The X-Files: Existence (8.21)

Existence is cool and showy for the most part, even if the first thirty minutes are essentially more grandiose remakes of the very same scenes depicted last week. There are more chases through underground parking lots, more running up stairwells, more Billy Miles Terminator theatrics (despite his ending up crushed to death in Essence). It's still vacuous entertainment, and there are certainly moments that perk up your interest, but there's little here to justify why this needed to be a two-hour finale.

The X-Files: Essence (8.20)

This feels a lot like one of the conspiracy episodes of yesteryear, opening with one of those pretentious narrations that Chris Carter killed us all with when the show first began, followed by a series of scenes in which agents break into buildings, interrogate shifty individuals and argue over alien experiments. While it's all breezily entertaining, this isn't an episode that breaks any new ground, and in some ways feels almost regressive.

The X-Files: Alone (8.19)

There's something amusingly retrospective about Alone, Frank Spotnitz having fun with a guest character who easily subs in for the show's audience, referencing old cases and generally enjoying her time with the X-Files. At the same time, Doggett easily takes the reigns for the hour, showing that he's more than a capable protagonist for the show, should Scully finally bow out. As a monster episode, Alone isn't hugely interesting. Besides some neat special effects, the story becomes overly familiar when Doggett and Harrison get stuck underground and seek their escape, but I guess that isn't the point of the hour. It's a throwback episode, a bittersweet closer to the monster-of-the-week Mulder years.

The X-Files: Vienen (8.18)

A necessary episode, but one that travels down predictable roads. Mulder and Doggett's relationship has quickly devolved into a macho pissing contest, barking demands at each other and undermining each other's vastly different methods of investigation. Unfortunately, there's little of the deeper shading to this tension. While recent episodes have tread similar ground, they at least rooted their animosity in some kind of fear or personal trauma, here they're like mismatched agents in a buddy cop movie.

The X-Files: Empedocles (8.17)

Had The X-Files exhausted its standalone origins by this point? Are there no more monster-of-the-week stories left to tell? I ask because Empedocles opens up as a traditional standalone mystery, only to become another episode more concerned with character development than breezy spookiness. I'm not complaining, since the Doggett work here is particularly strong, but it feels like forever since we had an honest-to-God, straight-forward horror episode -- and you have to wonder if the well has finally gotten dry. The show is about to close its eighth season... so it's not surprising, but it's hard not to miss what was at one point such a trademark of the series.

The X-Files: Three Words (8.16)

The show has put us as an audience into a daring position following the return of Mulder. One of the lasting images from Deadalive was Doggett's saddening step back as he saw Mulder and Scully's reunion at the hospital, something that threatened to leave Doggett out in the cold. But here, in the first real episode with the three of them together, it's actually Mulder who suddenly appears so alien and detached from the X-Files universe. Presumably to make up for lost time, he's brash and dangerously determined, breaking orders and casting suspicion on literally everyone he stumbles upon-- in particular Doggett. With this, Mulder isn't somebody we can entirely root for anymore. And that's a scary new development.

The X-Files: Deadalive (8.15)

The X-Files has always been a two-person show. We may have had supporting characters coming and going over the years, but the big draw was always the banter between two FBI agents, the butting heads and romantic undercurrent -- two against the world as they crack conspiracies and solve monster mysteries. With Mulder's disappearance, Doggett was brought on as something of a placeholder for David Duchovny, something that ended up working better than it easily could have done. But what Deadalive does so well is positioning Doggett within the series in the aftermath of Mulder's unexpected return. Three's a crowd, and the emotional crux of the hour is generated by Doggett working out his place in the suddenly-crowded X-Files.

The X-Files: This Is Not Happening (8.14)

It's always admirable when a genre show focuses on the raw naturalism of an extreme event. Fox Mulder vanished several months ago, without a trace. Nobody would rationally believe that he'd been taken by extraterrestrial forces. His entire being is somewhere unexplainable. Every part of him has gone, and the people left behind are constantly hitting brick walls in their pursuit of him. The entire concept of a person just disappearing is unimaginably awful, and this episode successfully put the honest truth of the situation ahead of myth-arc hoodoo... and that was nice.

The X-Files: Per Manum (8.13)

Scully's pregnancy has been a cold affair since it was introduced at the end of last season, kept on the back-burner presumably to give Doggett's introduction some breathing room. Per Manum is really the first episode to push her story center stage, and it winds up being one of the more successful mythology hours. It goes without saying that these types of X-File turn out stronger when they directly involve characters we love, and Scully gets pulled through the ringer here. Gillian Anderson is always great, but I especially enjoyed seeing Scully working the case through the vacuum of her inner denial, verbally reacting to things as an FBI agent while internally breaking down over her own personal involvement in the case.

The X-Files: Medusa (8.12)

There are various real-world locales that I've always felt work wonders when depicted through the prism of genre film-making. Like planes or trains or subway stations. It's why I always dug The Lady Vanishes, or Daylight, or the parts after they get off the bus in Speed (woops, spoiler!) Medusa opens promisingly, with some sort of acid-monster presumably responsible for the death of an undercover cop on a subway train. Soon after, we're introduced to a collection of guest characters to support Scully and Doggett, giving Medusa an early air of vintage X-Files classics like Ice. But rapidly the potential trappings of locale-set storytelling take over, leaving the episode feeling like a strained collection of dimly-lit scenes involving people walking along empty tunnels.

The X-Files: The Gift (8.11)

I've written a lot this season about the writer's strange creative decisions when it comes to Doggett. The year opened with some particularly strong characterization for him, the character initially by-the-book and arguably antagonistic, before becoming deeper connected with Scully and intrigued by the possibility of supernatural phenomena. Then the show embarked on a run of episodes where his character was either intentionally left out of proceedings, or merely had Scully's pre-season eight dialogue subbed in for his own. The Gift produces an immediate turn-around in regards to his character, pushing him center stage and once again tying him in with the bigger scheme at play.

The X-Files: Badlaa (8.10)

About twenty minutes into Badlaa, I thought this was seriously one of the coolest episodes in a long, long time. We have creepy Indian mystics rolling around on carts, crawling up people's butts and stowing away inside their host's bodies for a quick trip across the world. There's a fantastic sequence in which Scully cuts open a man's body to find said Indian dwarf wriggling around inside, before he flees and crawls out of the medical lab. This is all just crazily awesome. But gradually as Badlaa continued, it suddenly dawned on me that literally none of this makes sense...

The X-Files: Salvage (8.9)

One comment in the writers' room inspired this entire episode, didn't it? "Wouldn't it be cool if Terminator 2's Robert Patrick remarked that metal-men only existed in movies?" And then they ran with it... Salvage, like last week's Surekill, struggles to become anything more than 'a cool idea'. Wade Andrew Williams, a great character actor, is unfortunately handed an antagonist whose entire personality boils down to a collection of mumbles and grunts -- he looks awesome on a visual level, with the metallic wounds and the metal fibers growing out of his head like facial hair, but Salvage ends up being a routine revenge tale, and not a very competently-told one at that.

The X-Files: Surekill (8.8)

Watching Surekill, I kept imagining ways that it could have been more interesting. Most of them revolve around the 'superpower' of the week, in this case the ability to see through walls. There's only one scene here that truly works, in which Tammi Peyton remarks that she feels like she's always being watched, X-ray visioned Dwight presumably peeking in at her from outside the room. It's a really vivid moment of creepy voyeurism, positioning the ability as something that's intrinsically unnerving, bringing out the reality in a supernatural situation -- since we can all kind of relate to the fear of being secretly watched. But, for some reason, Surekill ends up really dragging, Greg Walker's script struggling to find anything truly exciting within his intriguing premise.

The X-Files: Via Negativa (8.7)

This could have easily been a Freddy Krueger retread, and certain scenes do feel remarkably similar to those popularized in that seminal '80s dream-killer franchise. But Frank Spotnitz stumbles into new territory with his antagonist's M.O., Tipet able to cross into a higher plane of consciousness and embrace his inner darkness, leading him to a dream-state killing spree. There are some intriguing ideas here, notably the concept of exploiting the anger within us all so much that we become murderers. This is a story that is clearly highly-researched, Spotnitz pulling from strands including biblical prophecy, the Eye of Providence, cults like Jonestown, as well as modern-day spirituality. It's all evident on-screen, and raises the bar for what could have been a pretty mundane monster-of-the-week story.

The X-Files: Redrum (8.6)

Forcing Mulder and Scully to take a backseat and thrusting a guest star center stage has had mixed results in the past, but Redrum quietly falls into the more successful category of this type. While it's again a little unusual to see Doggett get pushed into the background for the second time in just six episodes (surely the writers should want to utilize him more?), Redrum is brilliantly carried by Joe Morton, who manages to convince as a character stuck in an unusual sci-fi predicament of experiencing days unfolding in reverse, except he only has memories of the future. It takes a while to wrap your head around it, but this eventually proves to be pretty fun.

The X-Files: Invocation (8.5)

Like a lot of David Amann's work on this show, Invocation features a ton of impressive moments and ideas, but falters a lot as an actual episode on its own. Too much seems to happen over the course of the hour, the script folding in Doggett back-story with 'evil kid' tropes, as well as a fractured family and a bunch of redneck child murderers. On their own, each one of these elements is impressive, but thrown together like this and failing to give much resolution to any one of the stories in the end only helps in making Invocation sort of a misfire.

The X-Files: Roadrunners (8.4)

Ranking up there with Home in terms of grizzly scares, Roadrunners is one of the eeriest episodes in a long while, Scully embracing the classic female horror movie protagonist role as she's pursued and attacked by a group of crazed cult members in the middle of the desert. Vince Gilligan's script is straight out of the genre playbook, with an isolated Scully cut off from the outside world and trapped in an abandoned desert town populated by a collection of vacant eccentrics. The story opens traditionally, before turning into one of the most gory horror shows I've seen.

The X-Files: Patience (8.3)

With Doggett settling into his new role as an agent of the X-Files, it's natural that Patience is a traditional monster episode. As a standalone mystery, there's a lot to enjoy. The bat monster thing is one of the most unsettling antagonists in a while, and I liked the idea of it lying in wait for the perfect opportunity to exact revenge. But, generally, the script kind of dovetails down strange new roads as the story continues, eventually wrapping up with two eccentric guest characters and over-reliance on shady monster attacks in dark environments.

The X-Files: Without (8.2)

This is essentially one long chase scene, Kim Manners photographing the Arizona desert beautifully and brilliantly conveying its scope and intensity. It's also one of the stronger uses of the Alien Bounty Hunter, who shapeshifts into a variety of different characters during the hour. With that in mind, the episode lifts from the season one masterpiece Ice as well as the obvious influence of John Carpenter's The Thing. There's an enjoyable sense of paranoia throughout the episode, through both the shapeshifting mystery as well as the feeling that this is a whole new world for Scully and Skinner, both being the only characters we can fully trust at this point.