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45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bonding In The Pursuit Of The Paranormal., February 10, 2008
Despite the loss of fine writer Darin Morgan, this may have been the best season of this very underappreciated series? Honestly, I think this season & season five are tied as the best two of the entire series. At least Twenty of the Twenty Four episodes were excellent. After moving from Friday night to Sunday night the X-Files placed in the top Nielsen Twenty & often the top Ten on a regular basis. It was Fox's top rated show.
For me this season had the most imagination, action, suspense, fine acting, & special effects. The following exchange between the two main characters beliefs in episode "Herrenfolk" were the "soul of the series." Mulder{David Duchovny}, "You put such faith in your science, Scully{Gillian Anderson}, but... the things I've seen science provides no place to start." Scully: "Nothing happens in contradiction to nature; only in contradiction to what we know of it. So, that's a place to start. That's where the hope is." Season Fours "Mythology" episodes continued the storyline that was the heart of the series. It created new questions which added more depth since many of the old questions were often left unanswered as loosends.
This season saw more clones, shapeshifting aliens, black oil aliens, & Mulder's old enemy, Alex Krycek. The newest plot thread was Scully's battle with Cancer, which was a side effect of her season two abduction. The soul searching angst brought out the best in both the actors & characters as their bond grew. Gillian Anderson certainly deserved her Emmy award.
The most Classic episodes of this season were, "Home"- Mulder & Scully try to unravel the mystery of a deformed infant. This had some fun moments despite it's grisly subject matter. "Tunguska"- A Martian Meteorite gives the agents plenty of clues about the Black oil, while Krycek leads Mulder on a chase in Russia. "Paper Hearts"- a serial killer with the ability to influence dreams leads Mulder to question his memories about his sisters abduction. David Duchovny should have won the Emmy for this one. "Memento Mori"- Scully finds out that she has inoperable Cancer, as do other women who were abducted. While she undergoes an experimental treatment, Mulder hunts to find a cure & answers. "Small Potatoes"- A series of bizarre pregnancies lead Mulder & Scully to investigate a man who can change his appearance. This episode was included in TV Guide as one of the top one hundred greatest episodes of all time, I agree. "Demons"- Mulder has blackouts & memory loss while being accused of a double-murder. Did he do it, or will he be cleared? "Gethsemane"- Scully fights her Cancer, while Mulder fights to protect what he feels is undeniable proof of alien life. The tearful climax was worth the wait. This season should get nine out of ten stars.
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36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great season, extras disk not included but great price, February 9, 2006
"The X-Files" continued on a roll with a stellar fourth season with the exception of one or two episodes. The show continued to be one of the best on TV even when it went into a sharp decline with season 7. "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" remains one of the wittiest and funnest episodes of the show while "Paper Hearts" remains one of the most moving. In this episode a serial killer that Mulder put away prior to being assigned to the X files contacts him. He tells Mulder that there are more victims than have been found. He also tells Mulder that his sister wasn't abducted by aliens at all--this is a memory that Mulder fabricated to deal with what really happened. The killer took his sister and he'll reveal more about all of this if Mulder will agree to provide him with his momento book. It's a brilliant, tragic and ultimately moving episode that does everything that the series did best. It's also one of the finest hours of TV you'll ever see filled with suspense, powerful acting and imaginative direction that rivals a feature film. "Leonard Betts" managed to have the gross out factor of "Home" with more imagination. We literally have a "Cancer Man" in this episode. Betts is a paramedic. He's kiled in an accident but somehow his headless corpse manages to walk out of the morgue. The worst episode has got to be the horrible "The Field Where I Died"; good performances as usual and direction but surprisingly its badly written by Morgan and Wong. I take issue with "El Mundo Gira" being the worst episode of season four--at least it had a sense of humor to it. "Small Potatoes" remains a delight with writer Darin Morgan (who wrote "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" among other classic episodes)as a guy who just wants to have kids. Lots of them with tails. It's whimsical in the best sense. "Momento Mori" is another fine and powerful episode. Roy Thinnes (ironically cast as an alien when he was the "Mulder" on the Quinn Martin TV show "The Invaders") appears in a great story arc where Mulder finds his sister in an unexpected place. "Max" features the return of a character abducted by aliens from the first season. It's a fascinating episode that, again, does shows why at its peak this was THE BEST show on TV.
This will feature the exact same transfer as the previous set with deleted scenes, commentary and international clips included. What's missing is the booklet, deluxe packaging (some people hate it)and the final disc with all the featurettes, documentaries, etc. Some of the special features include commentary tracks by writer Frank Spotnitz on "Momento Mori" and by Vince Gilligan on "Small Potatoes". There are also deleted scenes throughout the set. Go to special features prior to watching the episode and select the deleted scene option to add it back into the episode. An X will appear in the corner alerting you to its appearence. Missing are the promotional spots, the documentary, the "Behind-The-Truth" spots from when the show was being aired on F/X and the DVD-ROM game "Urbs Tertia".
Many point to the show's move to Los Angeles as the reason the show lost creative steam--the reality is simpler--the show had reached it's peak by the sixth season with a slow gradual decline. While I enjoyed every season, season seven saw a marked drop in the quality of the show despite some appealing episodes. I enjoyed every season of the show but the last three presented a ship without a rudder--the show seemed less directed and focused than before. Unlike some fans I liked when Robert Patrick came on board--his new character brought conflict and focus back to the show even if for a brief period. Patrick's character Dogget provided a nice foil to Anderson's Scully during these seasons as more of the main characters became "believers" in Mulder's ongoing crusade.
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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another outstanding season from the show's creative peak, January 21, 2006
What a difference a year makes! A year ago I was ranting and raving that Twentieth Century Fox was bringing out the four-volume Mythology sets of THE X-FILES, something for which there was minimal demand, while what we really needed was an edition of the show that was actually affordable. And here we have it! Moreover, they aren't dawdling with the release dates. In only a few months we will have all nine seasons out at prices that the average individual can afford. Not just that, but far better packaging than in the original sets.
There are a host of opinions concerning when THE X-FILES was at its highpoint, but while I love all nine seasons, including the wildly reviled seventh and ninth seasons, I do think that from the second season until somewhere in the sixth the show was at its creative peak. Because story lines spill over from one season to another, contrasting Season Four with either Three or Five doesn't really have much of a pay off. Let's just say that here we see the show in the middle of its creative peak.
This season contains some of the show's most memorable moments, none more haunting than the opening image in "Memento Mori," as the camera seems to travel through a tunnel to look upon a woman in a hospital gown looking at an X-ray, only for us to discover that it is Scully looking at the evidence that she has a brain tumor. Or the deeply disturbing "Unruhe," which is truly nightmarish and demonstrated how scary THE X-FILES could be at its best, unlike most shows that even at their scariest are rather tame affairs. The season also contains an episode that many think may have gone too far, the genuinely upsetting "Home," in which Mulder and Scully discover a profoundly inbred family that keeps their limbless mother under a bed on a skid. I will confess that while I have watched THE X-FILES all the way through three times, I have never been able to rewatch "Home." The Fourth Season also has a host of outstanding Mythology episodes, beginning with "Herrenvolk" and continuing with "Tunguska," "Terma," "Tempus Fugit," "Max," and "Gesthemene." There is also the famous episode "Never Again," in which Jodie Foster provided the voice for a tattoo that drove a man to commit murder. It is also an important episode for showing Scully's growing sense of self-doubt about what she is doing with her life.
of THE X-FILES broke into two unequal parts. The first two thirds tended to drop many of the ongoing development of the series story arc to focus instead on individual stand-alone episodes. Now, these were largely great episodes, but THE X-FILES was always at its best when it focused more on the longer story than on individual stories. There were some major plot developments in the first two-thirds of the season, however. Most importantly, we learn that there is a deep and shocking connection between Mulder's mother and Cancer Man aka The Smoking Man, to the extent that one even wonders if he an
Season Four does not have as many great comic episodes as Season Three, partly because Darin Morgan ceased writing for the show (or any show, with only minor exceptions, a situation I hope changes because the man is clearly one of the great writers in television). Morgan does, however, appear as an actor in "Small Potatoes," as a man capable of altering his shape at will, a skill he employs to change himself into a physical copy of the husbands or lovers of women he would like to sleep with, and in once instance as Luke Skywalker. He very nearly achieves a moment of bliss with Scully by changing himself into Mulder, her willingness hinting at plot twists in future seasons. Another great comic episode is a wonderful parody of FORREST GUMP, with the Cigarette Smoking Man (who my daughter and I like to call the HCSM, since he actually does not smoke, and uses herbal cigarettes onscreen). The Smoking Man ending up as one of the driving forces of modern history, yet privately yearns more than anything to become a professional writer. In one of the most poignant moments in the entire run of the show, he manages to get a single short story published in what turns out to be a soft-core porn mag, and when he reads what they have done to his story, he agonizingly is forced to destroy the letter of resignation that he had planned to submit. It is a brilliant episode in part because he adds enormous complexity to all of his future appearances on the show.
There is no more somber plot line in THE X-FILES than the Scully cancer arc. The last third of the season is dominated by the sense that she is a dying woman, a fact the viewers are reminded of by her frequent nosebleeds. During the last third of the season the plot thickens considerably indeed. The year ends with a host of questions. Will Scully die? Did Mulder really die in the final episode? If not, why did Scully identify the corpse as Mulder's? What is the connection between the CSM and Mulder? Could he be Mulder's biological father? And will more develop out of that big tease moment in the episode where there Mulder-lookalike comes within an inch of kissing Scully? And was she as willing to kiss him as she appeared? In fact, although Mulder and Scully are have a great interpersonal chemistry and both are ridiculously gorgeous looking, the first four seasons are remarkable for the lack of romantic interest they express towards one another. In Season Three there are a couple of episodes where they express considerable jealousy towards others who get close to their partner (e.g., "Bambi" in the great cockroach episode from Season Three), but the show never lingers over this or expands this. Clearly Mulder and Scully love each other and are deeply committed to the welfare of the other, but there is little or no romantic element in this.
Season Four also illustrates some of the problems that plagued the show, in fact the only problems that plagued the show until the very end when it lost some of its creative energy. This was the tendency both to develop parallel plot lines that somewhat contradicted other plot lines and before a prior plotline had been fully developed. For instance, by the end of the season there was the clear implication that the X-Files were a gigantic scam on the part of nefarious forces within the industrial-military complex, that they had "created" Mulder. In fact, the first episode of Season Five would take this a step further, in a very funny episode in which the gents who would form The Lone Gunman pooled their resources for the first time and at the same time met Mulder, who at the time was not interested in the X-Files. The episode represents Mulder as being exposed to a powerful drug that would cause extreme paranoia and a tendency to conspiratorial thinking. This was all enormously funny, but it also undercut the show's own mythology. This lack of internal consistency was, in my opinion, the only thing that kept THE X-FILES from being as superb overall as BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. While BUFFY got its mythology straightened out, THE X-FILES never did. Speculating further along these lines, one wonders if this illustrates the difference between Chris Carter and Joss Whedon. Carter tends to be more tactical as a creative talent, whereas Whedon is a strategist who thinks seasons ahead. The Carter versus Whedon factor is especially crucial when one considers that several key figures on THE X-FILES, including David Greenwalt, Howard Gordon, Tim Minear, and Jeffrey Bell, would serve as producers on ANGEL (and in the case of Minear, FIREFLY) as well. Or perhaps Greenwalt, Gordon, Minear, and Bell learned the mistake of not under girding a show with a consistent mythology.
Nonetheless, THE X-FILES managed a consistency despite the inconsistent mythology behind the episodes. This largely stems from two things: the absolutely magnificent writing on individual episodes and the astonishingly good cast. Few characters in the history of TV have held a show together as well as Mulder and Scully. BUFFY, to keep that parallel going, was always held together more by the writing than by the cast (though the cast was good also). David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (by the way, a natural blonde who is impossible to imagine without her red dye job) are not merely the glue of the show, but the nuts and bolts as well. I believe Anderson especially is outrageously underrated as an actress (though if everyone saw her in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH their minds might be changed). In episode after episode I marvel at how both of them bring so much more to their roles than can possibly be contained on the page).
But this is nitpicking. By any standard this is one of the highpoints in the history of television. And I am just grateful that I am now going to own these sets instead of being a frequent renter.
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