less likely to get recruited to the majors and risk exposure. Martin) has fallen in love with the game of baseball. The majority of the episode flashes back to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, where an alien named Josh Exley ( Jesse L. Written and directed by David Duchovny, "The Unnatural" is a fanciful short story about the value of unnecessary things. Nostalgia may be a danger to the truth, but it's a saving grace for art.įox 22. It's the smartest and most self-aware episode of the revival, but it's affectionate, too. It's a satirical obituary for "the truth" in an era of fake news - and if the truth doesn't mean anything anymore, where does that leave Mulder and Scully? In a meta take on reviving The X-Files, Morgan insists there's no way to bring back something beloved and make it as good as it was, but he almost disproves his own point with how good this episode is. But this episode is more topical with its politics, spoofing The Twilight Zone to make Rod Serling-esque points about the lengths the government will go to avoid taking responsibility for its crimes. One-of-a-kind writer Darin Morgan's last episode in the X-Files revival is an updated take on his last episode in the original series, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." Like "Jose Chung's," "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" plays with the unreliability of memory. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" (Season 11, Episode 4) It's a chilling episode about how rational it is to fear the everyday world.Ģ3. On one level, "Irresistible" is a reckoning with Scully's trauma in the wake of her abduction, but the show also allows for her reaction to simply be humane a person should be horrified by what Pfaster is capable of. Every detail of the character is nails-on-a-chalkboard upsetting, and Scully is genuinely rattled by Pfaster even before he targets her. Donnie Pfaster ( Nick Chinlund) doesn't seem to have any supernatural abilities he's just a death fetishist with a childlike voice who makes women wash their hair before he kills them. In the tradition of all the best sci-fi, the scariest monster The X-Files ever produced was human.
Plus, Gillian Anderson gives one of her best comic performances on The X-Files when Scully gets her hands on an invisible man.Ģ4. "Je Souhaite" walks the line between cynicism and sentimentality - most people want what isn't good for them, but people like Mulder and Scully are still out there putting in the work.
The hour introduces the agents to a genie who's seen the worst of humanity, pushing them to debate whether it's possible to make the world better. Mulder gets three wishes in this delightful Vince Gilligan episode, which marks Mulder and Scully's last standalone case as partners until the revival. From underrated favorites to Emmy-winning standouts, these are The X-Files' 25 best episodes.įox 25. That range also means that aside from the obvious classics, the details of any best-of list come down to personal preference. ">TV Throwback: The Best Shows to Rewatch Right Now For the most part, those are the episodes that have held up best, standing as examples of the show's impressive range.
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It was the mythology arc that gave The X-Files its emotional weight in the early seasons, but as the series evolved, the monster-of-the-week episodes took over as its creative center. Structurally, the series helped pioneer the procedural balance between overarching mythology and standalone episodes, as Mulder ( David Duchovny) and Scully ( Gillian Anderson) unraveled a far-reaching government conspiracy one week and chased small-town monsters the next. The X-Files could be a black-and-white fable, a satire of political corruption, or a time travel romp it could be absurd, funny, romantic, horrifying.
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Fox's iconic sci-fi drama churned out 218 episodes and two movies over a span of 25 years, experimenting with genre and form in a way that pushed the boundaries of what a TV procedural could do. No matter what mood you're in, there's an X-Files episode for that.