Things Are Getting Strange

Something of a dramatic reversal into comedy after the darkness of the last episode... We discuss why some people aren't keen on this, but get into the likely reason why Twin Peaks is like this..Support the show

Content Warning: discussions of sexual abuse, violence against women, murder of women, abuse of minors and yellowface.So, we come, inevitably, to the horse in the Palmer household. With all the horrors that entails and all the reveals. Please bear in mind the content warnings - we don't dwell on the details but do touch on what happens and the associated discomfort.Apart from the unmitigated horrors, there are nice moments of levity and continued soap opera shenanigans. And of course, the answer to the question posed by the pilot.Support the show

Cooper finally contends with his litany of illegal actions! For a few minutes. Then he starts withholding medication...Twin Peaks continues!We talk about James's perplexing timing to resolve last episode's cliffhanger and how Shelly is evaporating audience sympathies in her and Bobby's escapades.Bonus points if you know what a vicuna coat is and who's most likely to own one...Support the show

Back to Twin Peaks!We briefly talk about upcoming X-Files news (both old and new!) and The Amazing Digital Circus finale (don't worry, we're not about to spoil anything) before diving headlong into the Pacrific Northwest.We get hung up on how ambiguous the layout of Twin Peaks itself is even now and celebrate that Audrey is finally getting rescued!Support the show

We get a bit hung up on how Maddy's hair has changed over the course of the series. And reach silly conclusions about the potential Laura Palmer-ifiction of every woman in Twin Peaks. Sort of like Third Impact. Or carcenisation.Otherwise this is a kind of a place-holder episode with setups for the future and some typical soap-opera moments. Where has Mike gotten to...?Support the show

If you're watching along with the series, what perpetual cynic Albert believes in might come as rather a surprise in The Man Behind the Glass. Especially moments after his giddy glee about the pop-culture provenance of the gun used to shoot Cooper.While discuss Doctor Jacoby's surprising home-life, Donna's improbably horrible timing and why we are at best indifferent to James and the love-tangle he seems intent on flinging himself head first into.Support the show

So much coma! We wind up talking about how much of a trope the soap opera coma is... and how Twin Peaks weirdly (for Leo anyway) plays it closer to reality than most...We get side-tracked onto The Fourth Kind for a while purely because of how it used owls and how that might be a kind of inference back to this series...Support the show

Twin Peaks gets off to a slightly unusual second season start...We discuss comas and how it feels so oddly distanced from season 1. Also get minorly fixated on the previously unmentioned Hayward daughter.Support the show

Hard to ignore how good Piper Laurie is in this episode. And in general in this series!We've reached the all too soon end of season 1 of Twin Peaks and it feels like everything's happening, so many cliffhangers and dangling plot-threads! And somehow while talking about the series we loop in things like Clueless and Psychonauts...Support the show

Watch as Dale Cooper fends off Audrey's attempts at seduction in order not to bring the FBI into disrepute shortly before making use of the Bookhouse Boys because they need to do something across the Candian border! Not saying he shouldn't have resisted Audrey, but the latter also feels distinctly dodgy.At this point in the series everyone seems to be converging at One Eyed Jack's or about to commit arson. Or making *checks notes* Laura Palmer's cousin dress up as her in order to lure her psychiatrist out of his office in order to steal an audio cassette made by Laura Palmer...Support the show

Twin Peaks continues to tease that a solution to its central mystery can only be imminent! Birds singing and perpetual music get their explanations here!But in the meantime, we continue to complain about James, continue to enjoy every time Bobby shows up on-screen, and remain hopelessly fixated on Maddy and who's playing her in this series. Also the mill-arson plot is just getting more tangled by the minute.Support the show

Feels like everyone is turning out to be psychic in Twin Peaks... Laura Palmer, Sarah Palmer, Dale Cooper... Hank Jennings?! Or at least we don't have a good way for him to call right after the letter he sent (presumably days earlier) was opened.But! For those who know the kind of things Twin Peaks is famed for may be interested that this is the first time an owl has an on-screen presence. Also Maddy looks very set to just make all the relationship tangle even more complicated...Support the show

You may be shocked - SHOCKED - to learn Twin Peaks immediately swerves away from naming Laura Palmer's killer despite explicitly promising such an answer last episode. Such is the way of Twin Peaks, and these days its well known this was never quite what David Lynch and Mark Frost wanted to focus on, and yet... the answer is out there still.In the meantime we talk a fair amount about the funeral at the centre of Rest in Pain and bring up Ringu once again.Support the show

The Red Room makes its appearance in Twin Peaks! If you've been wondering how the series has the reputation it has, it all ramps up from here.We talk backwards talking, our "clues" for the central mystery, compare the series to (variously) Insidious, Neon Genesis Evangelion and professional wrestling!Also come to a startling realisation about the Horne brothers...Support the show

The soap opera continues, though we will note how Cooper seems to travel. Or at least which items seem essential. We're still a bit early, not quite to the kind of thing Twin Peaks would become famous for... But there's still some weirdness.We talk a lot about Laura Palmer's astonishingly active pre-death life and the odd bits and pieces that would normally get cut out of this kind of show. If it wasn't going to be, well, what Twin Peaks will be...Support the show

Join us as we take a trip into the Pacific North-West... To a town with a population way too high for how its depicted. And an eccentric population.We are, of course, talking about Twin Peaks this time. Taking in the views of the feature length first episode (critically not the International Pilot version of this which we will get into later), we find that the series is a lot more subdued this early with few of the hallmarks that would be infamous as it went on...Support the show

Alas we have reached the end of Darkplace with so much of the series still left unglimpsed... What sights and truths could it reveal? Maybe that Dean Learner actually can act since once again he actually does for a brief moment.Given the title and subject matter for The Creeping Moss from the Shores of Shoggoth, we end up talking about HP Lovecraft. But there's also some Clive Barker and Quatermass in here too...Next time, we're off to Twin Peaks!Support the show

Looking past the less than subtle "borrowing" of John Carpenter's back-catalogue, we end up zeroing in on the actual theme of Scotch Mist! Doesn't have much to do with xenophobia, fog, mist but is very prevalent in the episode!Inevitably we also talk a lot about Stephen King...Support the show

We reach the infamous episode! The one with Garth Marenghi's attitude to subtext... Also his questions no one else asks...Despite the very obvious Planet of the Apes styling, we talk more about Avatar, Star Wars and Rawhead Rex and have fun trying to get back to the point as usual.Support the show

Content warning: mentions of sexual assaultWe're not wild about this episode of Darkplace, but as discussed it contains some of the more quotable lines. Also the episode has the absolutely incomprehensible production mistake of Thornton Reed actually acting in the episode!Otherwise, as is our way we meander off into other avenues of the 80s and in particular 80s horror...Support the show

Episode 2 of Darkplace has perhaps one of the more obvious inspirations from a famed horror author's work and perhaps quailing from the maddening reality of that we talk about why where horror is set seems to dictate what kind of horror you wind up with.More fake lost media and horror projects that intend to hide their actual horror nature and how thin the border between horror and comedy is; all derived from Mr. Marenghi's work.Support the show

In a surprising move, we change our focus to something quite different: Garth Marenghi's Darkplace! A comedy, sort of horror series from the early 2000s.We get into how it all works and talk about how it belongs to the weird sub-genre of fake lost media. Also the bewildering cloud of comedy projects the various cast are involved with.Support the show

A wrap up now we're done with The X-Files for now. A whole franchise overview, out top comedy, top serious, worst episodes and best villains!Next time: Something Quite Different.Support the show

Or at least, there are a surprising number of British people and accents in this series continuation! We discuss the implications and... probable influences on the direction of travel the book is taking. We're quite taken with the writing and how Scully is depicted.(and realised after the fact - while we note that the timeline feels off in this book and comment that it has to occur within about 4 months of My Struggle 4 as per human biology, there are some references that are suspect...What we mean is, typically the assumption is a series of The X-Files has to happen more or less concurrently with broadcast - something more or less borne out by Season 11, Seasons 10 and 11 have to happen in at least 2016 or charitably 2016 to 2018 at best. Its not impossible to take place after that, but its unlikely to be the intent. What we're getting at is that the references to WandaVision and Andor feel out of place given neither series would exist at that point in time unless My Struggle 4 occurs late 2022. Which, yes, is very pedantic, but surely that implies a hugely divergent timeline given Covid 19 ought to have a major bearing on the plotlines, so I don't think so?)Support the show

Somehow, Nick forgot the gore-fest of Nothing Lasts Forever existed at all, but is now painfully aware of the strange choice of penultimate episode. Not least that the original intent was much more meaningful, touching and appropriate at this late stage. And not involve nailing back-street doctors to the floor with fence posts for reasons the episode never bothers to even try to justify.And My Struggle 4 suffers greatly thanks to My Struggle 2. We struggle to talk about the finale and how much is left unresolved, how many answers unanswered and how only now do we know its not the end but Perihelion is not starting from a position of strength per se.Support the show

It's man vs machine in Rm9sbG93ZXJz, though the robot wait-staff are also determined to make Scully pay. One way or another. We discuss the motive of the antagonist and how Scully could be plausibly tracked through her personal massager...Familiar feels very old-school The X-Files but we get hung up on plot weirdness and suspect character design. Also why Mulder and Scully got involved in the first place.Support the show

We get really hung up on the implications of Jackson Van De Kampf's life in Ghouli and how people just ignore the less than great series of events that would have lead to this episode's events. Not really helpful that Jackson clearly used to have a quite different and significant name. We get heavily into how what was clearly a monster of the week episode morphed into something else...Kitten feels a bit Wetwire, a bit Blood and a lot another Skinner episode about his time in Vietnam. Despite an interesting reason for the episode existing, it feels a real strange thing to throw into what everyone anticipated The X-Files' final season being...Support the show

*if you want to end the series in the best possible way...Plus One is a fun episode, possibly a little overshadowed by the sterling guest-star turn and the efforts of the make-up department. Also suspect the entire point of the episode was less doppleganger hangman game and more getting Mulder and Scully into bed together...The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat is not actually the final episode of the series, but like Sunshine Days, the perfect note to go out on. An episode that at last uncovers the true villain of the series, that rocks everything you thought you knew about every previous episode... and makes a surprisingly good argument against Season 10 and 11 existing at all...Support the show

We reach Season 11 and find that the chosen way to resolve the massive, massive cliffhanger season 10 left on is.... lacking.My Struggle III spends a lot of time undoing some of Season 10 but not all of it and as a result leaves some weird debris behind. We talk retcons and wave goodbye to the nominal replacement Mulder and Scully...This is one of Kim's most hated episodes, and its hard to ignore that being written and directed, the thoroughly nihilistic episode is being inflicted on Langely as seemingly creator really out to hurt his own creation.And for those confused by our episode title, we will explain quite what that means too...Support the show

Don't promise us the Lone Gunmen being back and then do... that.Babylon was quite notorious on first broadcast and the intervening years have done little to aid the fact it feels the wrong fit for The X-Files in general and specific for Mulder and Scully. We also get into what the whole point of Einstein and Miller probably was...My Struggle II uses the phrase "alien DNA" way too many times (we counted) and made Kim quite angry with its rather flippant - if typical - attitude to how medicines work and what certain terms actually mean in real life.But what a cliffhanger! Oh, how can they possible resolve it....?Support the show

We struggle to say much about Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster, broadly because the episode is an absolute delight and revisiting it has not diminished how starkly it contrasts with the rest of season 10. It is still a fantastic episode.Home, Again on the other hand is part fantastically acted Scully drama, part serious Arcadia remake and part mystifying Candyman-a-like. One of these things feels distinctly out of place and we struggle to make sense of why the episode is formed like this...Support the show

Welcome to season 10! And plots we could swear we saw in Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'. And Gethesmane...Still! The X-Files is back. Skinner is back! Cancer man... is somehow back! And now we're trying to retcon seemingly 9 seasons of plot out of the backstory. We discuss how strange the apparent project to discredit Mulder is and how odd some of the choices with the revival are.Founder's Mutation is at least a better episode. Though all these mentions of William are concerning. They're not going to do anything with him, right?...right?Support the show

We reach the second The X-Files film and are beset by questions. Many of them "Why this?" and "Really?"While the acting is fine, we are not so taken with the plot or the any of the new characters. We also learned a fair amount from the synopsis we are not sure we even got hinted at in the film itself...Somehow we can even pick fault with the end credits...Support the show

So here we are. What once was the end of The X-Files is a bit too much like how Seinfeld ended for its own good...We end up talking about Franz Kafka for hopefully good reasons as well as continuing to observe that Mulder should never be allowed in any kind of court-room.We also get to our best and worst episodes of the season.Support the show

Release wraps Doggett's running backstory up perhaps a little too fast and a little too without warning (and that's not getting into Reyes' questionable decision re: seeing people taking bribes). But. There is an answer - its bleak and awful and does not involve whatever happened to Samantha. We are however obliged to point out that supernatural force continues to drag its feet in these kinds of episodes...We disagree on just how supernatural the episode is and discuss the implausibility of walling fresh murder victims with clay.Sunshine Days could easily be the last episode of The X-Files ever. Sure, Mulder's not present and the whole super-soldiers - let alone alien aspects of the series - would remain unresolved, but it makes a point about the quest for the truth and the cost of that pursuit that with the whole series in mind is extremely persuasive.Support the show

A strange description of Jimmy Bond, but accurate nonetheless.After our hiatus, Nick is trying to be more positive about The X-Files. Each episode must have some positive points. Unfortunately, he is trying this on Jump the Shark and William of all things.Jump the Shark does have a lot of sharks and Morris Fletcher. We get into why concluding a series in a different series feels like a terrible plan and how most of the regular X-Files lot seem to be largely absent. Still a shame to say goodbye to the Lone Gunmen, if not so much The Lone Gunmen, though some behind the scenes stuff makes the decision more comprehensible. Though... we'll be back to this in future.William (the character) is also far from done, despite this William (the episode) seemingly determined to tie up a plot-thread before the series runs out of time. The make-up and prosthetic effects are absolutely phenomenal and we're in two minds bout how the series seemed to toy with expectations given leaving guest star names off the start, but making real clear about the writers and director being one D. Duchovny...Support the show

At least, we're pretty sure guest star Burt Reynolds is God in Improbable at any rate. A rather stunning surprise from Chris Carter, this episode is tremendous fun, though unable to escape more questions about why Reyes isn't fired for this sequence of events.We talk about our own life-path numbers and how relevant they are; also how Mulder crazy contrasts with Reyes crazy...Scary Monsters sees the welcome return of Leyla Harrison to the series in a amusing if still grisly episode that can't quite hide how much it resembles a rather famous The Twilight Zone episode.We wind up talking about fandom given how Leyla views the X-Files staff and how Mulder might be becoming Poochy...Support the show

One of them anyway...Audrey Pauley feels more like a Twilight Zone episode, but is an interesting contrast to Steven Maeda's previous season 9 episode of 4D. And yet, somehow we end up talking about Dark Souls and Die Hard during the course of this episode. And how familiar the villain is.Underneath is an episode we really did completely forget existed. And this despite it being the most The X-Files episode this season! A shame that Doggett is completely correct in this episode for a succession of completely wrong reasons.Also not clear how he trusts anything after this...Support the show

...mostly about the current state of the conspiracy here in Season 9...Providence, wait, Provenance. No, Providence. Dammit, its Provenance!Provenance has the Lone Gunmen for hilariously, almost futile inclusion and seems to want to hark back to one of the series more startling reveals - a half-buried ancient UFO off the coast of Africa. Except not we have one in Calgary, Canada.We complain at length about what has been done to Scully's character and how weirdly certain people are that Mulder has died somewhere off-screen (made pointless given Carter's reported statement that Duchovny would be appearing in the finale).Providence doesn't get much better as a weird alien prophecy means either Mulder or William has to die for... reasons, and how everyone acts like Mulder stopped the aliens taking over when he did effectively nothing of the sort.The episode also reminds of us of better things. Babylon 5, The Tommyknockers. Quatermass and the Pit...Support the show

Vince Gilligan has failed us!And apparently only us as the critical reception to John Doe is strikingly positive. We speculate how much of this is due to snobbishness around sci-fi/fantasy/horror and how much is because we're well acquainted with Gilligan's later productions.Also a waste of a memory vampire...Hellbound is not The X-Files take on Hellraiser, but that film inevitably comes up as a point of comparison given such focus on skinned corpses. And also ask high-brow philosophical questions such as when does the soul enter the body - and The X-Files' apparent inference being potentially hours after birth...Support the show

With Lord of the Flies, we wonder why The X-Files is now about a group of British school-children trapped on a desert island-Wait...We actually get curious as to whether the show's allusion to Jackass makes any sense anymore and the horror of body lice as a concept. At least we have an unscrupulous entomologist in the form of Rocky to provide entertainment in an episode reminiscent of Rain King but... Well, things are different now.Trust No 1 demands the question of did Chris Carter actually want to still be involved in this series? Mostly because he seems quite intent on torpedoing Scully's character in a deeply frustrating and seemingly pointless episode.Well, there is the introduction of the super-soldier's weakness, but there's some... hilarious complications with it.Support the show

Daemonicus is Kim's most hated episode of the entire run of The X-Files. Fun times!A good start leads into an increasingly dissatisfying experience and we once again discover how different intent was to how we wound up interpreting the episode on both watch and re-watch. Inevitably we also end up talking about Hannibal and also Hannibal.Also; its clear the writers don't quite know what to do with Reyes...4-D is better though bleaker and depressing and should probably have shown up in the series later. But the series struggles to know what to do with Scully, these initial episodes seemingly written before her return was confirmed.And really, why ask about vampires of all things?Support the show

We're not entirely sure if Scully buys Jigsaw brand mobiles for her baby or the foley-artist made a strange choice for season 9's opener, but when baby William seems to use telekinesis to make his mobile move... It does sound like something out of Saw...Welcome to Season 9! It all looks and sounds and feels a lot better than another series we've been struggling through. And in a possible bid to get more viewers both episodes involve Lucy Lawless not wearing anything.We discuss how the tone of the series has changed dramatically after real world events and how much more serious things have gotten. Despite the super-Soldier stuff.But at least Reyes is now part of the main cast. New intro feels wrong though.Support the show

...it won't attract the worm!Weapon of Choice used (for no particular reason) in All About Yves is one of the high points. We get into why even with the writers throwing every trick in the bag to get a second series, even the revelatory answers were never going to be exactly great by way of Star Wars and Twin Peaks.Plus, Kim has a far better plan to capture Yves than anything Morris Fletcher has dreamt up and its really hard to overlook how much simpler and effective and quick her suggestion would be.As is usual we get into an overview of the series, along with best and worst episodes and look forward to returning to The X-Files.Farewell The Lone Gunmen! You could have been a fun series if you consisted of episodes like The Unusual Suspects, Three of a Kind, or Pilot. Alas, you made Jimmy Bond a mainstay of the series and kinda wrecked everything. Kim even has a far more interesting use for him in the series too...Support the show

We were told these two episodes were an improvement... and that was not wrong!The Lying Game impressively avoids a gigantic pitfall that would have made the episode incredibly uncomfortable and lowered our impression of the characters still further. It also boasts a guest appearance from Mitch Pileggi who does a stellar job of impersonating Jimmy when events call for it.We'll even overlook how the reasons the LGM get into the plot aren't exactly meant to be their thing, the plot does revolve around the kind of thing they would care about. It's doing well!But it's just... why don't they even try talking to Mulder or Scully or Doggett as events spool out? Why do we need to add a moment when a dog humps Langley's leg? Why does Skinner not jump to shapeshifter as the explanation when confronted by himself?The Cap'n Toby Show is likewise more LGM-like than a lot of the series. It even has a scene about how the LGM find stories which feels so intrinsic and fundamental, its actually really odd it wasn't in episode 3.Despite this, the episode while better, it remains faintly awkward with some odd focuses. And as has become a pattern, the original three LGM do one thing while Yves and Jimmy do another. And at the 11th hour, the series tries to imply something more about Yves, but there's only one (sort of two) episodes to go and no time to really get into it.Support the show

It is hard to muster energy for The Lone Gunmen at this point...Diagnosis Jimmy feels stitched together from discarded parts of other episodes and continues to call into question how Jimmy is able to exist in the real world. Meanwhile the other LGM-centric plot feels so poorly justified for its inclusion.Unprofessional nurses and weirdly ineffective bear-traps abound...Tango de los Pistoleros is a better episode but has so many question marks hanging over it that its still hard to enjoy. We wind up talking alot about how the characters don't appear to have any character arcs and again how weird it is that the series can't even attempt to duplicate either LGM-centric The X-Files episodes...Support the show

We've reached episode 100 and so... are taking a break from The Lone Gunmen for this week.Instead we have taken a trip to Springfield to witness the reasonably inexplicable crossover of The X-Files into The Simpsons. Which remains a lot of fun and is an extremely highly rated episode even now.A lot of jokes and only a little threat of fear, famine and pestilence...We also talk about the spec script, Flight 180, that went on to become Final Destination. We talk about the differences between the script and the eventual film, Charles Scully, and Scully's... shot fired retort to Mulder in one bewildering moment.Support the show

...which was probably more baffling on release, but now we have to ask why the LGM don't actively use Linux for like paranoid reasons...Back off hiatus! And despite the episode title being Planet of the Frohikes, the episode is more about Jimmy and chimpanzees and not really about Frohike at all. We get into the episode tipping its hand way too early, the The Murders in the Rue Morgue inferences and are somewhat floored by Yves actually being in-character.Why does the series have a running gag about the LGM's newspaper being trash? How much has Dreamland influenced all this?Alas it could not last: Maximum Byers has Yves pushed back into an eye-candy role. Its also blatantly influenced by The Green Mile just with cockroaches in place of mice and the series actively referencing The A-Team.Next time, we take a break from this series as we have reached episode 100!Support the show

Stuff happened between watching Three Men and a Smoking Diaper and when we recorded this episode and made it somehow even less fun than the first time around when we were merely severely annoyed by every little thing in it.Quite apart from the Lone Gunmen apparently getting into Gonzo Journalism rather than their normal style, the continued reliance on Jimmy as the "presentable" member of the gang (and not, say, Byers), the apparent lack of using Jimmy for his intended purpose (explain technical terms) and the juvenile humor, somehow the episode just casually tosses Frohike and Langely literally kidnapping a child and apparently of the mind to just hang onto it come the ending.That this is Chris Carter's fault is even more astonishing being someone who should know far better than this.To say Madam, I'm Adam is better is not hard. However, the initially fun hook drops by the way-side almost immediately and the entire premise and tone of the episode is from some half-forgotten early (and cancelled) sitcom from the 90s by the last third.Its a peculiar episode, the Lone Gunmen repeatedly refuse to dwell on the actual sinister background details, no one apparently has any idea what to do with Yves and the hook and explanation don't really connect... Not unheard of in The X-Files either, but given this episode ostensibly is about a man convinced he was abducted with aliens and ends with disrupting a wedding in a wrestling ring, all former examples were somewhat mild.At least next week's episode is written by Vince Gilligan. That's... gotta be a good thing. Right??Support the show

Somehow the third episode of the series is Eine Kleine Frohike, an episode of The Lone Gunmen which feels like it should come from a hypothetical season 4 when the writers have well and truly run out of ideas. That it's also taking inspiration from The Ladykillers is just an additional bizarre twist to the whole mess.We return to wondering if this series is just supposed to be an unauthorized Mission Impossible reboot or it just somehow has amazing rubber masks for some other reason. Jimmy's presence in the series continues to mystify and annoy given his depiction as barely capable of tying his own shoes.There's been butt related moments in all the episodes so far, but so much greater is Langely's encounter with a bull in Like Water for Octane. Somehow this is a running thing in this series.Overall this is much more like the kind of episode we expect from this as a spin-off, but we get hung up on silo demolition and the astonishing excuse the episode chooses to use to not introduce water-powered cars to the wider X-Files universe.Support the show