Damn, I know everyone has already said this, but First Person Shooter really is a bad episode. Like. They never even explained how the game worked?? Like is it VR? Projections? How was it killing people? Or why they didn't just like open up the door to the room when people were starting to die? Like, the whole thing reads like something I wrote when I was twelve.
Like "Hello my name is Jade Blue Afterglow. I fight with a 14th century broadsword and dodge bullets with backflips. And I feed on testosterone." And also the little melodramatic run the programmer girl does from the room and then Scully going after her, and the whole exchange between them and like... Idk how to put it into words but like..... all the shots.... the whole script...... it would be funny if it weren't like..... so pitiful compared to the usual level of x files writing? Like, I can't believe this is a real script. That they okay'd this.
I feel like part of the problem is that the X Files usually benefits from kind of being vague/mysterious with the phenomenon they encounter, it's like the whole vibe of the show. (Which is interesting, since other sci-fi shows rely on at least implied specificity through techno-babble.) However, being really vague with a premise like this really does not work... it ends up just being sci-fi done badly. If they wanted to go in this direction they ought to have tried something like... "oh look we found this video game on a hard drive in like a landfill somewhere, I wonder where it came from or what it does...?" They've had some episodes that still honored the mysteriousness of the X Files premise, while still dealing with techno-anxieties, AI, and etc.
The only people on the team who gets a pass on this one is the costume/props department, cause the one good thing to come out of this episode is that Mulder and Scully DO look cool asf.