top 5 txf seasons?
season 3 is not only the best season of the show by a HIGH bar but it's one of the best seasons of all of scifi. the mythology is gripping and shockingly coherent. the motw episodes are scary and funny and heartfelt all at once. (overall it's got the highest ratio of bangers to clinkers of the whole show.) it's gorgeously shot. both mulder and scully have good hair at the same time. the character work is CRAZY. the foreshadowing for season 4 is unmatched. it's even got the best episode of all of tv AND scully's dog. what more do you need from a show
this is normally a tossup spot for me between season 2 and season 4. right now i'm going to go with s4 because the mythology in s4 gives me brain worms. holy fucking shit. leonard betts into never again into memento mori is absolutely generational and CRAZY risky with RIDICULOUSLY high reward
so by default then this is season 2, which is when i think the show really hit its stride and figured out what kind of story it was telling. scully's abduction is some of the best doomed-from-the-beginning writing i've ever seen. it didn't have to happen but it was always going to happen and they could have stopped it but it would have happened anyway. it changed the entire show
season 5 is deeply underrated but SO fascinating... by switching mulder and scully's roles in the narrative and introducing the idea that maybe aliens actually aren't real, it's able to dig really deep into all of its characters (even secondary characters like skinner and the gunmen and krycek!). it's one of the most tonally cohesive seasons and has a lot of hidden gem episodes (pine bluff variant is top 20 for me, and i think kill switch and folie a deux in particular deserve more love too), with only three (schizogeny, travellers, and all souls) that i'd say aren't good. chris carter going back on the mythology of this season by saying that aliens ARE actually real was a huge mistake in my opinion. that's not the kind of story he'd been telling the entire time
i'm going to cheat and tie seasons 1 and 6, because season 6 is a much better season from a technical perspective (it's sharp, it's original, it's cohesive, it's got really incisive character work that needs just a little more followthrough), but the spookier, more mysterious vibes in season 1 work a lot better for the show. and it's got some classic episodes too- i actually think the pilot is largely kind of bullshit, but the tooms sequence, ice, and beyond the sea, at the very least, deserve all their flowers. rip deep throat. what a guy
ask my top 5/10 anything!!!
