Image: Season five episode “Bad Blood.”
Scully: “Mulder, it's such a gorgeous day outside. Did you ever entertain the idea to try find life on this planet?”
Originally written in 2021-12:
The episodic style of X-Files (and many other tv series) really lends itself to many types of episodes. For example I think the humoric episodes fit very well, and even the "it was just a dream" ones tend to be okay. And the way they put the very serious mythology episodes on top of it, or sometimes even slightly mixed with the other content, it's just great. Now watching the episode with an alien baseball player.
The episode Field Trip was also pretty cool. I saw a lot of it coming, but it was well done. It works well in this show to question all the weirdness that is going on. Scully always suggesting the simplest solution, and Mulder always being right anyway. In this episode Mulder calls out that fact specifically to Scully "How many times I've ever been wrong? Every time we play out this exchange, and I turn out to be right 99.8% of the time. If I say it's aliens, won't you give me the benefit of the doubt?", so of course this is the one episode where he *is* wrong. But it's executed in a nicely layered way so that Scully is also wrong, then Mulder, and finally Scully again and in the end it's a third party who saves the day.
A boy creates living nightmares for others by using his imagination. I chuckled at the ending of the episode: He is put into a "treatment" to "stifle his imagination" — he is shown sitting in a room, watching TV (dozen sets at once actually).