Season 8, Episode 5: “Invocation”
Original Airdate: December 3, 2000

So what is this, is this business as usual? A monster-of-the-week, a skeptic and a believer investigating the disappearance slash reappearance of some creepy little kid, same old business, same old partner dynamic, I mean. That’s the risk, isn’t it? Even flipping the script and turning Scully into a believer is a thing that could be ruined. Fortunately, “Invocation” shows us that there’s potential in the flipped script. Unfortunately, “Invocation” also shows us how harrowing the new world might be.

[Now listen to it backwards.]

Season 7, Episode 21: “Je Souhaite”
Original Airdate: May 14, 2000

So here we are. Nearly at the end of the seventh season of a show about two FBI agents who investigate paranormal activity. Seventh season! Did you ever thought you’d live so long? Fitting, then, to have an episode about immortality, and the corruption of a long life. “Je Souhaite” is the episode with the genie in it, an episode that—despite the fact that there’s explosion, halfway through—comes off as meditative. There’s hardly a crime, and hardly a case. Just a woman who has seen too much, meeting a man who always needs to see more.

[Barbara Eden never killed anybody.]

Season 7, Episode 17: “All Things”
Original Airdate: April 9, 2000

Hey Scully what's going on with you these days! Like belief-wise, still Catholic? Eh? Believe in aliens or whatever? Not sure? Eh? Okay great, here's an episode called “All Things” that's going to cover, again, this ground, again, about whether or not Scully has the capacity to believe in things that are unusual. Wait, isn't that the premise of this entire show, sort of, you ask me? And I say yes. Except this time the episode was written and directed by Gillian Anderson. Okay so what does that mean for me, you ask? I tell you: Buddhism.

[Is that beautiful, or what?]

Season 7, Episode 15: “En Ami”
Original Airdate: March 19, 2000

Throughout the run of the show, the Cigarette-Smoking Man has appeared both as a simple bogeyman and a complex figure whose life has been a series of painful choices. The latter is interesting, of course—the Cigarette-Smoking Man as a steely-eyed family man, raising Samantha Mulder as his own alongside a son he would later be the death of—but there’s plenty of merit in the former. Since The X-Files has so often disregarded consistent character development, having a guy who you can always count on to be Very Bad is both a comfort and a mile marker. Draw too much sympathy for a guy like that and he ceases to be useful, as a Very Bad. Starts, instead, to be sort of depressing. 

[Just do your damn job.]

Season 7, Episode 12: “X-Cops”
Original Airdate: February 20, 2000

Nothing like the threat of a Cops crossover to put a scare in the honest X-Files fan, am I right? The drunk great-uncle of reality programming, Cops has been fighting the good-ish fight since 1989, inspiring all manner of parody and satire and terrible jokes and your friends to sing “Bad Boys” while hanging their heads out of a moving vehicle. It’s the sort of show that has no place mixing with Fox’s prestige program—even in the year 2000, when that prestige program was maybe losing a bit of its luster, maybe, a little. So it is against all odds, then, that “X-Cops” is a smart little gem of an episode.

[Because the FBI has nothing to hide.]

Season 7, Episodes 10 and 11: “Sein und Zeit”/“Closure”
Original Airdates: February 6 and February 11, 2000

Samantha Mulder has always been a concept. Never really a character, just a motivation, a young girl who disappeared and, through her disappearance, defined the lives of those she left behind. Mulder would not be Mulder if his sister had not disappeared, and thus, Samantha Mulder is important. But: not as a person. She has never had personhood, never had dimension. Never even really had consistent casting. She has been there when she was needed to serve the story, and now, she is done.

[I'm sure you're busy.]

Season 7, Episode 4: “Millennium”
Original Airdate: November 28, 1999

I think it must be nice, when one of your television shows is canceled, to be able to have another television show available, like if you need to tie up some loose ends. I think this is actually nice! And this is what Chris Carter got to do when Fox shut down his second television program, Millennium. Lo, the adventures of Frank Black, Depressed Former FBI Agent, did not have to end, not so long as the adventures of Mulder and Scully, Slightly Less Depressed Current FBI Agents, were ongoing. Both shows thrived on shadows and supernaturality; it should have been a match made in weirdo heaven. It was, instead: just okay.

[First and 18.]

Season 6, Episode 21: “Field Trip”
Original Airdate: May 9, 1999

A redhead and a gentleman argue in a motel room. They’ve spent all day in the woods together, and she’s upset with him. “I thought we had a good time,” he says. “You had a good time,” she says. “Tromping around and leaving me a half a mile behind.” The gentleman apologizes to her. The redhead forgives the gentleman. Then the redhead and the gentleman lay down and die.

[Whatever happened to the most logical explanation?]

Season 6, Episodes 11 and 12: “Two Fathers”/“One Son”
Original Airdates: February 7 and 14, 1999

Okay so we're halfway through season six and it's a mythology two-parter. This is, it's been five and a half years of mythology at this point, it's been oilians and shapeshifters and Consortiums and rebels and even if you have managed to keep track of it, you probably haven't always managed to make sense of it. And the thing is—they know that. They they, the people making this show, they know. They know that there's mythology fatigue. How do I know they know? Because they made us these episodes. And blew everything up.

[You've never seen one before, have you?]

Season 6, Episode 9: “S.R. 819”
Original Airdate: January 17, 1999

People don’t die so much on The X-Files. I mean, people die on The X-Files all the time, and if you’re an informant you’ve really got to watch your back, but this is six seasons and a movie and we’re talking fairly minimal recurring character death. So what are we to think, facing a cold open with a flat-lining Walter Skinner? Are we thinking, this is it, they’re killing someone off! Or are we thinking, oh hey! It’s the Slightly Disappointing Semi-Annual Walter Skinner Episode.

[Who did this to me?]

Season 6, Episodes 4 and 5: “Dreamland I/Dreamland II”
Original Airdates: November 29, 1998 and December 6, 1998

The body-swap narrative, she is a satisfying old gal. A morality tale with a science fiction spin; empathy, but for real this time. “Dreamland”  is the story of a couple of G-Men who get body-swapped and nothing really bad comes of it, except one of them gets a slightly cleaner apartment and the other, possibly, a better marriage. It absolutely shouldn’t work—heaven’s sake, it’s a two-part episode with a single part concept—but somehow, it does. Endearingly so.

[You think being a Man in Black is all Voodoo mind control?]

Season 6, Episode 6: “Triangle”
Original Airdate: November 22, 1998

For a science fiction television program, The X-Files is not particularly interested in time travel. We’ve had fortune-tellers, missing time, and an old man who encouraged us to Fight the Future, but not so much with the landing in the past/waking up in the future. “Triangle”—which drops Mulder onto a Nazi-laden luxury liner in 1939—could have been the category winner, but, unfortunately, it’s more party trick than TARDIS up in here.

[How’d you like to see the stars on the American flag?]

Season 6, Episode 2: “Drive”
Original Airdate: November 15, 1998

Let’s say you’re the kind of person who goes around saving the world. Sometimes in a big way. Sometimes in a small way. But always: with the saving. And it’s a good life to have, or anyway, it’s a good thing that you’re doing. Except when you’re saving the world, there’s this catch. There’s this catch that when you’re saving the world, you don’t get to choose who you save. When you save the world, you save everyone. Even the lousy, nasty, slur-spewing ones.

[I can think of something else I’d like to call you.]

Season 6, Episode 1: “The Beginning”
Original Airdate: November 8, 1998

The strangest thing about “The Beginning” is how much it cares about “The End.” After the bright, broad bombast of Fight the Future, you might expect another crowd-pleaser, something to lock down those potential new fans who might be interested in the show now that they’ve seen what it can do with bees and Antarctica. But “The Beginning,” is really “The End, Part II,” a tough-nosed mytharc that wants to define the show’s future rather than fight it.

[Is there going to be data to back this vague, omnibus account?]

The X-Files: Fight The Future
A Major Motion Picture
US Release Date: June 19, 1998

Fight the Future might be better named Sheesh, Hubris, You Guys! A real-live-movie-film premiering between seasons 5 and 6 of The X-Files—what is that! What is that at all, a movie that airs during the run of a hit television program? A film that will both satisfy hardcore fans and entertain the average Joe Popcorn, you had to be a brave and bold showrunner to think that would work. And with so many expectations riding on this thing, it's a miracle that Fight the Future holds up as well as it does.

[Don't think! Just pick up the phone and make it happen!]

Season 5, Episode 20: “The End”
Original Airdate: May 17, 1998

Oh, my friends. There’s a movie a’coming. It’s been there for months, lurking just around the bend, slotted between Season 5 and Season 6. And if you get into your imagination time machine and pretend it’s the spring of 1998, it’s like this: you know it’s there, you’ve known the whole time, but you haven’t had to think about it until right now, until “The End,” a season finale that has the unpretty job of setting up both a major motion picture and the rest of the freaking show.

[My long term plans? You got them right there in your hands.]

Malinda Lo’s newest book, Adaptation, is a step away from her usual fare: it’s a young adult science fiction novel set in the near future. As the story begins, Reese Holloway and her debate partner David Li are waiting for a flight back home from a championship with their coach when planes start mysteriously crashing all over North America, due to flocks of birds striking them. As they try to make their way home in a rental car, the nation goes into upheaval; rioting, looting, and murder abound. However, at night on the Extraterrestrial Highway, Reese wrecks the car—and they wake up nearly a month later in a secure facility, alive and healthy, with no memory of the events after the accident. (I will note that Adaptation is the first half of a duet. Readers alarmed by sharp cliffhangers, be forewarned. The closing installment is due to be released in 2013, so it’s not too long of a wait.)

Having appreciated Lo’s previous work, I’ve been looking forward to her first novel-length foray into science fiction. Plus, there are certain things that more or less guaranteed I would enjoy Adaptation—for my tastes it was a grab-bag of treats, mixing a diverse cast led by a young queer woman, a theme and structure riffing on The X-Files, and a fast-moving plot driven by conspiracy, action, and more than a little bit of (also queer/questioning) teen romance.

[A review]

Season 5, Episode 12: “Bad Blood”
Original Airdate: February 22, 1998

There was a time when a television program could do a funny vampire episode that did not contain even one joke about vampires sparkling in the sun, do you remember that? “Bad Blood” is just such a vintage gem, a Vince Gilligan-penned monster-of-the-comic-relief with an irresistible premise and no brooding whatsoever. It’s also The X-Files’ funniest episode since the departure of Darin Morgan and a delightful send-up of the show’s most crucial relationship.

[Do you have an old cemetery in town, off the beaten path, the creepier the better?]

Season 5, Episodes 6 and 7: “Christmas Carol”/“Emily”
Original Airdates: December 7 and December 14, 1997.

Was there ever a character so abused by her writers as Dana Scully? In tribute to the character’s fortitude, the Internet used to call her Saint Scully—overlooking, of course, the fact that saints tend to be dead. Scully’s not dead, but Scully does suffer, over and over, as though the show’s writers believe that the character couldn’t exist without depression dogging her heels. Just a handful of episodes after she survives cancer, along come “Christmas Carol” and “Emily,” a bleak pair with angst in mind.

[Medicinal or recreational?]