The X-files (1993 series)

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Summary

"The truth is out there. I want to believe." Two FBI agents, Fox Mulder the believer and Dana Scully the skeptic, investigate the strange and unexplained while hidden forces work to impede their efforts.

Details

• Release Date: 1993-present
• Country/Language: US, English
• Genres/Technical: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Mystery (monster-of-the-week), occasional Comedy (dark humor)
• Runtime: (generally formatted for a 1-hour commercial television slot)
• Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Mitch Pileggi
• Creator: Chris Carter
• Producer/Production Co: Ten Thirteen Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, 20th Century Fox Television, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Dune Entertainment III
• View Trailers/Promotional Shorts: (Intro), (Season1), (1998_film), (2008_film), (2016_revival)
• TVTropes: (link)
• IMDB Page: (link), (link), (link)

Ratings

MPAA Ratings

• Rated: generally TV-14/PG-13(Violence, mild Profanity and Adult Content)

Episodes of the series over its long run could range anywhere from mostly kid-friendly, to the infamous episode "Home" (about depraved, incestuous, hideously deformed mutant hillbilly cannibal-rapists, the first episode of The X-Files to be rated TV-MA and carry a viewer discretion warning about graphic content).

Tentacle Ratings

A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:

• Ss___ (One and a Half Tentacles: Barely Lovecraftian)

Generally not very "Lovecraftian", though Lovecraft was almost certainly one of the inspirations (either directly or indirectly) for the series; the monster-of-the-week formula used in the program's long run, combined with a main story arc premise involving paranormal investigators tracking down sketchy information about ancient alien astronauts and conspiracies filtered through a variety of unreliable narrator sources should hint at some occasionally vaguely Lovecraftian themes and make this series a useful source of ideas for Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu scenarios.

Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.

Reviews

Review Links:

• (review needed)

Synopses of Suggested Episodes

Some suggested episodes either with vaguely Lovecraftian overtones, or which might provide some inspiration for Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green scenarios:

• "Pilot" - FBI Agent Dana Scully is assigned to work with Agent Fox Mulder on the "X-Files" in an attempt to discredit his work on the paranormal. Their first case has them investigating apparent alien abductions when a near comatose man, Billy Miles takess his classmates into the woods, where they are killed in a flash of bright light.
• "Conduit" - As the Section Chief expresses his concern with the direction of the X-Files department, Mulder becomes obsessed with solving a case that closely parallels an encounter he experienced as a child, which dealt with alien abduction and an exploration of Mulder's determination to find his sister, Samantha.
• "The Jersey Devil" - An homage to Night Stalker (1972 franchise) in which the murder of a homeless man leads Mulder and Scully to the legendary man-beast the Jersey Devil roaming in the forests surrounding Atlantic City.
• "Ice" - When an Arctic research team mysteriously kill each other and themselves only days after drilling deeper into the ice than ever before, Mulder and Scully accompany a team of doctors and scientists to investigate. They discover an organism which infects living creatures and amplifies the host's feeling of anger and paranoia, and the new team starts to deteriorate as they wonder who among them are killers.
• "Eve" - When two fathers on opposite sides of the country are inexplicably murdered at exactly the same time in exactly the same way, Mulder and Scully find that their eight-year-old daughters are perfect twins and were created in order to continue The Litchfield Experiment, a eugenics project of the 1950s which produced cloned boys named Adam and girls named Eve who have heightened strength and intelligence, but are prone to psychotic behavior.
• "Gender Bender" - A series of identical sexual murders, where the killer appears to be both male and female, draw Mulder and Scully to members of a strange religious sect who may be of alien origin, leading to the discovery of a man who can change sex.
• "Darkness Falls" - Mulder and Scully travel to a remote area of Washington State National Forest after an entire group of thirty loggers goes missing. They soon discover that an unseen force that was lying dormant has been awakened.
• "Squeeze" - A series of murders appear to have no tangible method for the murderer's entrance and escape. Eugene Victor Tooms, a seemingly normal janitor, is suspected to be a mutant who kills his victims and extracts their livers in order to prolong his existence.
• "Tooms" - Tooms is released from the psychiatric sanitarium in which he was incarcerated for assaulting Scully – and he needs to kill once more to get the final liver which will allow him to hibernate for another thirty years. Mulder and Scully race against time to find evidence of his involvement in the past string of murders before Tooms disappears again.
• "The Host" - When a man's decomposed body is found in the sewers of Newark, Mulder is given the supposed "grunt" work. But after Scully's autopsy turns up a parasite living inside the body and a sewer worker is attacked and bitten by something, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
• "Firewalker" - A malfunction in a robot designed for volcanic exploration yields evidence of a lifeform living in the caves. When this lifeform seemingly causes the death of a member of the research team, Mulder and a newly recovered Scully are flown out to the site in The Cascades to investigate before anyone else dies.
• "Red Museum" - Several Wisconsin teens are found wandering in the woods in their underwear with "He Is One" scrawled on their backs. Mulder and Scully travel to investigate this aberrant behavior, though the strangest thing in this meat-producing area is a mysterious cult of vegetarian "walk-ins."
• "Die Hand Die Verletzt" - Teenage students at Crowley High School feign an occult ritual in an attempt to "score" and inadvertently cause the murder and mutilation of one of their group. When Mulder and Scully are called to look into the matter, the town's real cultists attempt to hide their tracks, though it seems there is a mysterious force at work that even the cultists are afraid of.
• "Fresh Bones" - One morning, after two gruesome hallucinations, an Army Private crashes his car into a tree that has a voodoo symbol drawn on it; the second death of a marine in two weeks that has featured that symbol. The marines in question were guarding a processing centre for Haitian refugees, and when Mulder and Scully visit the centre they find the deaths were not as unexpected as they seemed.

Notes

Associated Mythos Elements

• TO DO