Review for The X Files: The Complete Seventh Season

Introduction

Onwards and downwards! As mentioned in my review for Season 6, I finally bit the bullet and finished off my X Files collection, buying the final four seasons to add to the first five, as well as upgrading the movies to Blu-ray in the process. Which is when German television starts airing HD re-mastered episodes and makes loads of X-Philes suddenly desperate to double dip. As I’m the kind of person who waited until the final four seasons were a tenner apiece before buying them, you can bet that I won’t be at the head of that particular queue. The X Files after season 5 took something of a downward turn into eventual ignominy. It’s why I held out on buying them for so long. So far Season 6 wasn’t quite that bad, with several episodes up there with the best of the show, and only an imbalance of tone really letting the side down, a little too much in the way of comedy and not enough in the way of spooky. But I have been dreading the eventual moment that The X Files jumped the shark, although not having seen these episodes since they were originally broadcast, I’ve long since forgotten when that occurred. As I put in the first disc of season 7, it turned out that I didn’t have to wait long.

At the end of Season 6, while it looked as if the conspiracy had been defeated, and many of Mulder’s questions answered, there remained one driving question, the question that compelled him to join the X Files in the first place. Just what happened to his sister Samantha? A new, chilling lead opened up when a crashed UFO washed up on the shores of the Ivory Coast, its hull adorned with Navaho script, which at once reflected many of the world’s major religions, while also depicting cutting edge scientific knowledge about the human genome. But it was the simple act of looking at a rubbing of that etching that had a profound effect on Mulder’s mind, an effect that had him committed to a psychiatric hospital as he increasingly lost touch with reality. At the end of the last season, in a desperate attempt to find a cure for Mulder, Scully flew to Africa to investigate the crashed ship first hand. The next 22 episodes of the X Files are presented in this Season Seven boxset, across six discs.


The Sixth Extinction
The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati
Scully isn’t prepared for what she finds in Africa, as the very existence of the spaceship challenges her core beliefs. What’s more, strange occurrences around the ship only serve to unsettle, a plague of insects, the sea boiling, and then turning to blood, and then the duplicitous Dr Barnes arrives seeking to advance his own theories. Meanwhile back at the hospital, as Mulder’s condition continues to deteriorate, Skinner turns to an unlikely source of help, former government employee Michael Kritschgau.

Hungry
You want to fit in, be like all the other people. You make a conscious effort to be friendly, to be personable, and even have a therapist. You keep your apartment clean, you get on with the neighbours, and you have a job at a fast food restaurant. It’s not your fault you’re a genetic freak with an irresistible compulsion to suck out human brains!


Millennium
What do you do when your show has been unceremoniously cancelled before you can even resolve the storyline? Why, you cross it over with another of your shows and finish off the story there. The year 2000 is almost upon us, the dead are rising from the graves, FBI agents dead by suicide to be exact, and it looks like the world might be coming to an end. Mulder and Scully will need the help of an expert on this one. The problem is that the expert, one Frank Black, is currently a resident of a psychiatric facility.

Rush
A sheriff’s deputy dead from a traumatic impact, and a prime suspect who’s patently incapable of demonstrating the force required brings Mulder and Scully down to small town America. Mulder’s theorising all sorts of spectral apparitions and poltergeists behind the death, but the reality is a far more confusing mish-mash of the fantastic and the mudane...


The Goldberg Variation
When a timid man, wholly out of his depth, takes on the mob at a poker game and wins, it isn’t surprising that he gets thrown off the top of a skyscraper for his trouble. What is surprising is that he gets up, only slightly bruised, and makes his way back home, missing only his glass eye for his trouble. Against this man’s luck, not even organised crime stands a chance, let alone Mulder’s suit.

Orison
Remember Donnie Pfaster? He was the fetishist murderer who Mulder and Scully were instrumental in capturing a while back. Only now he’s escaped from prison. But this time the X-File lies in just how he escaped, along with two other prisoners from other penitentiaries. What they have in common is the prison chaplain, a firebrand preacher named Orison.


The Amazing Maleeni
When a magician turns up dead, his head neatly severed from his body, just minutes after he performs a hair-raising act, Mulder and Scully investigate, only to find that they’re on the receiving end of some egregious misdirection and prestidigitation, and other ponderously polysyllabic words in the usual conjurers’ spiel.

Signs and Wonders
So a couple leave their fundamentalist church, a church that uses lethal snakes in worship to prove their faith, to join a more moderate, open-minded church across town, and then the boyfriend winds up dead in his car, killed by a over a hundred snake bites, with not a snake to be found. It looks like an open and shut case, but then it wouldn’t be an X-File.


Sein Und Zeit
Closure
A child abduction in California seems to be a run of the mill, if distressing case for the FBI to investigate, but certain elements attract Mulder’s interest, not least a note that bears striking similarities to a previous X File. But a sudden bereavement for Mulder suddenly makes the case a whole lot more personal, once more bringing the disappearance of his sister Samantha to the fore.

X-Cops
It’s one of those reality TV shows, where a camera crew follow a police department around all the time as they look for chavs to arrest. Then on a night with a full moon, they get a call about a monster being sighted. It’s a call that leads to two suspicious characters in a back alley. Now the TV crew have a couple of FBI agents to shadow as well, and while the female agent isn’t too happy to appear on TV, the male is coming out with all manner of weird theories as the sheriffs go looking for the monster.


First Person Shooter
Byers, Frohike and Langly have invested in the latest in computer games, a blending of first person shooter and virtual reality. Only this game has exceeded its programming, with one of the players murdered by an in-game character. With the game close to release, they can’t afford the scandal, so they call on Mulder and Scully to investigate; only they’ll have to investigate from inside the game.

Theef
When a respected doctor’s family is targeted by a killer, his father in law found hanged, his throat slashed, the word ‘theef’ scrawled on the wall and dirt found in his bed, Mulder suspects hexcraft. Surprisingly, Scully agrees with him.


En Ami
An ultra-religious family refuse to have their cancer-stricken son treated. And then angels appear, looking mysteriously like Men in Black, and cure him. That’s a red flag to a conspiracy theorist bull, but this time it’s the Cigarette Smoking Man trying to get Scully’s attention. He’s facing the final curtain, and he wants to leave more than shadowy half-truths as his legacy. An alien panacea is his gift to the world, but does Scully trust him enough to accept?


Chimera
When it’s a choice between a stakeout in a red light district, and steak dinners in perfect suburbia, Mulder knows on which side his bread is buttered, but this perfect utopia turns out to have a seedy side, with housewives going missing, ill-omened ravens, and a nameless beast stalking the neighbourhood.

all things
With Mulder all fired up about fractal crop circles predicted to appear in England, Scully’s showing a distinct lack of enthusiasm. A series of coincidences and accidents cause her to evaluate the course of her life to this point, especially following a chance encounter with a figure from her past.


Brand X
A tobacco company employee testifying against his employers is the sort of situation that requires state protection, and it’s Skinner’s responsibility to ensure the safety of Dr James Scobee. When Scobee ends up dead whilst under FBI protection, his face literally eaten away with the only evidence a dead tobacco beetle in a glass of ice water, Skinner needs his more unconventional agents to figure out this crime.

Hollywood A.D.
An X Files movie, starring Garry Shandling and Tea Leoni? It all began when one of the ‘Skinman’s’ screenwriter friends wangled his way into shadowing Mulder and Scully on a case, an explosion in a church crypt that leads to conspiracies and mysteries stretching back 2000 years. Sometimes reality is less believable than a movie script.


Fight Club
The urban legend is that should you ever meet your doppelganger, one of you is destined to die. It doesn’t say that everyone else is compelled to try to kill each other. But that’s exactly what happens when a couple of Jehovah’s witnesses call on Betty Templeton and Lulu Pfeffer. And then again, when two uncannily familiar looking FBI agents go to investigate.

Je Souhaite
What else would you expect to find rolled up in a Persian rug but a genie, or the female equivalent? For Anson Stokes, this proves to be anything but the stroke of luck that he’s been looking for. When our intrepid FBI duo get on the scene, will Mulder succumb to temptation and make a wish?


Requiem
It’s back to the beginning. While the X Files may face their usual fight for survival, this time down to a zealous auditor peeved at Mulder and Scully’s expense claims, the intrepid investigators take their first chance to escape when news of a potential UFO crash arises. It takes them back to Oregon, and the first case they worked together, the abduction of Billy Miles. For the Cigarette Smoking Man, now terminally ill with cancer, it’s his last chance to resurrect the project.

Picture

The show is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with the usual softness that comes from transposing an NTSC source to the PAL medium. It does enough to tell its stories, and while detail might be lacking, it’s typical of television of the era. Thankfully there’s a lot more in the way of consistency in the seventh season as compared to the sixth, and the only visually lacking episode is the X Cops episode, which is deliberately made in a style to ape the fly in the wall documentary. Once again it becomes apparent that the X Files episodes were really shot as mini-movies, with a filmic grandeur and scope that belied their small screen origins. The DVD format, particularly the NTSC sourced visuals we get here doesn’t really do the show justice, although in that respect, neither did the original broadcast. We could really use an HD broadcast in the UK about now to revisit the show.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 Surround English, French and Italian, with subtitles in those languages, Dutch and Greek. Subtitles are also available for the extra features and the commentaries. There are no issues with the audio, with the stereo offering a little spookiness for the show, Mark Snow’s inimitable score offering a whole lot more, and the dialogue remaining clear throughout.

Extras

Six discs are presented in an Amaray brick style case. There are two hinged panels inside which hold two discs on either side, and there’s one disc at the front of the case, one at the rear. You’ll also find the series booklet, 16 pages in length, with a listing and a breakdown of the episodes by chapter, a listing of the extra features, and a bit of blurb for the season.

The discs boot up to an animated menu following the usual copyright screens. You’ll find the extras listed on each disc in a separate section, as well as from the episode page to which they pertain. Each episode will also have a couple of pages of cast listing which usually expands on the show credits.


Disc by disc the other extras are listed as follows...

Disc 1 has International Clips in Italian, German and Japanese for The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati and a deleted scene as well, which you can watch reinserted into the episode from the episode menu, or separately from the main menu. On disc 6, this and all other deleted scenes are repeated with optional audio commentary.

Disc 2 has a deleted scene for Orison, and you get International Clips in German, Italian and Japanese for The Amazing Maleeni

Disc 3 has a deleted scene for Signs and Wonders, and also a deleted scene and International Clips for Closure.

Disc 4 has an audio commentary for First Person Shooter from Chris Carter. He does mention that this episode is a departure from the usual and strains the bound of credulity, in a typically dry and gappy commentary. Theef has a deleted scene, and En Ami had three deleted scenes and International Clips.


Disc 5 has an audio commentary on all things from Director and Writer (and star) Gillian Anderson. It’s a nice, detailed and comprehensive commentary that looks at the story, and the filming process. Hollywood A.D. gets International clips in German and Japanese (I guess they sussed out the pointlessness in presenting them in Italian by now).

The majority of the extras are on disc 6 in a separate section, but you also get some extras to go with the episodes too, beginning with an audio commentary for Je Souhaite from director and writer Vince Gilligan, it’s a fairly dry and straightforward commentary track. You also get two deleted scenes for Requiem, as well as International Clips in Spanish, German and Japanese.

The Season 7 Special Features comprise the Documentary: The Truth About Season 7, which lasts 20 minutes, and has the cast and crew speak about the season, and their more notable episodes. In a change from the usual X Files series release, there’s some input here from both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.


The X Files Profiles on AD Skinner (6 mins), and Samantha Mulder (5 mins) were originally on a couple of VHS releases from this season, which collected the multi-part stories.

There are 43 promos spots for the episodes running to 10 and 20 seconds for each episode.

You get 22 minutes worth of Special Effects with Narration from Paul Rabwin, showing how the visuals were put together for the episodes.

The Deleted Scenes are repeated here, with Optional Commentary from Chris Carter explaining why they were deleted. I’ll save you the bother. They needed to cut the episodes to fill the time slot.

Conclusion

Just how many ways can one show jump the shark in one season? The X Files hit the skids in a big way in Season 7, and all that’s left are a few individual episodes which rise above the morass of mediocrity. It seemed like the show was coming to an end at this point, the final episode of season 7 does indeed feel like a coda to the whole thing, but it somehow managed to struggle on for another couple of years. But season 7 is where you start wishing that the networks had done the honourable thing. Even the usually reliable episodes, the monster of the week shows, or the conspiracy episodes, begin to flounder, and that’s apparent right from the off, with the conclusion of the story left cliffhanger-ing from Season 6.

It was a good story, a new direction for the conspiracy that added theological dimension to the alien invasion storyline, and the first episode in the season is a solid and effective one, with Scully racing against time to solve the mystery and save Mulder’s life. Then comes the second episode, and it’s spent mostly in Mulder’s unconscious, as he imagines his ideal life in a twist on the Inner Light episode of Star Trek TNG. It’s indulgent and uninformative, and it commits the high crime of killing one of the main villains off-screen, and just mentioning the fact as exposition. (Shark Jump #1) In Hungry, it seems that the creators are tiring of the Monster of the Week format, when they decide to tell an episode from the monster’s point of view. The end result is not enough Mulder and Scully.


The same can be true of Millennium. Chris Carter’s other supernatural procedural got ignominiously cancelled, so the decision was made to give the story a conclusion in the X Files instead. The story itself is agreeable, but X Files fans will be disappointed at the lack of the X Files feel to this story, the zombies are too blatantly obvious, and there’s not enough misdirection and mystery to make it feel at home in the series, while Millennium fans will probably be disappointed at their main character acting as second string to the show. Rush feels like a Marvel comics story, although it does add an element to the alien mythos that will crop up again. Just like Millennium, Orison has a sense of two stories jammed together, there’s not enough Donnie Pfaster, and there’s not enough Orison, and the end result is unsatisfying. The Amazing Maleeni is a remake of Season 2’s Humbug, only with magicians instead of ‘freaks’ and not as satisfying.

The second conspiracy story, and two-parter once again starts off spectacularly, with the kidnapping of a young girl drawing the agents into an investigation that evokes memories of the loss of his own sister for Mulder. This story explores Mulder’s character a little more closely, and brings aspects of his character journey to an end, a good thing in a series that might have been coming to a close. Sein Und Zeit is creepy, unsettling and effective. And then comes Closure. Throw in the comedy psychic, and have Mulder accept his sister’s fate without any real evidence, just taking it on faith, and throw in a bunch of ghosts in a total non-ending which for me doesn’t do justice to the whole journey from season 1 or the alien conspiracy that grew up around it. The explanation is unqualified and too mundane. And at the end, I’m left asking, “What about Amber Lynn?” Shark Jump #2.


And then there’s Shark Jump #3, with Mulder and Scully on reality TV in X-Cops, followed directly by Shark Jump #4, with the duo plus the Lone Gunmen trapped in a virtual reality game that follows Hollywood rules of how computers work. Written by William Gibson, on a bad day, just after he watched Tron. It was dated in 2000, it’s even lamer now. I can’t make up my mind about En Ami, the next conspiracy episode, with the CSM tempting Scully. It’s well written, an interesting idea, and after so long of Mulder and Scully being joined at the hip emotionally, this threatens their relationship with a seed of distrust. The weakness is in the details, with the all-encompassing panacea that CSM offers Scully a little difficult to believe in, lacking in complexity, and even harder to believe is Scully’s gullibility. It tries jumping the shark, but crashes into it instead.

There is Shark Jump #5, which is spectacular. If you’re going to jump a shark, line up a whole school of sharks and jump them like you’re Evel Knievel. That’s exactly what happens in Hollywood AD, which so shatters the X Files mythos that it becomes enjoyable to watch on a wholly different level. It’s a tinseltown parody full of in-jokes and winks at the camera, that somehow manages to cross itself with an Indiana Jones movie in the process. It’s one of those ‘so bad it’s good’ shows. You can’t say the same about Fight Club, which delivers Shark Jump #6 by casting Kathy Griffin, the most annoying woman on television... twice. And you know that you’re running out of ideas when you do an X File about a genie, in a rug. Je Souhaite is for me Shark Jump #7, and after all that, even Fonzie would need to take a break. I bet Mulder was glad to be abducted in this season’s finale, another episode which tried to turn the conspiracy on its head once more, something that had been done so often since season 5 that it no longer had weight, and was rapidly turning into a joke. But Requiem was an enjoyable and strong story in its own right, one that would have been the perfect end to the X Files, revisiting as it did the opening episode seven years previously. The only criticism I had and still have is the out of character, Crybaby Skinner moment at the end.


You have to sift through all that to get to the golden X File nuggets, and there are still a few in this season run. The Goldberg Variation is one of the few times in this season that they get the comedy X File just right, and even the presence of Shia LeBeouf can’t knock this one down. X Files and religion always go together well, and Signs and Wonders has great performances, and a level of creepiness that works really well. The same is true for Theef, as another Space Above and Beyond alumnus makes an X Files appearance, with James Morrison as a doctor haunted by his past, with a chilling performance from Billy Drago. Chimera is another strong episode, which finds a balance between spooky and funny, while in a series where the end looked to be on the wall, all things maybe a self-indulgent character study from Gillian Anderson, but it does look further into Scully’s character than before, and it has a Zen feel to it that while new to the X Files, really works well. Against it, Brand X is where this season does manage to recapture the classic X Files feel, and take a pop at the tobacco industry too.

Season 6 is where the X Files should have ended, going out on a comparative high. Season 7 is where the show should have been cancelled, as it really does look like a show running out of ideas. It’s no wonder that one of the stars left the show at this point, and the final episode could be a perfect ending for the series, bringing the story full circle. You also see Mulder and Scully’s perceptions of the X Files beginning to merge, with Mulder gaining a little scepticism, and Scully becoming more of a believer. That would have changed the character dynamic completely if Mulder had remained, but by Scully becoming a believer, that gave the creators a direction if the series continued. Mulder being abducted at the end of season 7 was a big change, as was Scully’s pregnancy, but bigger changes were yet to come, and not all of them for the better. I better polish my ‘flogging a dead horse’ metaphor for season 8.