Exactly. After the secrecy around IWTB seemed to backfire (though actually it was releasing it against The Dark Knight), FOX decided to spoil everything up front in a blitzkreig of marketing. On ratings, it clearly worked. But on the flip side there were no surprises left for fans — virtually the entirety of the…

Keeping in mind that the first season of the original show was far, far from the best of what was to come, I can remain cautiously optimistic that a second run at the revival could improve on things now that everyone's warmed up. If they're able to schedule eight to ten episodes, it could avoid the overstuffed…

As brilliant as Darin Morgan is, if every single episode was one of his unique comedies then it would be a very different show. They work because they're so abnormal. By his own admission, Darin is not a prolific enough writer to sustain a whole show — Were-Monster was largely written ten years ago.

The mythology actually makes perfect sense and is wrapped up in a satisfying conclusion in S6 (Two Fathers/One Son). They added a post-script to that story to keep the show alive, and it was literally explained point by point in the series finale.

That was a refreshingly original episode in what has otherwise been largely a greatest hits package so far. The dialogue was more sparky and the interplay between Mulder and Scully (and their counterparts) hasn't been as lively since the old days. While Founders Mutation and Home Again plodded through things we've…

The Time Is Now, S2 finale. Urgh.

They were originally slated to do 8 but the actor's availability wouldn't allow it.

Well, that's Glen Morgan's contribution to the revival - writer/director/executive producer.

That's how it played in S9. But in Home Again it kept reinforcing the idea that Scully's decision was irresponsible, that to give him up for his own safety was akin to "treating him like trash." Pretty much everything in the episode says Scully made a mistake. Nobody ever speaks to the idea that she made the right…

I have to admit that I was rather disappointed with that. The monster had been done before on the show (Arcadia) and never really added up to much beyond a series of fairly repetitive kills. The story didn't quite marry up to the emotional stuff with Scully's mother, nor the continuing references to William. It's also…

Yeah, they even called it a Tulpa too.

It's a little simpler than that when you read the original Night Stalker script.

Are you serious? How anyone can deny that Triangle is an extraordinary feat of filmmaking is beyond me. And I'm not listing every good episode Chris Carter has ever written by any means, just making a short list of highlights, so you can forget that 11% statistic! Even so, it just demonstrates how there's a world of…

"Limited stellar hands-on work"?

Those are Darin Morgan's episodes, which are indeed fantastic, no argument there. Morgan & Wong refers to Glen Morgan and James Wong, who worked as writing partners back in the 90s. They wrote some classic MOTWs for sure, but they also wrote forgettable stuff like Shadows, Shapes, Blood, 3 and The Field Where I…

I use the Indianna Jones analogy because of the relic-hunting, Nazi fighting strand the show took on. Frank Black was a criminal profiler, then suddenly in S2 he was jetting off to Germany in search of the mythical Hand of Saint Sebastian from the Middle Ages. He and Peter were dealing with broad, comical German…

Keeping in mind too that Carter almost didn't sign on to Season 9 until the eleventh hour, only finalising his contract when the premiere was already in preproduction IIRC. Frank Spotnitz was more or less running the show at that point. But "Improbable" still managed to be a cool, quirky, innovative episode that was…

Maybe not. But I think he just didn't want to jump back into series television at the time. He wanted to go out and live life after 10 years in constant production.

Season 2 is a more juvenile show, to me, replacing a dark meditation on human nature with a campy relic-hunting adventure. Season 1 was Se7en, Season 2 was Indianna Jones. It became more of a sub X-Files clone, with sillier stories like A Single Blade of Grass, The Hand of Saint Sebastian, and The Pest House.

Have you seen the 2005 remake? It's very similar to The X-Files, with a believer/sceptic duo chasing the paranormal/supernatural. They're at a newspaper not the FBI, sure, but it's a pretty similar setup for telling similar kinds of stories.