“While I’m busy at with the Television Critics Association this week, Film Channel editor William Bibbiani offered to contribute some picks for Best Episode Ever. The first of two, Bibbs chose ‘The X-Files’ for us, particularly good timing given the ‘X-Files’ anniversary panel that just took place at Comic-Con .” – Fred Topel
It figures. I get invited to write a guest column for Best Episode Ever and I foolishly suggest that I pick an episode of “The X-Files,” one of the most popular TV shows of all time, which boasts more classic episodes than some whole networks can muster in a decade.
What about “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose?” Emmy-winning guest star Peter Boyle’s title character is the most sympathetic figure that “The X-Files” ever conceived: a psychic who takes no joy in his abilities, who kept to himself until a serial killer took to murdering psychics and no one else could assist in the case. The joy comes from the episode’s humor – the showbiz mentalist The Great Yappi is nothing if not an ideal comic foil for true believer Fox Mulder – but the heartache comes from the episode’s final reveal, that hope and fatalism are not mutually exclusive.
Or what about “Humbug,” the hilarious sideshow episode about another serial killer, this one mysteriously assaulting retired circus freaks, who defy expectation based on their physical appearance, but like the rest of us can sometimes be more disturbing than they seem? What about “War of the Coprophages,” which illustrated better than any episode the way incidental evidence leads Mulder to believe in conspiracy theories that, when presented any other way, sound utterly ridiculous, like a stealth invasion of Earth by robot cockroach aliens?
One thing these episodes have in common is that they are not so-called “conspiracy” episodes, which furthered “The X-Files’” ongoing plot about an elaborate government cover-up of a decades-old alien invasion. Although initially intriguing, and playing cannily into the post-Cold War tendency for Americans to push their paranoia inward now that external threats seemed so unlikely (how naïve we were), it rapidly became clear that “The X-Files” was basically making the subplot up as it went along, and had no dramatically satisfying linear storyline planned from the beginning. Even the better episodes in the long-running story arc are now marred by their association to a plotline that (at best) made little sense, and (at worst) was terminally obtuse.
So the Best Episode Ever of “The X-Files” would have to be a so-called “Monster of the Week” episode, which comprised the majority of the series and found FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), ever the believer, and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), ever the skeptic, traversing the country investigating one inexplicable crime after another, and learning valuable lessons about the American cultural identity and mankind’s obsession with the supernatural. And, if my initial ideas for the Best Episode Ever were any indication, it would have to be written by Darin Morgan, who scripted only four full episodes of “The X-Files,” but created a TV classic in each one.
And so, as obvious at it may be, and as hard as I tried to resist it, it became abundantly clear: the Best Episode Ever of “The X-Files” is the critically-acclaimed “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space.’”
The 20th episode of Season 3 guest-starred Charles Nelson Reilly as the best-selling author Jose Chung, whose latest opus is a “non-fiction science fiction” story about the conflicting accounts of a supposedly real-life alien abduction. Chung – a spritely and affable figure, spurred by his love of prose but unapologetic about making money based on all this alien/conspiracy pop culture zeitgeist – interviews Dana Scully (herself an avowed fan of Chung’s work) about the incident, and the bulk of the episode reveals itself in one subjective flashback after another.
The story itself is actually strangely straightforward, if you can get past the elliptical flashback-within-a-flashback structure, designed to keep you engaged in the episode’s mysteries, but always a little off-balance. It begins with a typical “X-Files” scenario: two young lovers, Chrissy (Sarah Sawatsky) and Harold (Jason Gaffney), encounter a flying saucer and two grey aliens on their first date. Then, the twist: the two teenagers and the two greys are visited by a third alien, a seemingly stop-motion monstrosity (actually, it has been reported, a guy in a suit filmed to look like he was in stop-motion). “Jack! What is that thing?” says one of the greys. “How the hell should I know?” says the other, lips not moving, through an obvious latex max.
