"The X-Files" was always excellent at delivering edge of your seat two parters and this one is full of thought provoking mystery. At times feels like revisionist history but what's interesting is that it also adds to the show's history by showing the character's involvement with Mulder and Scully and the world of the show. The episode is a great showcase for Davis and it even has an unreliable narrator device that efficiently adds to the series' main conspiracy theme.
assassination) with major events of the series, this episode beautifully adds to the mythos of the series by essentially telling the villain's story. Davis), and sheds light on how he became the main villain of the series.Ĭombining real life events (like the J.F.K. It gives the origin of the main antagonist of the series, the sinister and mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man (the incredible William B. Written by Glen Morgan and directed by James Wong, this episode does what a great prequel story should do in spades. It's a marvelous season opener that shows Carter's series as both thought provoking and moving.Ī good prequel story enhances the world that we've grown accustomed to and gives us something we've never seen before about something that we're entirely familiar with. encounters (Mulder's sister was after all abducted), the episode beautifully explores Mulder's own personal demons with alien life and how far he'll go looking for the truth - personal or non-personal. One of the great aspects of this episode is how it effectively deals with Mulder's beliefs and how it toys with whether or not he actually witnessed what he's been searching for his whole life. One of those was, of course, the existence of extraterrestrials which was a primary theme of the series that tied directly into Fox Mulder's (Duchovny) obsessions.Īfter the events of the explosive finale of Season 1, the episode is notable for featuring its first full-fledged extraterrestrial - a watershed moment for the series. "The X-Files" was never shy about the fact that at its core, it was a show about conspiracy theories and how the government uses its power to hide secrets. With an incredible guest performance by Cranston (who humanizes what is essentially the monster of the week) and a taut self-contained mystery involving frequency waves, "Drive" is an utterly efficient and relentlessly paced mystery that never lets up until its emotionally powerful conclusion. Intense, action packed and morally engaging, this episode showcases how Gilligan would always bring a deft humanism to his X-Files stories. Cranston's performance in the episode was so great that Gilligan knew he only had one person in mind for the role of Walter White after that.Ĭranston plays a man that is suffering from an illness but is also on the run and being pursued by the police (later by Mulder whom he believes the man to be part of an X-File) in a high-speed car chase across the Nevada desert. Gilligan, a driving force and co-executive producer of "The X-Files," actually wrote the episode.
No, not the Nicolas Winding Refn art-house action classic, but this glorious standalone episode was actually the first collaboration between "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston. Granted for a series that ran as long as "The X-Files" did, we're bound to miss on a couple of fan favorites, but hopefully these 15 are great examples of both stand alone episodes and mythology episodes. With talks of more episodes in the future, here are our 15 best episodes of the classic series (just don't go making up any conspiracies if your favorite didn't make the cut, all right?!).
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Part paranoid conspiracy thriller ("All The Presidents Men" and "3 Days of the Condor" are massive cinematic influences), part alien invasion, all revolutionary television Carter's TV series remains a fierce and seminal piece of the genre. Big, heady, and magically cinematic, "The X-Files" was unlike anything that had come before. Created by Chris Carter and starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (in career defining performances), "The X-Files" became a groundbreaking TV phenomenon that reinvented what science fiction could do for television. it seems that phrase is more relevant now than ever and way back in the 1990s, it was the tagline that was on everyone's mind.