season six: the crack season?

[jmtorres]

Last night I wanted to watch the (? I'm trying to remember if there was ever another) Christmas episode of X-Files with niq, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas. In finding which season it was in, I happened to notice the high volume of total crack episodes in season 6:

--Drive, which opened with a faux news broadcast of a high-speed chase realistic enough to confuse and frustrate wee Juls for several minutes
--Triangle, in which every act is comprised of about three long shots, tops
--Dreamland I & II, in which Mulder is bodyswapped with an Area 51 suit, but it's all retconned, except for the waterbed
--How the Ghosts Stole Christmas, in which the word "paramasturbatory" is used twice, among other hilarious tidbits
--Tithonus, in which Clyde Bruckman's prediction that Scully will never die comes to pass
--Monday, aka Groundhog's Day
--Arcadia, in which Mulder and Scully go undercover as the Petries
--The Unnatural, in which aliens came to Earth to break into pro baseball
--Three of a Kind, the Las Vegas episode, featuring the abuse of squibs
--Field Trip, in which Mulder and Scully do shrooms.

It's not that X-Files never did crack before (Jose Chung's From Outer Space, Small Potatoes, Bad Blood, the aforementioned Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose), but I rather feel that season six had a very high crack quotient. Curiously, season 7 seems to have less crack, though, still, more than the early once-a-season break-outs--it wasn't a long-term commitment to crack, I guess? In any case, suddenly I understand much better why some people draw the line on their acceptable canon at season 5? My own line is at season 7, cast changes shook up my show more than I could stand more than crack did. niq says this prefigured my fifth-wave fannishness.

Dude, screw the mytharc, niqaeli and I should just watch the crack episodes. It. It would be a very different experience.

Comments

[giandujakiss]

I'm not sure I would define all of those as crack - but I can see how coming off five seasons and the movie (which was probably an intense shootign schedule) everyone might have been feeling a bit trippy.

My understanding, btw, is that they didn't shoot Tithonus with Clyde Bruckman in mind - like, it might have been something the fans pointed out after the fact. But I might be misremembering.

Also, I love The Unnatural beyond the telling of it.

[jmtorres]

Drive & Tithonus I'm willing to be argued on esp Tithonus is more crack in the implications than in the storytelling which is standard MotW, but I strongly consider the rest to be crackity crack crack crack. (I also left Biogenesis off the list because while Mulder's psychic powers are specialsauce, season finale/premieres are in a class of their own.)

[flugantamuso]

That's kind of how I feel. I mean, I *like* the mytharc, but it takes a great deal of commitment to sit down and watch them closely enough together that they all make sense. I do it maybe once every five years. Whereas I watch some of the crack episodes at least once a year.

When I'm introducing someone to XF, I always start with a crack episode, because they're much less packed with information. It's also easier to hook people on the funny :)

[flourish]

This is actually part of why I like Season 6. I like some very specific X-files things - Profiler!Mulder, Angry!Scully, and crack. The mytharc has little of any of these three things (well, ok, sometimes it has Angry!Scully, but not always) so I'd rather have the crack.

It is probably telling that my top X-files episodes are "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," "Arcadia," and "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."

[viridian5]

For me, The X-Files as The X-Files became less canonical for me when filming moved from Canada into California. The lighting and the mood of the series changed considerably. The Mulder "died" and characters became ever more OOC and Carter rewrote the past depending on what crack he was smoking that week.

Then again, I felt that the series put a lot of stress fractures into Scully's character by forcing her to always be the skeptic, even in the face of present and past evidence, until she became a semi-believer only so the show could contrast her to Doggett. She also had what now seems to be the mandatory awful and weird sci-fi show pregnancy and birth aftermath. Blaaaaah.