Top 10 X-Files Episodes, Part I

Based on How Many Times I Said “Oh Fuck Off” While Watching

There are so many episodes of The X-Files. There are so many episodes of The X-Files and so many of them are bad. Yet I love this show. I love this show and it keeps me awake at night. Oftentimes it angers me with its dumbness. But the dumbness also moves me. This is hard to explain. Decades have passed and I am still pondering.

Mostly this says something about me: I cannot simply let it go. My brain is a churning ball of fire and will never be silent until the grave claims it. I must keep posting.

Today I must post about Agents Mulder and Scully, and their unending and inexplicable quest to prove aliens are real. Or the government is evil. Or their baby was stolen? Or Mulder’s sister was stolen? Or the Smoking Man is Mulder’s dad? Or he isn’t?

Cancer. There’s something about cancer. It’s the government’s fault, I’m sure about that part.

We had so much fun last year with my Philip Pullman Star Wars Prequels listicle that I thought “Why not unfurl the world’s lowest low-bar internet content device once again to help me finally write about my toxic relationship with The X-Files?” It is incumbent upon you, the reader, to judge whether or not this device has made the article better.

These are the top 10 X-Files episodes ordered by how many times their impenetrable elements prompted me to say “Oh fuck off!” out loud while watching.

#10.  Hollywood A.D.

This is the episode where Hollywood decides to make a movie out of the lives of Agents Mulder and Scully, specifically a case during which they investigate a magic bowl that serves as the only recording of the voice of one Jesus Christ. David Duchovny wrote this one and it shows because it plays like something written by a guy with a lot of unfinished dissertation lingering in his wake.

Needless to say, it’s a classic of the series and unhateable (if you like The X-Files for who it is, not who you want it to be). There’s no real mystery to be solved here: the Lazarus Bowl is a meme and so is every other aspect of the case. It’s a frame for doing bits culminating in our heroes being forced to watch a bad movie adaptation of their lives. The prickly relationship between real life and story is a rich, underrated theme of the show, presented here in its most humorous form.

The ending of this episode keeps me up at night. As our heroes leave Hollywood behind, a number of ghosts arise from the cemetery movie set and begin to dance, as if in response to Mulder and Scully’s discussion moments prior about what we owe the dead. Much of The X-Files is spent pursuing the dead: lost family members, unjustly murdered innocents, victims of alien stuff. What does it mean to discover late in the show that the dead have been at peace all along? Not just at peace, but unliving la vida loca?

#9. The Unnatural

This is the baseball alien episode, which David Duchovny also wrote. In it, Mulder goes to confront an elderly contact and finds himself forcibly regaled with a tale about a star Negro Leagues baseball player who was secretly an alien. This ball player, whose name is improbably Exley, longs to do nothing more than quietly enjoy baseball, but finds himself pursued by both major league recruiters and the recurring X-Files villain “Alien Bounty Hunter”. 

I don’t know what to tell you: that’s his name.

What haunts me about this episode is its lovable silliness, its irrepressible charm. It’s blatantly stupid and Exley is rather in the baleful tradition of the magical Black guy. Yet (for me, it doesn’t have to be true for every viewer) the episode maintains buoyancy by its sincere contention that the silly parts of life are the most important. Baseball is a much better priority than world domination. Exley is miraculously well-portrayed by GOATed character actor Jesse L. Martin, who later did all the emotional heavy lifting in approximately 137 episodes of The CW’s The Flash.

Where else can you see a rubbery grey alien in a retro baseball uniform? Nowhere! Where else can you be reminded that a love of frivolity and ludic practice is magic enough to turn an alien miraculously into a man? Nowhere! Is that something people really need to know? Will that message in this form reach them? I don’t know...

#8. Sunshine Days

This is the episode about the Brady Bunch. Yes, there is an episode about the Brady Bunch and it’s written and directed by beloved television creator Vince Gilligan. Which makes sense once you see it, because it’s about the nature of television.

Scully and her two hapless temporary pals (we’re in the season where Mulder’s missing) investigate the murder of a man who died by getting rocketed through the roof of an unassuming Los Angeles house. The house, when entered, is somehow actually the house from the Brady Bunch. This is the handiwork of a powerful psychic residing in the house, who finds comfort in the Brady Bunch because he leads a lonely and tragic life since his father-like therapist abandoned him. The Brady Bunch guy’s undeniable psychic powers provide Scully and her followers with an opportunity to finally prove the reality of the paranormal.

Except the Brady Bunch guy begins to die, his psychic powers too much for him. The only cure is reunion with his father-like therapist, which dries up his psychic well instantly. Scully and the other agents accept this, though, because Mulder’s not around to get obnoxiously hung up on the truth. The ability to bear living is more important than the truth, unfortunately. Particularly unfortunate for those of who tend to get hung up on the literal and the certain due to our Capital-T Tendencies. That’s why we need television, that most stilted, formulaic, and idiotic of media, to reassure us that everything will go back to normal someday.

Which is an insane thing for a show about “Oh I hope the government admits about aliens soon” to try and say, three episodes before ending! It demonstrates the power of television: even a show explicitly about the tantalizing promise of total revelation wants, in its heart, to go home and sit on the couch with its loved ones.

#7. Two Fathers & One Son

I am cheating because this is a two-part episode, but I don’t remember which one is the good one. The good one here meaning the one in which the evil Syndicate of old white guys controlling the corrupt US government hand the American flag over to a cadre of rubbery Roswell greys in exchange for protection from climate calamity. Or something?

Along with the American flag, they also hand over the vulnerable women and children in their own families to serve as test subjects for creepy reproductive experiments.

That’s right: the aliens are Jeffrey Epstein.

These episodes remain delectably impenetrable to me, nearly arthouse cinema in their what-the-fuck nature. Images appear onscreen, and you can decrypt them or they can destroy you. They have not yet destroyed me, but I am far from decrypting them. Meanwhile every day in real life the old white guys keep handing the American flag over to eviler and eviler greyliens.

That’s right: the aliens are also Christian Nationalists. Or something. I can decide what they mean pretty freely, because based purely on the incoherent text it’s hard to argue they mean anything.

And I haven’t even gotten into the guys with all their holes sewed shut, who look scary but I think end up being actually good? Call them Antifa, I guess.

#6. Triangle

“Triangle” dukes it out regularly for the position of My Favorite X-Files Episode, the most prestigious award available to an episode of The X-Files, though it has only ever been won by the films Blow-Out and Dark Waters. A survey of the episode’s elements reveals an array of catnips-for-me: old-timey times, cinematic gimmicks, casting gimmicks, dream stuff, a light amount of magic.

Mulder gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle, tossed through time. He’s hauled up onto a lost cruise ship from the late 1930s where the forces of good and the forces of Nazis duke it out in real time. In a Wizard of Oz-esque move, the major figures on the boat bear a striking resemblance to the regular and recurring characters of Mulder’s 1990s life! Meanwhile in the actual 1990s, Scully finds the wreck of the lost ship and explores it, looking for Mulder.

The episode cuts for commercial breaks, but otherwise the creative team employs elaborate visual trickery and extremely lovable wipe transitions to avoid making any visible cuts during “Triangle”. I love it: the cinematography and editing achieve a new height of playfulness, a feat in a show as silly as The X-Files. Yet the gimmick functions as critical rhetoric: the whole episode is about the way we’re embedded and enmeshed in time, spatially close to each other but temporally far apart, reliving each other’s struggles and yet unable to touch.

Luckily for us The X-Files is a sentimental show, filled with more tenderness for its inhabitants than the real world is. It’s also television, so it has to go home again. Mulder and Scully find their way back together at the end of the hour, which comes as a relief. Time and circumstance often refuse to let us go.

What makes me say “fuck off” out loud to this episode is primarily the accents done by the various actors playing the Nazis. Each is truly goofier than the last, culminating in the Cigarette Smoking Man doing nothing to alter his deeply Canadian vocal signature while speaking entirely in German. The effect boggles one’s froggle, but then so does time travel.

We must pause here, to allow these episodes to percolate. These are episodes which made me say "Oh fuck off" aloud to the screen at least three or four times in less than sixty minutes each. How much worse will it get? Spend the next week wanting to believe and then return to find out.