The Best Worst: The X-Files

Okay, this is the third of three episodes of the best worst that I will be putting on this feed.

So this is the last one.

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Please enjoy.

Hello and welcome to The Best worst, a celebration of the best and the worst of the television we love.

I'm Joseph Fink.

And I'm Meg Bashburner and we love TV.

So we created the show to explore what we love about popular TV shows by watching both the IMDb viewer best rated and worst rated episodes of a quintessential series.

Because we used to love TV and now TV has gotten kind of weird.

And so we want to figure out what was so good about the TV we loved.

Maybe we were just better.

Maybe we were just better people then.

Yeah, and we got what you deserve, I think.

I really do stand by that.

There was a study, I think, in the Washington Post that everyone thinks that everything was best when they were between 10 and 15 years old.

Everyone will just always be like, oh yeah, people were most trustworthy.

The music was best.

And it's always just whenever they were 10 to 15 years old, which is when the X-Files were out.

Each of the shows on this podcast must

adhere is the word I'm looking for to our set of rules.

Each show must have at least 100 episodes.

We are also excluding premieres or finales because those tend to have inflated ratings and we're looking to watch the television show at its absolute best, not at its most important or cliffhangery.

Let's get to today's show.

Meg, what is today's show?

Today's show is the X-Files, which ran for nine seasons, 217 episodes from the years 1993 to 2002 and was brought back for a couple more seasons in 2016 and 2018.

Those seasons, as far as I know, not good.

Oh, yeah.

I don't think there's been a single time that anyone has brought back a beloved show and it's come back good.

Just that it just doesn't work.

Everyone's like, right now they're announcing they're going to bring Malcolm in the Middle back.

And it's just, it's not going to be, you can't recapture the magic.

You're never going to be 10 to 15 years old again.

I think for shows that had like a really long run and a really like satisfying conclusion where like the writers really gelled on a proper conclusion for these characters and then they'd come back with like a shitty spin-off like 15 years later.

It's like, I find that insulting to everyone who worked on the original show.

They worked so hard to come to a conclusion and like leave it there.

I understand for shows that were like kind of canceled without like a proper conclusion or were not given enough space to get the ratings that they needed to survive.

But the shows that like had like this big, beautiful career.

And then like they just come back and just like, it really is pissing on the grave.

But even like Arrested Development was brought back, which was definitely canceled too soon.

And when it was brought back, it was bad.

Like it's just something about they lose the momentum of what they were working on.

they lose the magic of that Roddy's room, and they can't recapture it.

So, X-Files, let's talk about our own background with the show.

Expectations, nostalgia.

What do you got?

I did not watch it when it was on.

I was one of the like four other people in this country who did not watch it when it was on.

Yeah, so I was aware of it because of the monoculture, but I did not watch it when it was on.

If, like, I had had enough knowledge of it because of the monoculture, like, if someone made a joke about it, I understood it, but I did not.

No, I don't think I had watched like a full episode of X-Files until recording this podcast.

I have kind of two layers of nostalgia.

The first is when it was like on its first run, like in, when it was first starting up in like the early 90s, I mean, we were seven, eight years old.

I was too young to watch it, but I had like family friends who watched it.

And the kind of whisper network of kids about X-Files was that it was the scariest show ever made.

Like there was this real, like, this show is terrifying.

And so, I was like, I never watched it, but it was so built up in my head as like, this is the scariest thing ever made.

The X-Files is terrifying.

And then, kind of in the era of like Netflix, getting Netflix discs in the mail, I started catching up on some shows I had missed.

And I watched,

I fell off eventually, as most people do, because X-Files is one of those shows that gets pretty bad later on.

But I went through like probably the first five or six seasons on Netflix by Disc and and really enjoyed it.

So I was excited about this one.

As listeners might know, I'm very into like paranormal and conspiracies and stuff like that.

X-Files is not

an influence on Welcome to Night Vale.

So I was very excited to get to this one.

You're just staring at me, so I'm just going to keep going through.

Should we get to the worst episode?

Let's take that excitement that you have for it.

I'm just staring at you because I'm trying to communicate that I'm ready to move on to the next segment, which is, yes, so let's take that excitement and move right into the worst episode of this show, which is season three, episode 18.

Tesso dos Bichos.

Tesso dos Bichos.

Which is the name of a place, although apparently Bichos is also in several Spanish-speaking countries slang for balls, which the writer did not know.

So the name of this thing is two balls in a lot of countries.

Which is adorable.

You want to give us a brief summary?

So there's an archaeological dig in the Ecuadorian highlands, which is where we begin.

There's two archaeologists there, Dr.

Bilak and Dr.

Roosevelt, and they get into an argument about the removal of an urn that contains an Amaru, which is a female shaman.

And then Roosevelt's like, We have to take it because they're about to, I guess, like do some sort of like mining of that area, so it's just going to get fucked anyway.

And Bilak's like, Or we could just leave it for the people that live here that like would know what to do with it, who are indigenous to this area, but Roosevelt doesn't want to have that.

And then we see Roosevelt get murked by a giant cat, then we find ourselves in Boston.

So they've moved the burial urn to Boston because, of course, why not?

Take it to one of America's bottom five cities.

Yeah.

I like to think of it as America's Dublin.

Anyway, so they take it there.

And then there's another doctor that's missing who's the archaeologist there.

And there's also like a huge amount of blood that they discover in the lab.

So like people are going missing.

And then we meet Monica, who's a graduate student who works there, who has a dog, who doesn't appear to be a sort of service dog but just like has a dog in the museum and the museum that has lots of bones which i would think would probably be like a maybe it's not cool to bring your dog to this job situation but anyway all right so scully and molder show up and like they're just keeps having these like cat attacks on people it is sort of an incoherent episode as i'm trying to describe the plot to this i'm like this is just people well people keep disappearing there's also a red herring plot happening, which is the museum is overrun with rats and there keeps being dead rats everywhere.

And so there's like, I think a little bit of a red herring that maybe this is rats doing something.

But no, listeners of this show, what's happening is just cats, like house cats

are killing people.

The house cats, we think, possibly.

No, definitely.

It's like the

basement of the museum has like a hundred house cats in it and they're unlike normal cats because they have like this this this urn is making them act differently they are hunting in a pack and killing people okay you're helping me out here all right and then so dr.

Bilak who's the one who who was like we can't take this thing as apparently doing this drug called Yahweh which is just Iowa it's ayahuasca just ayahuasca so he's just been like tripping balls on ayahuasca like the whole time since he's been back and it's definitely fucked him up quite a bit and then he goes to the to the museum but then Mona is dead the grad student and then the dog the dog is also dead the dog gets killed yes because they do an autopsy on the dog and they find rat poison in the dog's stomach.

Wow, you really missed a lot of details in this episode.

The dog ate a cat.

Yeah, the dog ate a cat.

And the cat had eaten a rat with rat poison.

Yes.

And that's how the dog died was from the rat poison that was in the rat that was in the cat that it ate.

It's a real nesting doll situation.

And so then we get to the end of this episode where they're like in the steam tunnels underneath this museum trying to find Mona or Dr.

Bilak and they get attacked by the pack of cats.

Jillian Anderson gets attacked by a stuffed cat in a very obvious way.

And then the State Department says that they have to send the urn back and then all is well again.

Yes.

And

the people in the Ecuadorian highlands under the watchful eye of their shaman rebury the urn back where it was and all is well.

Yeah.

And presumably those cats just go back to being cats.

It's unclear.

We don't get a follow up.

The cats are just back to napping in sunbeams.

Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, an episode with good intentions.

This is like an issue episode, right?

Like,

it's about, you know, colonization.

It's about archaeologists not considering local people.

It's like trying to say something.

It's just executed very badly.

It's executed so badly.

It felt like they tried to make this episode in one day for $100.

I understand that the script that they're working with is very silly, which is going to be difficult to making something cool and scary.

So I get that they're up against something big here, but it's just a lot of like TV magic, directorial magic, a lot of like sound effects and foley and cutaways.

There's so much of that that there's really not much left to even further the story.

So some background is that, so this is written by John Shabon, who like went on to write for Breaking Bad and Better Call Sol.

He is a writer capable of better work.

And it's written by Kim Manners, who has...

Directed by Kim Manners.

Directed by Kim Manners, who has been directing TV since the 70s.

He's a real pro, and Kim Manners knew he had a dog shit episode.

He was very aware.

And he understood what the problem was, which was the ending.

I think if you change the last third, then you have what is a mediocre but not terrible episode of television.

I think it's the pack of cats attacking them in the basement.

And so he apparently begged Chris Carter, the showrunner, for a while, being like, let me change the ending to one giant, like one jungle cat, because I can make that scary.

And Chris Carter would not budge.

It had to be a pack of house cats.

Yeah, they fell into the trap of what they thought they were doing was important.

And I want to let everyone out there know that your art is not important.

It is not important to anything or anyone.

And I think if you believe your art to be important, it absolutely will not be.

So.

Yeah, you kind of have to, you have to let other people make your art important.

you can't make your art exactly exactly joseph that that is what the the kinder way of what i'm trying to say is is that yes i think that the that there was there is an opportunity with this episode again it's an issues episode and i think that they took it really seriously and i appreciate them taking it really seriously but as a result they've made dog shit television or cat shit television i guess or dog shit cat shit rat shit rat poison yes

kim manners by the way would not let this go he referred to so x-files had a system

where every rewrite, they would change the color of the paper so that no one would mix up rewrites of scripts.

And this one went through so many rewrites, it ended up going back to salmon.

And so he referred to this episode as Second Salmon, and then also got everyone who worked on it a t-shirt afterwards saying, I survived Tessos Dos Bichos.

So this is bad TV being made by a guy who is so aware he is making bad TV and is pissed off about it.

Is trying to.

And by the way, second salmon is what you feed cats.

So

this episode was watched by 17.38 million people in its initial broadcast.

It's amazing.

It's just like we keep going back to secession because secession was like the most like this really talked about show.

And I bet at its peak, it probably was like 2 million, maybe, maybe like a little over 1 million.

And it's just the era of the monoculture where you could turn out just horrible television and 17 million people would still watch it.

And I do, I do want to give them, I obviously want to give X-Files credit.

It's a very popular show that they did lots of cool stuff with.

They created, I would say that it's defined the genre.

Yeah, I mean, I think most people working in sci-fi and horror right now are people who grew up with the X-Files.

Like the X-Files is a real influential work for the work coming right now.

Yeah.

And I will say that they've made, you know, they made 24 episodes, 24 episodes a season, 20, like they were making a ton of television.

They are producing hour-long shows every week.

And again, it's not all going to be incredible and it's not all going to be, it's not all going to work, but they're working without a net because they have to, they have to turn the tape over to Fox and Fox has to put it on.

So we get to see them fail, which I think is cool because normally you don't get to see failure on TV anymore or anywhere anymore.

It's like something that is so invested in and so like managed and noted that like you don't get to see sort of big swings miss.

And I like that.

I like to see something that is overall really, really successful.

I'd like to look at it at its worst, to look at it for its failures, because I think there is a lot to learn from it.

Yeah, I mean, I think going back to some of what we try to do with the worst episode, which is look at what is the show, why did the show become so popular that we can see even in its worst, you have David D'Akofni and Jillian Anderson who just have undeniable chemistry, are great on screen.

They're there.

They're doing it.

I honestly think that some of the shots are good.

There's some like good cinematography in this.

There's some like cool lighting.

When they're in the steam tunnels, there's like some like stark shadows and lights.

Like they're someone really, someone who knows what they're doing did like think through what that scene would look like.

Yeah, and going back to Kim Manners, Kim Manners really did try really hard to make this episode good.

And even just speaking to the writing, the fact that you're at, you know, second salmon, you've tried so many times.

And I think that's cool.

The thing that I love in the artistic process is it doesn't matter if it's good, it doesn't matter if it's bad.

What matters to me as a person who creates art and as a person who enjoys art is that you tried.

You tried your absolute hardest.

You used all your tricks.

You did not phone it in.

You did not give up.

And I think, I don't think they gave up ever here.

I just think that, you know, sometimes you can't win them all, right?

They're also, they're trying to say something that honestly is, I feel like, a little ahead of its time in popular culture in the early 90s, which is this idea of like, even if you're well-intentioned, you can't save a culture without listening to that culture.

You know, you have this pompous archaeologist who's like, I want to save this urn because it'll get destroyed, but he's not listening to the people.

whose culture that urn belongs to.

As I said, the execution of that story is very bad, but I think the idea that they were trying to talk about was actually pretty ahead of its time for popular culture.

And then the other side of that coin is just because it's a culture you understand doesn't mean that it's necessarily witchcraft.

So just because you don't get them doesn't mean that they're witches.

But yeah, I mean, it's, it definitely then plays into a lot of the tropes of like the scary natives attacking white people.

Like there is kind of this very hitchy over the head scene at the beginning where the pompous archaeologist is listening to like classical music while the native people are playing like ominous sounding drums.

And so it's like this back and forth between like civilized music, scary native music.

And it's very much playing into the horror tropes of that.

They weren't past that even as they were trying to say something.

One interesting note is the guy who plays the shaman was a Cree activist and a founder of the Saskatchewan Native Theater Company.

I bet this episode annoyed the shit out of him having to play the scary shaman.

But you know what?

It was a paycheck.

It probably paid for a nice show at the Saskatchewan Native Theater Company.

And so good for him.

Yeah, I was going to say you got that SAG health insurance, but it's Canadian.

So

they don't need that.

They don't need their SAG health insurance.

One major problem I think this show has, and it speaks to what this show is good at.

This show is at its absolute best when Mulder and Scully are bouncing off each other.

Like, that's the show, is those two characters and those two performers.

And they don't show up for so long because we get a cold open that they're not in.

But then we get after the credits, like a second setup, because now we have to be in Boston and set up those characters and set up the murder there.

So we do not see Scully or Mulder for seven minutes of a 40-minute episode.

That's almost a quarter of the episode does not have our two friends in it.

Yeah, we're anchorless, we're rudderless without them.

Which I guess brings us to the best, right?

Oh, I've got some more notes.

Oh, he's got some more notes.

Go for it, babe.

I wrote all down all sorts of things.

There's the, I just wrote Where Are Himbo at one point when they weren't when Mulder wasn't there for seven minutes.

They do some fun like things.

There's the guy, one of the guy who gets killed is driving a Jaguar, so they can like really focus on the cat statue.

They have a nice killer POV shot that's very like Halloween or Evil Dead.

So they're kind of referencing some classic horror movie shots.

Like there's a lot of careful craft and thought going into.

an episode that just ultimately doesn't work.

I think one of the main reasons this doesn't work is the big cat attack just Scully waving around a stuffed animal.

And the reason was that Jillian Anderson is very allergic to cats and so could not be anywhere near a cat.

And so they had, why not just have it attack Mulder, you'd think?

But instead, we have Scully just like

doing her damnedest to pretend to be attacked by like an animal that my three-year-old would happily go to sleep with, just like a little stuffed cat.

It definitely speaks to the turmoil they had while creating this episode where they like did not realize that this was going to be a problem until like they were filming it.

Kim Manners realized it was going to be a problem, but it was Chris Carter.

Chris Carter apparently would not change his mind.

It had to be cats.

Like I don't think it would be great, but if it was like a jaguar in the basement hunting them, I think Kim could have done some nice scary shots of that.

And you wouldn't have had Scully.

having to like wave a stuffed cat.

I mean, even a freaking Maine Coon could have done it.

Yeah, I mean, Chris Carter is one of those people where he created a really good show, but also this is not the only episode where you really have to question his creative judgment.

There's a famous one called First Person Shooter that I really thought was going to be the worst episode that is about a like evil video game that is just very like kids these days in their video games.

Our intermission is, how is that theme song?

I mean, it's classic.

Obviously, you hear it and you're like, that's the X-Files theme.

I feel like when Ringtones came out, it was a lot of people's ringtone.

You can't sing along to it.

I wouldn't say it's a banger or a bop,

but I would say that it is instantly identifiable and non-offensive.

This is, for me, top five TV theme song of all time.

Cheers is number one.

I would put this at number three-ish.

It's just like it fits the mood perfectly.

It's so memorable.

Just the whole opening credits sequence is so good.

Just like, in and of itself, the opening credit

sequence is famous.

Pretty much every one of those shots and then the truth is out there, which they would very occasionally change to something like trust no one.

And everyone would be like, oh my God, they changed the text.

Just, ugh.

This to me is like peak television opening credit sequence.

I think that it should be a law.

I think the FCC should be involved, that every television show, no matter what television show, should have a theme song and a credit sequence.

I think that should be required.

Yeah, I I mean, the issue is that everything has a skip intro button now, so no one wants to.

The FCC needs to get rid of the skip intro button.

Every four episodes, you're required to watch it in full.

Well, that's the issue, right?

Is that now we watch 12 episodes in a row, and so we, by the 11th, we don't want to watch the credit sequence.

You know, when you're watching it once a week, the credit sequence is sort of like the overture at like an old-timey musical.

Like it's a little bit like, oh, it's been a long week, but now I'm getting into the mood for X-Files.

I think it's an important structural beat, and I think that it is a travesty that we have hollowed this from this artistic expression.

I agree.

I agree that the blame, I think, actually has a very easy-to-find scapegoat.

Scapegoat's not the right word because it actually is their fault, which is lost.

Because lost is both kind of one of the first shows that people were like, I want to binge this because it has this continuing story, but also lost is the first one in my memory that does not have an open and credit sequence.

It just has like the word lost coming at you briefly with a

sound.

And I remember even at the time, people were being like, wow, this is so innovative.

They don't have an opening credit sequence.

But then it turns out they ruined television.

Everyone was like, oh, we don't have to have an opening credit sequence.

Great.

You have to have an opening credit sequence and it has to be like a little bit silly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, like, to me, I wouldn't put the theme song in the top.

We'll talk about this when we get to it.

But to me, the like kind of the ideal opening credits is Buffy because Buffy has the like, they have like when they put Allison Hannigan's name you get like old clips of Allison Hannigan doing stuff it's just perfect it's it's it's sort of the curtain call like each of the actors comes out when their name is called and and you get to see them that's what I'm looking for and it changes every season so you can be like oh we're in season four the credits are different now yeah I mean there was the trend on HBO shows for a while where they had like really cool I think they even still do that some for some shows.

There was like, I remember there was one company that like, that was what they did.

They did all of the HBO opening credits.

Yeah, I think it started with True Blood.

I think it was Six Feet Under because Six Feet Under had a really cool opening credit sequence.

You know where it started was the Sopranos, probably.

Yeah, it's such a Sopranos is such a classic one.

I think what happened is the Sopranos had a classic one, and then HBO was like, we have a mandate.

We have to have cool opening credit sequences because that's kind of what we're known for right now.

And the cool part of the Sopranos is it literally is just the ride home from the city to very close to where the house I grew up in was.

So it's like a little personal gift for Meg.

And now, the best episode of the X-Files.

What is that?

It's Bad Blood, which is the 12th episode of the fifth season.

I forgot to note this based on my theory.

Teisoto's speeches is a little different because I said that the worst was most likely to be in either the first season or one of the last two.

Instead, this is in the third, which is very much not where I thought it would be.

But Bad Blood, season five.

I think we're going to be seeing a lot of seasons.

Seasons four to six are going to be like the sweet spot for best episodes because that's when a show is really cooking they haven't gotten tired yet i think we're going to see a lot of those season fives you gonna give us a summary do you want me to try to do it off the top of my head or or you got it i think we can do this together all right so this is a Monster of the Week episode and it's told in a very interesting structure.

The structure was based upon an episode of the Dick Van Dyke show called The Night the Roof Fell In, in which the main characters, they tell different versions of a fight that they had.

But this story is told in Mulder and Scully's different versions of the events that happened.

So we start out with a ticking clock.

Mulder's like, we have an hour before we have to go talk to Skinner about what happened.

Well, so what specifically we see right off the bat, Mulder kills a guy because he thinks the guy's a vampire, and then Scully shows that the guy is just a guy.

So Mulder has straight up killed a person.

And now they're looking, talking about how to cover it up, which is very like, cops kill, cops lie.

Like we're on, we're watching two cops try to cover up the fact that they killed a guy.

that's where we are.

So it starts with Scully's version of events.

Mulder's real cocky, comes in.

He's like,

we got to go down to Texas to go do this thing.

There's vampires there.

And he talks about vampires for a little bit.

And they go there.

They go to the Texas town.

And they, you know, there's been a person who's been killed, a tourist who's been killed.

So they're at the funeral home.

Then they meet the cop who's played by Luke Wilson, who Scully finds very hot, apparently.

Scully has to go do the autopsy while Mulder goes off with the cop.

And so we get Mulder's version of events.

We get Scully's version of events where she does the autopsy.

She figures out cause of death, which is poisoning, and there's pizza in his stomach.

She's really tired.

She goes back to her hotel room.

She orders a pizza.

And then Mulder comes in.

And then we flip to Mulder's version of the story, where we get to see where he goes with the cop and then also just his versions of events where when he's talking about it, Scully's like dismissive of him.

And the hot sheriff is ugly and kind of a hick.

The hot sheriff is kind of, yes, ugly and kind of a hick.

And molder is really brilliant about vampires and knows a ton about them and uh skelly's just like this horrible wet towel killjoy the whole time but so yeah we get the version of those events where mulder goes off with the cop they go to a cemetery and then they go to a trailer park where things have gone awry there's some great like physical comedy involving molder trying to stop a runaway RV and it ends with him just like hanging off the back of it being dragged in the mud.

It's very much a comedy episode.

Very much a comedy episode.

And then we end up back at the motel, but this time

we see that Mulder is to become the vampire's next victim because he has eaten the poisoned pizza that was that Scully ordered.

Because the guy was the pizza guy.

The guy was the pizza guy.

So Scully puts it together.

She's doing another autopsy.

She puts it together that Mulder's in trouble.

So she goes back and she finds him about to be eaten by the vampire.

She shoots at him.

He runs away.

And that is when...

That's when Mulder kills the guy.

And then we get this kind of coda

where they have to go back because the guy he killed woke up and murdered the coroner because it turns out he really was a vampire.

And then we get the little twist that, in fact, everyone in town, including the hot sheriff, is a vampire.

But they're kind of like nice taxpaying.

just get along go along vampire.

So instead of killing Scully and Mulder, they just knock them out and then skip town and disappear.

It was really just like this kind kind of bumbling late teen kid

brilliantly played by Patrick Renna that causes this whole issue by being like a messy, a messy vampire.

Yeah, the other vampires all eat cow blood, and he just like got in his head that he wanted to be a real vampire and kill humans.

And he causes so much trouble that they all have to pull up steaks and get out of there.

This is just a fun episode.

It's not the one I thought was going to be best because I think there's some episodes that the X-Files did that are really like beautiful and kind of cosmic.

And

at the time I watched them made me really feel things.

And this is not a feel things episode.

This is just a very silly, funny episode.

But I can see why people like it so much.

Yeah.

It's written by Vince Gilligan.

So creator of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saw, lots of great television this man has given us.

And directed by Cliff Bull, who was one of those, you know, 80s and 90s TV directors, directed a lot of Star Trek.

He, in fact, has a Star Trek alien race named after him.

And so, yeah, we got guest appearances from Luke Wilson and Patrick Rena.

Was Luke Wilson famous at the time?

Luke Wilson was just in Home Fries with Drew Barrymore, and I think Vince Gilligan wrote that film as well.

So this was right after.

Okay, so he wasn't like a movie star.

He wasn't like a full-on movie star.

He was working though.

Like he was, yeah, like it would make cultural sense for him to be guest starring in an episode of a very popular television show.

And he did great.

He did great.

Yeah, he was a lot of fun in both his, he did very well as a hunk and also very well as a silly hick in kind of the two versions of him.

Yeah.

But starting with the writing, it's great.

We love a show that is using using a fun structure, and we love a show that is borrowing from television, the television dynasty of the Dick Van Dyke show.

So I think-I mean, classically, you would call this like a Rashiman structure after the Japanese movie I watched once when I was 15.

I watched it in my film class.

Yeah.

But yeah, so it is of that style.

And that's great when we use an existing structure and bring our story and our characters to that.

I think that's a great way to write for things is to play with different structures.

I could talk about structure and laying your skin on top of its bones forever, but we're not going to do that because we're going to talk about this episode.

Jillian Anders described this episode as one of her favorites of the series, saying, oh, yes, I love that episode as far as I'm concerned.

It's one of our best ever.

I think it really showed how well David and I can work together, which, again, this goes back to your thesis that the most special thing about X-File is what makes it so great is this chemistry between DuCovny and Anderson.

Yeah.

And going back to the worst one, which had seven minutes without them, this one, they are in it from minute one, second one.

Like it starts with the two of them.

And so we're right in with their chemistry.

And the structure where we see their two points of view only works as well as it does because we have gotten to know their two points of view.

Like it gets to sort of poke fun at these personas that we've really gotten to know and love.

That in her view, Jillian Anderson isn't being skeptical.

She's just being the adult in the room.

Whereas from Mulder's point of view, he's not being like crazy.

He's just, you know, he's just laying out the facts and he just has an interesting case.

Like, kind of, we get to see how they see themselves, which is a lot of fun.

Agreed.

This was watched by 19.25 million viewers when it premiered.

You get two more million viewers.

I mean, it's a few seasons later, so I think X-Files was a bigger hit by then.

Yeah, it was definitely an appointment television show, an appointment television by that point in time.

Some notes: we have a prison rape joke.

So that's very 90s television.

Mulder does not tip the pizza guy at all.

It costs like $14.99 and Mulder gives him $15.

So in some ways, Mulder does deserve to get murdered by the pizza guy.

One thing I think you can really see what's good about the X-Files here is we have a joke about like points of view on a sex object, which is the sheriff.

But that sex object is a man and is based based a lot of it on Scully's point of view on him.

And so even in a episode about kind of a sex object joke, Scully is not that sex object.

Scully became a sex symbol because she's hot, but the show never plays it that way.

The show never like makes her wear skimpy clothes or plays into her sexuality, like other than her sexuality as like an active participant and that she was like hot for the sheriff.

So I really appreciated that.

That kind of the sex symbol joke was the hot sheriff and not Scully.

Yeah, guys, it's the mid-90s.

Women are allowed to find men attractive.

They'll never get to be president, but in the 90s, they're allowed to find men attractive on television.

I mean, I think in the 90s, they maybe were even president on television.

There was probably some show.

Starting around the 90s to early 2000s, every show, if you had the president, it had to be either a white woman or a black man just to be like, look at us.

I liked how before when you said Jillian Anderson is hot, you like had like a little bit of like a permission in your face for me.

And like, yeah, son, Jillian Anderson is very hot.

I don't think that's what I was thinking at the time.

There was a little bit of permission tone in there?

I think I was just trying to think of how to phrase it and then just landed on she's hot.

Not to like objectify her, but she's so pretty, man.

I mean, yeah, like they both are, right?

Like that's the whole thing is they were both really hot.

They're hot together.

Yeah.

That's sort of one of the big appeals of the show.

The amount of fan fiction written about those two, man.

And they did eventually get a romance plot, but it actually took, I think, quite a while.

There was, we'll talk about this more in our Patreon-only show, The Middlest, but there was an attempt to replace her as a possible love interest with someone else that just went really badly because viewers did not want that.

They wanted those two together.

My final note for this episode is that apparently I was trying to see this and they did a really good job hiding this, but the glowing eyes, the vampires all have glowing eyes, and that's how you know they're vampires.

That was just painted onto their eyelids.

and so none of them could see when it, so, like, when they were like being approached by a crowd of people with glowing eyes, all those people were just having to walk with their eyes shut, and that's how that effect was done, which is just, I love it.

Like, now you'd get a CGI team has to go in there.

And back then, it was just like, no, just glow in the dark paint, put it on their eyelids, and close your eyes.

Cool.

They could just put your hands out in front of you and walk slow.

You'll be fine.

I mean, I noted that in all the shots, like they only showed them walking for like half, like a second at a time.

And if it's real slow and their hands are out in front of them.

Yeah.

And if they're like all legs spaced pretty far apart.

Yeah, it's good.

It's like it's as we've talked about before.

There was this bridge between television and film.

And for most of its time, television was firmly in the side of theater.

You could do things like just paint glow-in-the-dark paint on someone's eyes.

And you wouldn't, you would never do that for a big budget movie.

But for a big budget TV show like this, that was fine because it's it's theater.

And you need to turn it around quickly.

Yeah.

And that kind of somewhere in the mid-2000s to early 2010s, TV slipped from theater to film.

And now everything has to be, everything has to look film quality.

Everything has to be shot in location.

And I think you see some of the just the fun of like, you can do simple theater stuff with TV and it works.

It doesn't look big budget, but it works.

Suspend your disbelief.

Like, do you really need all this?

Use your imagination.

Do you have any more notes on the best ever episode?

I really liked this episode.

I think that I understand why it's good.

And I think that for people who are really into X-Files and watching it while it is like while it was happening, I think that they would have had like a really good night with this one.

The one I thought was going to be best.

Well, there are a couple notes.

This is tied, actually.

I went with this one because it had more votes on IMDb than the other one.

But this is tied with Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose.

which is another episode that I would have thought was best.

It's a very good episode about a psychic who can only predict people, how people are going to die, is the only thing he's able to predict.

Great episode.

If you've never watched X-Files and you're curious to watch more good X-Files, I will say there's an episode, famous episode called Jose Chungs from Outer Space that I have not watched in

15 years, but when I watched it as a teenager, it genuinely was the single best episode of television I'd ever seen.

So if you're curious, go search out Jose Chungs from Outer Space, which is just such a weird and good episode of television.

Next, well, I was going to say next week, but next week is our Patreon only show, The Middle East.

But in two weeks, what are we covering?

It's in the script, so I'm going to say it's house, everyone.

It is not house.

We already covered house.

It is

I Love Lucy.

Oh, no.

Continuing,

we alternate between our dramas and half-hour sitcoms.

Yeah, I Love Lucy, I'm sure had some highs, but I am.

dreading its worst episode because I feel like the worst episode of I Love Lucy might be our I feel like so far, our worst episodes have all been not great, but still like watchable.

And I am a little afraid that the worst episode of I Love Lucy might not even be watchable.

I'm worried that the best episode of I Love Lucy might not be watchable.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to find out, and you're going to find out too, when we cover I Love Lucy.

Join us next week for our Patreon-only show, The Middlest, where we look at the exact middle-rated episode of the X-Files, which is season two, episode 24, Our Town.

It's a fun little one about cannibalism and a meat packing plan.

And it also has our Patreon-only episode within a Patreon-only episode, The Littlest, where we discuss how our three-year-old would handle the show.

See you then.

Bye, guys.

And that's it.

Thank you so much.

Please subscribe wherever you get podcasts to The Best Worst.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies, and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

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