marking katabasis down as books you should not read when you've just started grad school in the uk as an american transplant in a somewhat intense lab while also dealing with the unexplainable gradual dissolution of the most profound friendship you've ever had
hihi!! wondering if you could rank your favorite one-off or side characters from txf? or alternatively do you have any storylines/episodes that you think could almost be really good if they changed something but missed the mark? thank you!
OOH okay i have a lot of thoughts about this. i'm just going to do a general top 10 of one-off little guys without ranking them, and then probably put my storyline quibbles below the cut.
clyde bruckman is in fact my ranked number one favorite txf one-off character. i LOVE that guy
bambi berenbaum <3
modell sucks so fucking bad but he's such an iconic villain and robert wisden gives such a great performance
holman and sheila my best friends holman and sheila
i'm quite attached to agent bocks from irresistible solely because of his delivery of "faaanTAAAstic" when scully gets pfaster's prints. possibly best line delivery in the show
lyda and maurice, of course
max fenig. rip
this unfortunately means i can include melissa on this list because she was in the SAME NUMBER OF EPISODES AS MAX. fuck this shit man she didn't deserve any of that
esther from kill switch is the coolest woman alive. i wish they'd let scully hang out with more women
speaking of, HOLLY! i love that they brought holly back for redux and i love that she and scully seem to have remained friends since pusher! i do have to wonder if she was someone on the crew, or related to someone on the crew, because of how bad cc's continuity usually is (bringing her back, especially for such a small scene, seems more of a vince move, and vince didn't work on either redux at all)
come talk about the x-files!!!
easy fix episode changes i'd make in chronological order (i'm leaving out things like excelsis dei or tfwid that for various reasons would need a complete overhaul, or episodes like the pilot- don't kill me- where i think something isn't working but i don't really have a concrete idea of what that is):
i think oubliette really misses the mark because scully is so out of character. it's objectively a good story, and it's a great mulder episode, but i would absolutely have written scully to be less dismissive of lucy's trauma and mulder's attachment to the case, considering she doesn't act like this in ANY other episode that either is reminiscent of what happened to sam or involving a young woman undergoing significant trauma. paper hearts, which explores a very similar concept, understands this, and it's one of the (many, imo) reasons why paper hearts is a better episode by several orders of magnitude
hell money is actually a fascinating concept for an episode, down to mulder and scully being complete outsiders and not being entirely sympathetic, that i think is just left of being executed well. if they'd actually hired a chinese-american writer, i think it would have been REALLY interesting
they should have given scully a nosebleed right at the end of demons. i don't think demons is actually an episode about sam really at all. besides the fact that mulder wasn't taken (which we knew) because the smoking man chose sam (and we knew that the syndicate had something to do with it, and that teena and the smoking man were having an affair), we don't learn anything new about what happened to her. the most important piece of information that we DO get from demons is the first indication that what is happening to scully is making mulder actively suicidal, and i think having the nosebleed at the end would make that point even clearer while still leaving the outright discussion for gethsemane
i don't even think this is a question. postmodern prometheus. cut the rape storyline and make it so that the great mutato was just doing all the other things he did (the sandwiches, the tv, the dancing) for the chance to experience normal life. that's a perfect hour of tv
cut travellers and write a krycek bottle episode if you're really that hell bent on giving gillian the week off
whatever was going on with 1930s kersh in triangle needed like one more pass by a sensitivity reader (which i can almost guarantee they did not have on this show to begin with). also, they should have kept the original plan of having diana be the lounge singer who rats mulder out
i like both dreamlands but think that the parts of the episodes that are trying to be thrillers work considerably better than the parts that are just straight comedy. i'd lean into that more
overall storylines i'd change:
i think it would work VASTLY better with the themes of the show if kritschgau was 100% correct in gethsemane when he tells mulder and scully that aliens are a hoax and the syndicate is behind everything. it's a well-foreshadowed plot twist that still manages to be shocking, and it really seemed like the show was going in that direction based on the mytharc in seasons 3 and 4. and it then makes the character work in season 5 really fucking interesting- this dismantling of mulder's belief system works very well with the whole emily fiasco to sow the seeds of the rift between m&s that develops in the back end of the season into s6. the rest of the mytharc should have just been m&s (and co) vs the syndicate. hell, you could even still keep the bare bones, like gibson praise and the black oil, but just frame them to be a result of government experimentation like the eves. i think cc really cocked up going back on that in fight the future
whatever the fuck is going on with diana is VERY interesting but needed to be a more consistent throughline. it's possible to infer why mulder was so loath to believe that diana was working for the syndicate, but i think they needed to work that in a bit more textually. it wouldn't need to be hit-you-over-the-head! but i think they should have touched on it a bit more. also, what is diana's deal? why would she agree to any of that shit in the first place? she could be so interesting if she were a little more fleshed out
gummygunk
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
pixelskylines
stormborns
