The X-Files - The Complete Fifth Season (Slim Set)
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Movie Reviews of The X-Files - The Complete Fifth Season (Slim Set)
Movie Review: Running out of gas
Summary: 3 Stars
We saw fewer mythology episodes in season five and more and more silly filler episodes. It seems the writers are running out of ideas and the plots are getting weaker. The first two and the final episodes of the season were very strong.
Hopefully this was just an off year and season six will regain my interest.
Movie Review: THIS VERSION HAS NO EXTRAS
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a new version that just recently got released. These new boxsets don't have any of the special features that were included with the original version of the DVD boxsets; these new DVD sets only have the episodes.Movie Review: Prayers Answered !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the greatest things for X-Files fans since the pilot episode aired. They took the same DVDs put them in a more affordable, ergonomic package, and are selling it for half what the original sells for. If you have been an X-Files fan, but refused to pay 80 bucks a season for the original release, your prayers have been answered. Let me say that all of the episodes, bonus features, and interactive menus are still there, just cheaper. These seasons are now comparative in price to other TV shows available on DVD. This is something that Fox has really done for the customer and they should be commended.
Movie Review: Another great season, great price
Summary: 5 Stars
The last season shot in Vancouver has some of the finest episodes of the series. While the show would slip a couple of notches in quality with succeeding years, the fifth season still shows the production staff and actors in top form. The fifth season features one of my favorite episodes "The Pine Bluff Variant" about a group of U.S. terrorist that modify a bioagent produced by the military to kill rapidly and that can be passed on common objects. It's got a frightening opening that chills not just because of the drama but also because it reflects the fantatical insanity of terrorism. Excellent performances abound in this terrific episode written by John Shiban and the taunt direction is worthy of a feature film.
"Kill Switch" by author William Gibson is a mind bending episode where Mulder gets jacked into a computer that wants...information from him. It reminds me of "The Prisoner" in many respects with a new sheen applied. I've never seen the original script for Stephen King's "Chinga" but it's undoubtably the most disappointing episode here and the weakest. it recycles an idea that was old even when writer Charlues Beaumont scripted it for the original "Twilight Zone". I'm not sure how Carter revised the script (if he did at all or if it was more collaboration)but it would point to some of the shortcomings in future seasons--recycling older ideas and not doing it very well. Carter's homage to old horror movies "The Post Modern Prometheus" shot in stark black and white images that recall "Bride of Frankenstein" and "Son of Frankenstein" with its use of surreal set designs and impressionistic lighting is an example of style succeding when there isn't enough substance. Directed by Carter the look and feel of the episode (as well as the performances) carry a script that is OK if a bit deliberate and heavy handed. Still, it's one of the best looking episodes the show produced. "Emily" the second part of a two part episode in which Scully gets a call from her deceased sister saying "She needs you" is touching. It's an example of "The X-Files" at its best--emotionally honest yet dealing with complex issues and a great story. The first part "Christmas Carol" is equally as good but the conclusion of "Emily" is heartbreaking and has the edge of the two.
The humourous "Detour" is a great stand alone episode. A fan favorite returns in "Kitsunegari" with Pusher returning. The marvelous Robert Modell returns (why doesn't this guy appear on TV more and someone, please, get him a TV series or cast him in a major movie. The last time I saw him was in "Battlestar Galatica" last year). The humorous "Bad Blood" is another superior episode about a vampire on the loose in a small town. Mulder and Scully have very different memories of the circumstances and when each tells the story from their point of view the contradictions are hillarious. "Mind's Eye" was an episode I missed during the series original run and didn't see it until the DVDs were released. It's a great episode with strong performances about a blind woman who is implicated in a series of murders. The solution is surprising (or was to me) and powerful.
A great set the show will looks the same here as the previous boxed set because Fox is using the same digital masters and transfers for this set. As to extras will if commentary tracks, deleted scenes and anything on the disks with the episodes will be included but the bonus disk of extras (the game, featurettes, etc.) will not. You won't miss them trust me on this. Definitely worth picking up.
Movie Review: One of TV's greatest shows, now available in an easily affordable edition
Summary: 5 Stars
For me personally, nothing has delighted me in 2006 so much as the impending appearance of affordable editions of THE X-FILES. Before summer we should have the entire series available in new slim pack editions that will retail for less than half the cost of the original DVD sets. I have been ranting for ages about those far-too-expensive sets, renting and rerenting discs, refusing to support products that I deemed too expensive, holding out for sets in line with the pricing of other TV series. As they say: good things come to those who wait. Besides, I far prefer slim pack versions of television series.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
I'm not sure that a spoiler alert is necessary with a show so well known as THE X-FILES, but, what the hey! Besides, the new low prices could attract new viewers who have been curious about the show but have found the cost of the previous sets prohibitive.
What is astonishing in looking back at the first five seasons of THE X-FILES is how amazingly consistent the show was. With most shows you can clearly demarcate the better from the worst seasons, but this show hit the ground running in its first season and never really eased up. Apart from adding touches of comedy in Season Three, the first five seasons are masterpieces of consistency. Over the course of time the show managed to build up a massive back-story, often leaping back a few decades to detail events in the past (including an excellent episode that not only deals with Mulder's father, but pays homage to one of the few shows that could be a precursor to THE X-FILES by guest starring THE NIGHT STALKER's leading man Darren McGavin). There are a number of outstanding stand alone episodes, and several that I personally find scarier than anything in the first four seasons. The great episode "Detour" finds Mulder and Scully lost in a swamp with chameleon-like creatures that can strike almost at will (with more of the flirtation that left fans wondering if there was potential romance in the wings). Another very funny episode in black and white deals with "The Great Mutato," a take off on bad 1950s Sci-fi films. But the best comic episode of the season is easily "Bad Blood," set in Texas with Luke Wilson in a story about vampires, a RASHOMON type story in which we witness the same story first from Scully's and then from Mulder's point of view (the former presenting Luke Wilson as the apex of male attractiveness, while Mulder presents him as a doofus with buck teeth and possibly some idiocy in the family line). On a more serious level there is also an amazing episode with Lily Taylor guest starring as a blind woman who has the ability to see things remotely through the eyes of the man who biologically fathered her.
As with the former seasons, the most engrossing parts of the season dealt with ongoing plot lines. Season Four ended with Mulder apparently dead (though who really believed that?) and Scully in desperate shape because of her cancer). After a very, very funny first episode that provided comic relief after the cliffhanger ending of Season Four as well as dealing with both the creation of the Lone Gunmen and Mulder's involvement with the X-Files. The Smoking Man is revealed to be Mulder's father, but then later not to be Mulder's father. Or perhaps Mulder's father, and the father of both his brother and his sister, or perhaps not. Just who Cancer Man fathered is a complex mystery at the end of Season Five. (The CSM's fatherly status is revealed at the end of the series, but Chris Carter admits they were winging things as they went along.) We get endless amounts of increased by increasingly unilluminating details about government conspiracies and plots. This highlights the only real weakness the show ever had: a tendency to pile one mysterious plot element onto another without resolving previous ones, and introducing apparently conflicting plot details, as the Cigarette Smoking Man's role as potential father demonstrates. Unfortunately, subsequent seasons did less to resolve these tensions than to multiply and contradict them.
For me the most emotionally powerful episodes of the year and among the most powerful of the entire series was the marvelous two-parter of "A Christmas Carol" and
The season ends with a wonderful episode about a small child with psychic ability who Mulder and Scully (and Mulder's old flame, played by Mimi Rogers), the most intense heightening tease hitherto that Mulder and Scully might have feelings for one another that their professional relationship has forced them to ignore (more in a second), and the reappearance of the Smoking Man who not only steals the child but sets fire to Mulder and Scully's office, destroying the X-Files. The final image of the season consists of an utterly despondent Mulder laying on his couch with a solicitous Scully sadly watching over him. Nonetheless, fans wanting to see something happen between Mulder and Scully were encouraged by the words of the boy who tells Mulder with both Scully and Mimi Rogers's character present that one of the two women was thinking about him, and that he was thinking about one of them, and also by the look of implied emotional devastation (which she typically refuses to express) when Scully walks by a door and sees Mulder and her old flame holding hands. Though the X-Files are ashes, the viewer still feels that Season Six will not only begin with the X-Files being resurrected, but with Mulder and Scully, whom we all assume were thinking of one another, finally being coaxed to break the cold reserve that exists between them.
This was the final season filmed in Vancouver and also the shortest of all of the X-FILES seasons. They cut it a bit short in order to create more room for filming the not-very-well received feature length film, THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE (which I personally think works better than was acknowledged at the time). In Season Six the show relocated in Hollywood, where it remained for its final four years. Many hardcore fans believe that the move hurt the show, though I personally think the problems with the very gradual slide in quality had to do with long-term story arc strategy, such as not having a master narrative to structure the show after resolving in Season Six the alienation colonization arc that dominated the first five and a half seasons of the show.