The X-Files: The Third Season
The third season of "The X-Files" premiered on September 22, 1995. This was really the season that the show started firing on all cylinders and showed audiences what it could do. The ratings were the highest they'd been so far and the show was nominated for and WON Emmys. The series was nominated for 8 Emmy Awards and won 5. I think one of the things that propelled the third season ahead of the previous two is that the show finally found it's sense of humor. Episodes like "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," "War of the Coprophages," and "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" proved that the show could be funny, sometimes even poke fun of itself and still be suspenseful, scary and unsettling. A lot of this is thanks to writer Darin Morgan, who penned the aforementioned episodes and sadly, left the show after this season, not returning until the revived tenth season. Thankfully, the shows other stable of regular writers saw the returns on this episode and weren't afraid to incorporate humor and sometimes even ludicrousness into future scripts.
Before we start, I just want to say, that this is the first and only season of "The X-Files" I would recommend watching all the way through. I'll still list the mythology episodes, best MotW episodes and any you could probably skip, but even the ones. you could skip are good enough that if you didn't, it would be fine. Each episode has something worthwhile in it, something that distinguishes it and makes it worth your time. Here we go.
Mythology
"The Blessing Way/Paper Clip" - When we last left Mulder, he had been left to die in a train car by the CSM. Spoiler alert: He lives. :-P This two-part premiere wraps up the mystery of the digital tape, murders Scully's sister, reveals more about the Syndicate the CSM works for and introduces the Well- Manicured Man. It's a good way to start season three, thought the first episode suffers a bit from Carter's deep dive into Native American mysticism. "The Blessing Way" of the title is a sweat lodge ritual Mulder goes through to get healed and the whole thing is pretty hackneyed and hokey. "Paper Clip" is much better. Moving at a face paced clip (ha, get it?), it reveals that the CSM is willing to lie to his apparent masters and gives the agents and Skinner a nice wind at the end. It's a killer moment when Skinner reveals to the CSM that Albert Hosteen and over twenty Navajo have memorized the contents of the tape. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. Not only does Skinner die, but Mulder learns that Samantha was taken to ensure his father's silence and that his father chose her.
"Nisei/731" - An alien autopsy video leads Mulder to a train car wired to explode that might contain an alien. Meanwhile, Scully finds a Mutual UFO Network (MUFN) group of women who all claim to be abductees and know who she is. The bad news is that they all have implants like Scully found and they are all dying of a mysterious illness. These two episodes are pretty thrilling and feature some great action set pieces. Mulder jumping on the top of the train car. X carrying Mulder to safety before the train car explodes. It also gives Scully some interesting material which is nice. My biggest gripe with a lot of early mythology episodes is that Scully is sidelined for a lot of them. Relegated to chasing after Mulder or explaining away Mulder's absences to her superiors. Here, she has a story separate from what Mulder's following that is maybe more compelling.
"Piper Maru/Apocrypha" - A French salvage vessel crew unearths a World War II vessel that contains a mysterious black oil that is extraterrestrial in origin. The black oil jumps from person to person and leads Mulder and Scully to China and back again. It brings back Alex Krycek and the man who murdered Scully's sister, Luis Cardinal. Cardinal shoots Skinner. And they finally end up searching supposedly abandoned nuclear silos for an abandoned UFO craft.
The black oil is probably my favorite thing the mythology episodes ever introduced. A sentient virus trying to make it back to it's ship is super cool and creepy. It's very '60's sci-fi and even though it changes so much by series end that it's barely recognizable here.
"Talitha Cumi" - Mulder and Scully end season three by meeting a man named Jeremiah Smith. Smith has the power to heal and could be another hybrid. He's being trailed by the Alien Bounty Hunter. We also learn that the CSM and Mulder's mother, Teena, have a connection and X is playing both sides. A solid finale with one of the better cliffhangers the show produced.
Monster of the Week
"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" - Emmy winner Peter Boyle plays reluctant psychic insurance salesmen, Clyde Bruckman. Bruckman is trying to stay one step ahead of a man mutilating psychics.
This the first Darin Morgan episode of the season. Boyle is stellar as the misanthropic Bruckman. His connection with Scully is wonderful. Their chemistry is so good that I wish that he would have survived. The shot to the right is one of the best special effects sequences the show did up to that point. The Stupendous Yappi makes his first appearance here and Scully adopts Bruckman's dog, Queequeg. More on him a little later.
War of the Coprophages - Mulder believes that killer cockroaches are responsible for a series of deaths in probably the most straightforwardly comedic episode of the show's run in the second Morgan penned episode of the season. Scully is uncharacteristically sidelined in a Morgan episode but she provides quite a bit of lightheartedness especially in her reaction to Mulder's new partner, Dr. Bambi Birenbaum, a researcher studying cockroaches. This is also one of the first episodes where Scully's rational explanations for the deaths turn out to be absolutely correct.
"Jose Chung's From Outer Space" - The best episode of "The X-Files" is also one of the best modern episodes of television. Writer Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) is interviewing Scully about a strange case the agents recently worked for his newest book regarding UFO's and alien abduction.
The episode does a great job of shifting perspectives and it's fun watching different scenes play out from different points of view. You never know what is true and what isn't. The Ray Harryhausen Cyclops monster is fantastic. The way Mulder is handled in this episode is wonderful. Others see him as an unhinged, lunatic who can't tell fantasy from reality and David Duchovny's single greatest moment on the show comes when he yelps upon seeing the dead body. There is nothing that doesn't work in the episode and the cameos from Alex Trebek and Jesse Ventura are icing on the cake. It's no wonder that Morgan left after this episode. How could he possibly top it?
Pusher - Morgan's exit could have been a disaster but luckily the show still had other prolific writers waiting in the wings including "Breaking Bad" creator, Vince Gilligan. Gilligan tells the story of a man who is able to implant suggestions into anyone's mind, forcing an agent to drive into oncoming traffic and another to have a heart attack. The episode is distinctive in that the bad guy, Robert Patrick Modell, isn't a one and done. He returns in a later episode. The episode has a lot of dramatic tension specifically that Russian roulette scene between Mulder and Modell.
Quagmire - Mulder and Scully head to Blue Ridge, Georgia to investigate Big Blue, a Loch Ness monster type creature, Mulder believes is responsible for a series of death near the lake he is rumored to live in. This episode seems run of the mill, until about midway through. After something destroys the boat they are searching the lake in, Mulder and Scully find themselves stranded. What follows is a great back and forth between Mulder and Scully about the nature of Mulder's quest and Moby Dick. It's a great scene and Anderson and Duchovny knock it out of the park. Oh and RIP Queequeg.
You Can Skip These
"Tesos Dos Bichos" - A series of deaths at a Boston museum coincide with an Ecuadorian artifact arriving there. Scully suspects political terrorism, but of course, Mulder doesn't. This episode is kind of a mess. There are some decent ideas here and the idea of a jaguar spirit attacking is cool, but the climax where Mulder and Scully are attacked by obviously fake cats is laughable.
"Hell Money" - Chinese immigrants are being found murdered in San Francisco's, Chinatown. These murders lead Mulder and Scully to a lottery that involves organ harvesting. The series sometimes struggle when trying to tackle other cultures and this is no different. The episode is tone deaf at best and mildly racist at worst. Guest turns from a young B.D. Wong and even younger Lucy Liu can't save it.
Overall Grade: A
The third season is finally when the show realizes all the incredible potential that it had exhibited in the first two. Pushed by the performances by it's dynamic leads, Morgan's phenomenal episodes and the focused mythology episodes, "The X-Files" hit highs it would never reach again. (Not a knock against the next seasons.)
Man, I hate to leave season 3, but we must. Season 4, here we come.
Before we start, I just want to say, that this is the first and only season of "The X-Files" I would recommend watching all the way through. I'll still list the mythology episodes, best MotW episodes and any you could probably skip, but even the ones. you could skip are good enough that if you didn't, it would be fine. Each episode has something worthwhile in it, something that distinguishes it and makes it worth your time. Here we go.
Mythology
"The Blessing Way/Paper Clip" - When we last left Mulder, he had been left to die in a train car by the CSM. Spoiler alert: He lives. :-P This two-part premiere wraps up the mystery of the digital tape, murders Scully's sister, reveals more about the Syndicate the CSM works for and introduces the Well- Manicured Man. It's a good way to start season three, thought the first episode suffers a bit from Carter's deep dive into Native American mysticism. "The Blessing Way" of the title is a sweat lodge ritual Mulder goes through to get healed and the whole thing is pretty hackneyed and hokey. "Paper Clip" is much better. Moving at a face paced clip (ha, get it?), it reveals that the CSM is willing to lie to his apparent masters and gives the agents and Skinner a nice wind at the end. It's a killer moment when Skinner reveals to the CSM that Albert Hosteen and over twenty Navajo have memorized the contents of the tape. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. Not only does Skinner die, but Mulder learns that Samantha was taken to ensure his father's silence and that his father chose her.
"Nisei/731" - An alien autopsy video leads Mulder to a train car wired to explode that might contain an alien. Meanwhile, Scully finds a Mutual UFO Network (MUFN) group of women who all claim to be abductees and know who she is. The bad news is that they all have implants like Scully found and they are all dying of a mysterious illness. These two episodes are pretty thrilling and feature some great action set pieces. Mulder jumping on the top of the train car. X carrying Mulder to safety before the train car explodes. It also gives Scully some interesting material which is nice. My biggest gripe with a lot of early mythology episodes is that Scully is sidelined for a lot of them. Relegated to chasing after Mulder or explaining away Mulder's absences to her superiors. Here, she has a story separate from what Mulder's following that is maybe more compelling.
 |
| My what black eyes you have. |
The black oil is probably my favorite thing the mythology episodes ever introduced. A sentient virus trying to make it back to it's ship is super cool and creepy. It's very '60's sci-fi and even though it changes so much by series end that it's barely recognizable here.
"Talitha Cumi" - Mulder and Scully end season three by meeting a man named Jeremiah Smith. Smith has the power to heal and could be another hybrid. He's being trailed by the Alien Bounty Hunter. We also learn that the CSM and Mulder's mother, Teena, have a connection and X is playing both sides. A solid finale with one of the better cliffhangers the show produced.
Monster of the Week
 |
| Peter Boyle ladies and gentlemen |
This the first Darin Morgan episode of the season. Boyle is stellar as the misanthropic Bruckman. His connection with Scully is wonderful. Their chemistry is so good that I wish that he would have survived. The shot to the right is one of the best special effects sequences the show did up to that point. The Stupendous Yappi makes his first appearance here and Scully adopts Bruckman's dog, Queequeg. More on him a little later.
War of the Coprophages - Mulder believes that killer cockroaches are responsible for a series of deaths in probably the most straightforwardly comedic episode of the show's run in the second Morgan penned episode of the season. Scully is uncharacteristically sidelined in a Morgan episode but she provides quite a bit of lightheartedness especially in her reaction to Mulder's new partner, Dr. Bambi Birenbaum, a researcher studying cockroaches. This is also one of the first episodes where Scully's rational explanations for the deaths turn out to be absolutely correct.
The episode does a great job of shifting perspectives and it's fun watching different scenes play out from different points of view. You never know what is true and what isn't. The Ray Harryhausen Cyclops monster is fantastic. The way Mulder is handled in this episode is wonderful. Others see him as an unhinged, lunatic who can't tell fantasy from reality and David Duchovny's single greatest moment on the show comes when he yelps upon seeing the dead body. There is nothing that doesn't work in the episode and the cameos from Alex Trebek and Jesse Ventura are icing on the cake. It's no wonder that Morgan left after this episode. How could he possibly top it?
Pusher - Morgan's exit could have been a disaster but luckily the show still had other prolific writers waiting in the wings including "Breaking Bad" creator, Vince Gilligan. Gilligan tells the story of a man who is able to implant suggestions into anyone's mind, forcing an agent to drive into oncoming traffic and another to have a heart attack. The episode is distinctive in that the bad guy, Robert Patrick Modell, isn't a one and done. He returns in a later episode. The episode has a lot of dramatic tension specifically that Russian roulette scene between Mulder and Modell.
Quagmire - Mulder and Scully head to Blue Ridge, Georgia to investigate Big Blue, a Loch Ness monster type creature, Mulder believes is responsible for a series of death near the lake he is rumored to live in. This episode seems run of the mill, until about midway through. After something destroys the boat they are searching the lake in, Mulder and Scully find themselves stranded. What follows is a great back and forth between Mulder and Scully about the nature of Mulder's quest and Moby Dick. It's a great scene and Anderson and Duchovny knock it out of the park. Oh and RIP Queequeg.
You Can Skip These
"Tesos Dos Bichos" - A series of deaths at a Boston museum coincide with an Ecuadorian artifact arriving there. Scully suspects political terrorism, but of course, Mulder doesn't. This episode is kind of a mess. There are some decent ideas here and the idea of a jaguar spirit attacking is cool, but the climax where Mulder and Scully are attacked by obviously fake cats is laughable.
"Hell Money" - Chinese immigrants are being found murdered in San Francisco's, Chinatown. These murders lead Mulder and Scully to a lottery that involves organ harvesting. The series sometimes struggle when trying to tackle other cultures and this is no different. The episode is tone deaf at best and mildly racist at worst. Guest turns from a young B.D. Wong and even younger Lucy Liu can't save it.
Overall Grade: A
The third season is finally when the show realizes all the incredible potential that it had exhibited in the first two. Pushed by the performances by it's dynamic leads, Morgan's phenomenal episodes and the focused mythology episodes, "The X-Files" hit highs it would never reach again. (Not a knock against the next seasons.)
Man, I hate to leave season 3, but we must. Season 4, here we come.
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