I caught a couple of old X-Files eps on tv this morning. Boy that was a good show. It worked on so many levels, with all of the running plots and sub plots and season and series long arcs. Add to that the fact that almost every ep can stand alone as a solid hour of programming and you've got an all around stellar show. Thinking back, I don't think I ever saw the last few seasons.
Hows this for a mind fuck: the first ep I ever saw was the Season 1 finale at a friends house where Mulder was running in the desert and looking in silos and shit. I was 12, and for the rest of my middle school Fridays I was in front of my TV at 9pm to watch aliens, shadowy government officials, and unspoken sexual tension. It was a confusing time to be sure.
So heres the plan. There are 202 eps of the X-Files, each running about 45 minutes. If I wanted to watch the entire series from front to back so that I can finally see all the eps I've never seen before with the full context and feel of the show, it would take 9,090 minutes, or 151 1/2 hours. If you throw in the movie, that brings it to 153 hours of programing. If I watched for 6 hours a day (9 eps a day), it would take me almost an entire month to finish.
Now here is the interesting part. The "theme" of the show is alien abductions/odd shit involving aliens happening, and the different factions that know about it, are trying to cover it up, are trying to learn more, ect. At first blush it seems like every ep in the series involves stuff of this nature, but in reality only a few eps from each season deal with this subject matter, interjected around eps that are basically filler involving other paranormal subjects but don't really advance the long-running story line. It seems like there are 67 eps involving the alien story line (plus the movie), for a total viewing time of just over 50 hours. That seems more managable, yet it seems like I'd be losing some of the enjoyment of watching it through to the end.
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Watch them all. Yes a majority of the episodes have little or nothing to do with the "central" theme of govt. conspiracies and alien abductions, but you would be missing out on so much of what made the show so great. To me, the entire X-Files series was more about Mulder and Scully's relationship than it was about anything else, and IMO many of the best episodes were the stand-alone ones: the cockroach episode, the freak show, the beauty and the beast, etc etc. You won't regret taking the time to watch them all, I promise.
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