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chicafrom3I have returned from Maine! And now I'm missing New England. Oh, well, I got a week of seeing family and eating lobster and a day trip to Boston for delicious delicious cannoli and wandering the MIT campus, which is more than I usually get.
In other news I'm slowly getting caught back up on my X-Files marathon, as well as the rest of the TV I missed on my trip. Today I finished season six.
Season six is also REALLY GOOD. It's not quite as good as season five, but it handles the production move to LA so well. The tone shifts as it must without totally dropping what made The X-Files great -- sunny LA beaches just don't evoke the same atmosphere as gloomy Vancouver forests, but they keep up the creepiness anyway.
Also, Triangle. TRIANGLE. Triangle is so good. Everything about it, from the script to the performances to the production values to the cinematography. A MILLION AWARDS FOR TRIANGLE. And for the Mulder/Scully kiss that isn't.
The lowest part of the season is Alpha and Trevor and luckily they're right next to each other so you get them over with at once. They're not terrible, they're just not up to the level of the rest of the season. (Also, I didn't love Milagro as much on rewatch as I remember loving it back in the day, but I'm not sure why.)
I mean, seriously. Drive is a Speed-ripoff that transcends its original source. The Dreamland two-parter explores Area 51 for the first time and is also an excellent character study of Mulder. How The Ghosts Stole Christmas is one of the best Christmas episodes of any TV show ever. Bruce Campbell gives a masterful and surprisingly uncampy performance in Terms Of Endearment, which also has such a fantastic twist ending. S.R. 819 is possibly the best of what I think of as the Skinner trilogy although that's harder to call because the Skinner trilogy is consistently fantastic. Tithonus isn't exactly a sequel to Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, but like Clyde Bruckman it has all kinds of things to say about death and Scully and it says them masterfully. Cassandra Spender returns in two of the best mytharc episodes ever, and then Arthur Dales returns in the delightfully creepy Agua Mala.
Monday is an excellent take on the Groundhog Day/time loop trope, while Arcadia manages to be hilarious and shippy and creepy as hell all at the same time and would probably never have been done if they'd stayed in Vancouver. Then you get two Mulder & Scully-lite episodes -- The Unnatural, which is so good it's hard to put it into words, and Three Of A Kind, which follows up The Unusual Suspects to continue looking at The Lone Gunmen in a new light. Field Trip is trippy and mindscrewy and excellent, and then Biogenesis beats the hell out of Mulder and sets up the new season to be great.
Seriously, this season is so good I can't stand it.
Next up: season seven, a continuing exploration of new kinds of stories their new location opens up to them, and the most series-devastating season finale ever.
In other news I'm slowly getting caught back up on my X-Files marathon, as well as the rest of the TV I missed on my trip. Today I finished season six.
Season six is also REALLY GOOD. It's not quite as good as season five, but it handles the production move to LA so well. The tone shifts as it must without totally dropping what made The X-Files great -- sunny LA beaches just don't evoke the same atmosphere as gloomy Vancouver forests, but they keep up the creepiness anyway.
Also, Triangle. TRIANGLE. Triangle is so good. Everything about it, from the script to the performances to the production values to the cinematography. A MILLION AWARDS FOR TRIANGLE. And for the Mulder/Scully kiss that isn't.
The lowest part of the season is Alpha and Trevor and luckily they're right next to each other so you get them over with at once. They're not terrible, they're just not up to the level of the rest of the season. (Also, I didn't love Milagro as much on rewatch as I remember loving it back in the day, but I'm not sure why.)
I mean, seriously. Drive is a Speed-ripoff that transcends its original source. The Dreamland two-parter explores Area 51 for the first time and is also an excellent character study of Mulder. How The Ghosts Stole Christmas is one of the best Christmas episodes of any TV show ever. Bruce Campbell gives a masterful and surprisingly uncampy performance in Terms Of Endearment, which also has such a fantastic twist ending. S.R. 819 is possibly the best of what I think of as the Skinner trilogy although that's harder to call because the Skinner trilogy is consistently fantastic. Tithonus isn't exactly a sequel to Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, but like Clyde Bruckman it has all kinds of things to say about death and Scully and it says them masterfully. Cassandra Spender returns in two of the best mytharc episodes ever, and then Arthur Dales returns in the delightfully creepy Agua Mala.
Monday is an excellent take on the Groundhog Day/time loop trope, while Arcadia manages to be hilarious and shippy and creepy as hell all at the same time and would probably never have been done if they'd stayed in Vancouver. Then you get two Mulder & Scully-lite episodes -- The Unnatural, which is so good it's hard to put it into words, and Three Of A Kind, which follows up The Unusual Suspects to continue looking at The Lone Gunmen in a new light. Field Trip is trippy and mindscrewy and excellent, and then Biogenesis beats the hell out of Mulder and sets up the new season to be great.
Seriously, this season is so good I can't stand it.
Next up: season seven, a continuing exploration of new kinds of stories their new location opens up to them, and the most series-devastating season finale ever.