Any episodes that contain an especially important character development are included (unless they are truly terrible episodes) Any particularly great episodes are included My criteria for what episodes made the cut were as follows: And so, I pored over various episode guides and summaries to refresh my memory, and came up with the following list. Moreover, some of the series' very best episodes were MotW, and some of the Mythology eps were real stinkers. While the Mytharc was thrilling when the show was at the height of its power, skipping the standalones would ruin the pacing and result in a much more melodramatic and self-serious show the MotWs were essential part of the balance. One of the main appeals of the show was the way it balanced the anthology format with a continuing storyline, alternating between Monster of the Week and Mytholog, and so I dodn't want to focus on one and not the other. Neither list really satisfied what I was looking for, which was to re-live the experience of watching the show straight through, but in less time. Examples of the "mythology only" lists can be found here, here and here. (For those new to the show or it's fandom, you should know that most X-Files episodes can be categorized as either " monster-of-the-week," denoting a standalone investigation, or a " mythology," denoting an episode that connects with a series-spanning over-arching conspiracy story.)Įxamples of the "best of" lists can be found here, here, here and here. The other lists that I could find mostly fell into two camps: very short lists of the very "best of" the show, and lists of all the mythology episodes. The only reason I created my own is that I wasn't satisfied with what was out there. Of course, I'm not the only person out there to create a list of which X-Files to watch. I share it with you, the internet, in the hopes some may find it useful. Enough to get a sense of the whole series, without actually watching the whole series. I can barely keep up with the current TV shows I'm into, let alone something that debuted 20 years ago and that I've watched before.Īnd so I created the following viewing list for my wife and I, boiling down 201 into a more manageable 80. I don't have time for 201 episodes of anything, even my all-time favorite show. The problem is, there are two-hundred and one episodes, plus two feature films. I've also been promising my wife, who never got into the show, that I would show her what it's all about. It's been streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime for some time now, and I've been wanting to do a complete re-watch, a hankering given even more urgency by the announcement of an all new, six episode miniseries in January. I was young when I first started watching (probably too young for this show), and it was the first TV series where I ever crossed over from merely enjoying it to being a bona fide fan, seeking out everything related to the show and of course never missing an episode (at least, until near the very end more on that later).
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