Too Hot For TV

S01 E06 - White Powder Infused Confidence

• Too Hot For TV • Season 1 • Episode 6

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On this episode Dylan is joined by Iain Martin to discuss the expanded media of the X Files. First up its the audio book of 'Ground Zero' written by Kevin J. Anderson and read by Gillian Anderson. Then they look at the 1998 film 'The X Files' directed byRob Bowman and written byChris Carter.

SPEAKER_03

Welcome back to To Hot for TV. We are the podcast that looks at all things expanded universe. And today we're jumping into the expanded universe of the X-Files, and I'm joined by host of We're All Stories in the End, the High Council and Electric Sodcast. It's Ian Martin. Ian, welcome.

SPEAKER_04

Good evening. Sorry, I can't stop doing that now. Um hello, how are you, sir? I'm very well, thanks. How are you? Good. I'm really good. I've been having a lovely time of it lately, just kind of you know, watching classic TV and uh waiting for the snow to melt and the new spring to make all the all the cherry trees blossom and the world begins again, and here we are, new life, new energy, talking about something else that's about 40 years old. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_03

Waiting on World War III. Yes. So we're doing the X-Files today. What's your relationship with the X-Files? Are you a big fan? Are you a casual fan? What are you?

SPEAKER_04

I was a phenomenal X-Files obsessive in the 90s, which I'm questioning now, because I think probably at least 60% of my infatuation with the show was because I was obsessed with Gillian Anderson, which I have now grown out of, although I do find myself leaning more towards David DeCovny now. Not necessarily in that way, but I just think he's a he's a geezer. But in the 90s, because we had that vacuum, because there was no Doctor Who, and we all needed some sci-fi, and along came the X-Files, and I think we all adopted it unquestioningly. And these guys became our heroes. And I was videoing it off the TV and buying all the books and the tie-in books and the behind-the-scenes books and everything, and queuing up at the cinema to get in first to see the movie, and you know, I even watched the the last couple of series that they rebooted in about 2016, 2017. I even watched those, and those are not those are not good.

SPEAKER_03

I never got that far myself. I went X-Files Mad like the rest of England when I was a kid. I enjoyed the first four or five series, something like that. The moment it went over to Sky, I stopped watching because I didn't have Sky at the time. But certainly the stuff that was on terrestrial TV, I bought a handful of videos, a handful of books, comics, things like that. But when you're a nerd, you've only got time to really commit to one show. And um I was very much Doctor Who, Doctor Who, Doctor Who. So the X-Files had a little bit of my love. I revisited it a little bit in lockdown, but it's not something I've gone back to. That's not to say that I dislike it in any way, shape, or form. It's just it was something that happened when I was a kid and I enjoyed it. And whenever I've seen an episode since, I've enjoyed it still. But the the fan gene isn't quite there for me.

SPEAKER_04

You know how when they look at a virus under the microscope and it has a lot of tendrils that reach out and hook into things.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And the X-Files, I don't think, has that. I think apart from the main premise of the show in each episode, the characters viewed through the eyes of me now as a grown-up, they're not great characters, they're a bit up themselves, they're achingly conservative, and in many ways quite quite dull people. So if you if you don't happen to be massively in love with Gillian Anderson, I mean so I was at university when the X-Files was in its heyday, and my entire wall was a collage of pictures of Gillian Anderson. It was tragic.

SPEAKER_03

Well, she was everywhere, wasn't she? The X-Files is responsible for making sci-fi a bit cool, mainstream, and sexy in the 90s. Like before that, it's people in Lycra in Starter at the Next Generation, and whatever you say about them, I don't think the general public went, oh, look at those cool, sexy people. But the whole, like, Gillian Anderson was on the cover of FHM and things like that. You know, they were, if not the world's sexiest man and woman in the polls, uh, they were certainly in the top ten. Like they were very much loved, and their will they won't they relationship pulled everybody into this show in a way that Doctor Who fans sometimes use the term soapy elements, but it's not soapy elements, it's just real life creeping in, it's just normal drama. And I think that is the smart thing that got people who don't care about alien abductees and you know, monsters under the bed, as it were. It's like that's how they pulled people in, and I think that was a really smart thing to do by using these real-world things, and also by having a sceptic, because Mulder's the only one in that world that believes, and then everybody around is skeptical. And as people are skeptical of UFOs and indeed science fiction as a as a genre back then, so I think it's it's smart.

SPEAKER_04

It pulls in both halves of the audience because there are probably about as many people who do believe in aliens, and they're going, Yay Mulder. And everyone else is like, Yay, Scully. Yeah. Defeat him with your implatable logic. Implat that's not even a word. Indefatigable logic. And then take your clothes off. I mean, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

So what about extended media? Are you a big fan of X-Files, expanded media?

SPEAKER_04

I was more of a dipper than an unquestioning hooverer.

SPEAKER_03

I've always thought that about you.

SPEAKER_04

Right. I mean, so it was the 90s. I was kind of transitioning from education to menial jobs in in in book selling. I was not a rich man. Every month I'd have maybe eight pounds of disposable income, and five of that was going on a new adventure novel. So I didn't have a lot. I didn't need a lot. The show gave me everything that I needed the X-Files franchise to give me. So if I found the collected comics in the works for a pound, sure I'd buy that. I'd go and see the movies. I had a great deal of I was gonna use the word fun, but that's really not the word. I had I spent a very great deal of time playing the PlayStation game of the X-Files. And I I read a couple of the books, but I didn't I wasn't a completist.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I had quite a few of the comics. Uh again, definitely bought in sales and stuff like that, rather than like, I must buy the X-Files comic every week. Once the local comic shop had had them on for six months, they'd you know, they'd end up in a pile somewhere for 50p, and that's when I'd grab a couple. I had quite a few books. I remember distinctly there being quite a few X-Files books in the book sales that would travel around schools. Uh and so picking up a few, like when the book sale was on, it was always like, oh, well, you get a bit of extra money because you can buy a book you want to read, and it was like outside of your normal pocket money. So if there was anything, anything remotely science fiction related. I remember buying a book of that was basically the history of Arnold Schwarzenegger films, and my parents being like, Well, you were supposed to buy a proper book. This is just pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger with like a minimal text. But uh, you know, that that that's what I got. And I I so I've definitely got some. There was a series of X-Files books that were like junior books that were meant for that age at that age range. So I I would have read them at the time, and somewhere in a box in my dad's loft, there'll be five or six X-Files books that I couldn't tell you whether I've read or not.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it was there was a a lot of stuff out there for to meet people's needs based on the sliding scale of how desperate they were to see uh two young professionals doing their chore.

SPEAKER_03

So the first thing we're going to cover today is the audiobook of Ground Zero, which was released on December 12th, 1995 from Harper Audio. It was written by Kevin J. Anderson. It was released on a two-cassette format and narrated by Gillian Anderson. Presumably, no relation. So, what was going on in the world of science fiction at the time? Well, if you've journeyed down to your cinema, you could see things like 12 Monkeys, Cyborg 3, Judge Dread, Tank Girl, Strange Days, Waterworld, and Dark Man 2. Or you could also, if you just went straight to video, get the Doctor Who spinoff downtime. While on TV we had the Outer Limits, Sliders, Space Above and Beyond, Bugs, Earth 2, and Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager. So that's the landscape of science fiction at the time. Do we remember it fondly? Or were you just the X-Files, X-Files, X-Files?

SPEAKER_04

It's brave of anyone to try and compete with Darkman 2. I gotta be honest, I love Darkman, but I've never seen either of the sequels. And I think I'd probably enjoy them more than Darkman, because at least the sequels I believe don't have Liam Neeson in them. So that's a win. There was a lot going on. I didn't really give much of a a fig about any of that stuff beyond the X-files, and obviously the Judge Dread movie, which was amazing.

SPEAKER_03

I love the Judge Dread movie. I've got a lot of time for it. Yeah. I know I know purists dislike it, but I think it's great fun. But what I will say is it's an interesting time. Like science fiction on telly's on the up, but Twelve Monkeys I think did okay. But Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, Waterworld, Strange Days, probably Dark Man 2. I don't think any of them did particularly well at the cinema. So it it it's very much like science fiction sort of fallen out of mainstream cinema. But then most of those shows we mentioned only lasted a few years.

SPEAKER_04

But but but we we do have things like The X-Files, which are, you know, had about 10 years of juice in them and and really caught the public imagination. You had the Batman franchise, you know, people were there. It's just that I think there was something about these particular movies that maybe didn't quite reach the same middle of the road average Joe to break out and become successful.

SPEAKER_03

The Outer Limits, which I mentioned there, was definitely brought back to cash in on the X-File's success. And there were two episodes that I remember scaring the shit out of me as a child. One was called, I think, Sand Kings, and it was about a man who had like an insect from Mars or something living in his garage in some sand. And the other one was about a teddy bear with glowing red eyes that was actually a troll that lived under a child's bed and kidnapped the child, and they scared the shit out of me. I looked under my bed for years afterwards before I went to bed because I was so terrified. And then, around the same time as I decided to watch some X-Files in lockdown and that they stood up very well, I watched those two episodes of The Outer Limits. They did not stand up so well. Like if X-Files is A-tier TV that has aged well largely, this stuff was like hokey sci-fi channel bollocks.

SPEAKER_04

But isn't that a good thing? Because imagine if they had they if if they were still as good as you remembered them, you'd have re-regenerated that fear and you'd still be checking under your bed to this very day.

SPEAKER_03

Dr. Gregory, a leading expert in nuclear weapons research, has just died. He's been reduced to a radioactive husk. Because the incident occurred on federal property. But Gregory's death is just the beginning. A second victim, someone with no connection to nuclear science, meets the same horrifying fate in the New Mexico desert. Then a third dies in an identical fashion in Washington. Faced with a growing pattern, Mulder and Scully realize these incidents could not be random. As they dig deeper, they discover this has been a coordinated attack orchestrated by Ryan Comida, who saw his family killed by an above-ground nuclear test and is now seeking revenge. So you picked this story. Why did you pick it, eh?

SPEAKER_04

Well, I'll tell you why. Because when you assemble people to talk about the expanded media of the X-Files, pretty much they're going to talk about the movies and things like that. And this I thought was just a little bit niche compared to some of those other things. It wasn't very well known. I mean, you know, the the tie-in books are going to appeal to a very small percentage of people that would watch the show. And this basically is the X-Files equivalent of a Doctor Who New Adventure novel. Someone's someone's been said, right, here's the here's the characters, write a book, do what you like, stay within the brand guidelines. And I imagine they were slightly bigger for the X-Files than they were at Virgin Towers. So it's an interesting thing to compare in the context of I I know TV time fiction really well. Yeah. Let's see let's see what happens with an X-Files version, especially when you, you know, when you're a you know 18-year-old boy who loves Gillian Anderson, and you can have her in your ears all the time, reading out, you know, just the just the most amazingly erotic fiction.

SPEAKER_03

This is where Ian's ASMR fetish really started. This is ground zero for that. So this was a book, and then they did the audiobook, which was Condensed Down, and there is a full reading of the audiobook that was available some years later, if you fancy the nine-hour version read by somebody else. But we went for the th what's about two and a half hours, three hours read by Mz Gillian Anderson at the time. Mmm. Does it capture the show well?

SPEAKER_04

It does, in a very specific sense. It captures that early, I mean, kind of season two, season three, maybe, but mainly season two energy. It's all straight down the line, it's very serious, very earnest. There's a lot of minutiae about red-eye flights and expense forms and so on. It it's a very good capturing and evocation of the serious side of very early X-Files.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it's not trying to break out and go, we've got the cliched unlimited budget of pros or anything like that, and oh, we can do anything we want with these characters. So it is very much X-Files by numbers. That's not to say it's bad X-Files or anything like that, but if we're comparing it to other tie-in media, something that completely reinvents the franchise for five years, you're you're just not getting that. Because this has got to exist alongside one of the most successful TV shows in the world at the time.

SPEAKER_04

Yes. And and there's a lot less wiggle room that they can bring to bear. Nevertheless, I think they do a good job of capturing the kind of poe-faced, joyless episodes, as opposed to the later, uh perhaps more entertaining, silly episodes.

SPEAKER_02

Are there silly episodes of The X-Files? Oh yes.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, it gets ridiculous. There's one that's all about baseball. And I think I think there's a an alien who's posing as human and he's so good at baseball that everyone works out he's an alien. You know, there are there's the comedy episode with uh Gary Schandling in it, because De Kovney would turn up in the Larry Sanders show. Um so they they did a reversal of that just for shits and giggles, and I think it was mainly an in-joke for the cast, but they put it on screen anyway. There as the show went on, and uh there's a lot of things to say about the show going on, but it they they did sort of you know run out of serious things to say, so they started to have more fun with it.

SPEAKER_03

Right. Okay, interesting. I because I would not fun is not something I would associate with the X-Files in any way, shape, or apart from have the fun of watching the episodes.

SPEAKER_05

Yes, good, good, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So it's a story by Kevin J. Anderson. Is it is it a compelling enough story?

SPEAKER_04

It's very much a kind of uh standard detective procedural novel, although uh through the prism of the X-files, so some of the investigative uh twists and turns depend more on bullshit theories Mulder plucks out of his arse rather than character and cop sixth edition. You know, it's it's um it's sober in the context of what it is. It's fairly compelling in the context of what it is. But at the same time if you if you come to it now, you're uh secretly hoping there's gonna be a massive alien invasion or a baseball playing alien.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Um it does something quite bizarre about a third of the way through, in that the antagonist of it essentially is this guy who's witnessed who's the only survivor of this nuclear disaster. Uh and uh halfway through after all these people have been killed by radiation, or a third of the way through, it suddenly cuts to him and basically explains who he is, gives his backstory, and you just go, Okay, well, that is the story there. So we we're just you've got to wait for the next two-thirds for Mulder and Scully to catch up and go, Oh I can see why he did that.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, structurally it's a disaster. If I was writing this, I'd have started with the scene where the young Ryan comeda is on the island with his father, and then they're wiped out by the nuclear blast, and that's that, and then you begin the story, and I would introduce this kind of shadowy figure who's sending these little files of radioactive dust to the people he wants to kill. And I wouldn't necessarily make it obvious who it was, but you'd get there through a process of, you know, solving the clues, maybe. Um but this is much more the the kind of Thomas Hardy school of just set up your premise on page one. He sold his wife, she's coming back eventually. I don't know if it's just that that writing stories has become more sophisticated in the last 30 years, but it feels like that.

SPEAKER_03

Because yeah, so Ryan Comeda is actually it's he's got great motives for doing what he's doing, and he's a really good character, and his backstory really works. But to sort of jizz it all away a third of the way into the book is is really bizarre. And so I just felt like at from that moment onwards I was just treading water, and it was like and I wanted more, like I wanted him to have like a another twist and another twist and another twist, and for you know, X person high up in the government to be involved and this, that, and the other. But it's just it's just not there.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it's true. And I don't know if because obviously I'm making the judgment of how I'd have air quotes improved it with the benefit of hindsight and with, you know, if I was ever in a position where someone was going to give me some money to spend a couple of weeks writing this book, that's not gonna happen. But similarly, you know, Kevin J. Anderson, I believe, has written something like four million eight hundred thousand, six hundred and fifty-two thousand nine hundred and twelve books about sci-fi. He probably didn't spend too long on this. He probably didn't feel the need to make this the best book ever written, he just wanted to take the money and run.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I mean, if you are writing shitloads of books and you're like the king of tie-in media, then you've got to knock these out pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_04

There's a very old analogy about comparing the work of, say, Hilary Mantel with the work of, say, Stephen Cole. And I think I think you know where I'm going.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. Bloody hell, he's written a lot of books. He's written more books than I've read.

SPEAKER_04

So double figures.

SPEAKER_03

Yes, indeed. And not a new adventure among amongst them. No, what a loser. What a jerk. He so he wrote this book in '95, he writes another one in 96, another one in 97, he's done with it. But if you love Star Wars, chances are he's written some of your favourite books and loads of Dune stuff as well.

SPEAKER_04

Like we need more Dune books.

SPEAKER_02

Anyway, so what do you think of his prose style?

SPEAKER_04

I have to qualify this because I've only heard the audiobook, and that's read by one of the two main cast members doing her accent that she did on the show. I thought it captured them very well. Again, that very early season one, season two dynamic, where they will occasionally make a really three out of ten level sarcastic quip at each other. There isn't even any nascent shipping going on yet. There's just this guy and this woman, and they do this thing together, and they do it professionally, although he's a bit nuts and she's a bit dull. So I think it I think the prose style is what's a good way of saying workmanlike? Because this is It's not literature, it's not trying to be clever, it's not trying to be a baffling detective novel. It's just a straightforward here you go. It gets the job done. Here's a little bit of porridge with, you know, some syrup in it. It's nice, it's comforting, it's nourishing, but it's not uh it's not gourmet shit.

SPEAKER_03

No, it's not that delicious cheesecake you want. Oh, don't don't. Because apparently that's the most gourmet thing I could think of. What a fucking savage. Wow. With prose, quite often you can get into the mindset of the characters a bit more. Is there anything here with Mulder and Scully that makes you go, ooh, that's quite interesting. They wouldn't be able to convey that in the TV show. Do we get any any any little glimpse of more of them?

SPEAKER_04

I don't remember that. I remember a couple of little insights that were sort of, oh God. There was something about um Oh no, that was from the TV show. Forget that. No, I don't think it does. I think he treads a very careful line. And again, I have to imagine most of this is down to the the brand management who would have been saying very specifically, we don't know where the show's going. We don't know what we're gonna have to do with these characters to keep the show going. So don't do anything to the characters or reveal anything or any backstory or any sporting affiliations they may have or anything like that. I don't want to know where they do their shopping. I don't need to know where they live. Just, you know, paint them consistently and faithfully as depicted on this particular episode that they probably gave him.

SPEAKER_03

Wouldn't it be bizarre if this was the episode where Scully just suddenly goes, Do you know what? I actually really believe you, Mulder, and everything you say was absolutely right. Let's have sex.

SPEAKER_04

What's this sheet of paper on this desk? It's a it's a full rundown of the conspiracy with everyone's names and addresses. And oh, it's all true. Oh, we can retire now. Should we go and uh well what would you like to do, Fox, if you weren't an FBI agent? Oh I'd probably like to play baseball. Let's go and play baseball then. Let's go and start a team in the middle of nowhere. If we build it, they will come. That doesn't happen. You just get them, you know, catching red-eye flights around the country. Thrillingly, a lot of this is set in the exact town where I live right now. But we're going to New Mexico, we're going to the Bikini Atoll or wherever. We're I think they go to San Francisco at some point for very little reason. Just they're exp their expenses, by the way. Now, I used to work in international sales and I would fly all around the world and the Middle East, but I had very tight budgets and it was all very carefully pegged to the amount of books that we were selling.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

You know, these guys can literally fly to Adelaide and submit a report that says, Yeah, we interviewed a guy, he had nothing to do with it. And that's fine.

SPEAKER_03

In the smallest, most unliked department of the FBI. What's it like in like the people who deal with murders and like bankers' fraud? Are they just like, bring me that champagne? Yes.

SPEAKER_04

I want three of those swan pate sandwiches. And a cheesecake. Have Lady Gargar come in here and rub my feet while I eat this cheesecake.

SPEAKER_03

And solve this crime. Yes. So yeah, the FBI had massive budgets, apparently, even for their least liked departments.

SPEAKER_04

Which you know, you have to question the veracity of that.

SPEAKER_03

Speaking of uh the FBI, so how does this fit into sort of the mythology of the X-Files in the sense that like by the end of it, Skinner's not putting in the report and all this stuff? Like, does that stuff feel true to it? Does um does it work as part of the larger story?

SPEAKER_04

It does. It there's a there is a point in the X-Files TV show, and it's not until maybe series five or six where you start to feel safe as a viewer that Skinner is on your side and the side of Mulder and Scully and you can trust him. But before that, he would it was kind of metronomic 50-50. He'd do them a favour, but he'd sell them out to the higher-ups in the FBI, or maybe he'd say something to the cigarette smoking man that he shouldn't, and there was an ambiguity, and I think in this they are very carefully maintaining that early X-File status quo where he without doing anything to challenge your assumptions, he is unknowable. You know, you don't know him well enough to know that he's a good guy. So because uh uh everyone else uh employed by the federal government is in some sort of grey area on the scale, he's he's of of a piece with that.

SPEAKER_03

Right, okay. And then what do we think of Gillian Anderson's narration here?

SPEAKER_04

Well, if now in the nineties I would have told you it was the very high watermark of eroticism, and there was no greater pleasure than lying there in bed in the darkness, listening to her talking to you. And and doing whatever else you might have been doing. I don't know. Listening to it again now, it feels very I believe the word so perfect has been used. It is it is a very laid-back, drawled kind of, oh God, at my one day off this month, I'm still doing fucking scully. There is a kind of under-rehearsed quality to it. There's a few not many, but there are a few line readings where you think, you didn't stress the word you were supposed to stress, Julian. You're supposed to be a great actress. This is mm-hmm. But that's kind of, you know, the the big finish school of um record, not not rehearse record, just record. Yeah. And so I think she is doing for the best part, I think she's she's she's giving a good reading. It's just that because the story is kind of underwhelming, and because her delivery is kind of one note, it ultimately I think works more as a sleeping aid than it does as an edge of the seat narrative experience. I mean, I fell asleep listening to this for many years. It w it wasn't until I uh there was one day I'd had the double cassette pack for about three years, and one day I thought, I'm actually going to make a determined effort to listen to this while I'm awake and find out how the story ends, because I never had. You know, by the end of side one, I was gone.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it was a very monotonous delivery. And I know that Gillian Anderson has range. I've seen her in other things, I've seen her do things in the X-Files, but it was quite shocking at just how slow and monotonous it was. I can't tell you whether I've ever heard this before. And maybe I it's the sort of thing that somebody at school might have owned and lent to me or something like that. But I I I'm not surprised I don't remember it. And I think if I was going to if we were doing another one of these and it was like you've got a choice of listening to Gillian Anderson read it or reading the book, I think I'd definitely read the book.

SPEAKER_04

I think you're right. I think though, tonally, her delivery is of a piece with her 1990, ooh, I want to say 96, but correct me if I'm wrong, chart hit, Extremis, which she also delivers in this faintly embarrassed, oh god. I'm reading out poetry for nerd fanboys, total and masturbate.

SPEAKER_00

Atom by atom, molecular beings transport me away to the place of my dreams, a point in space where time is still, colliding world in the world.

SPEAKER_03

I forgot about that.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, extremists was would have been my other choice if I, you know, if we could have got half an hour out of a really poorly constructed song, I would have said, let's talk about extremists. But, you know, you get the sense, and and this is entirely fair enough, but everything that they did that wasn't being in the TV show The X-Files, they had to cram into like a two or three-month window over the summer, maybe when the show was was out of production for a few months.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

So to have to spend most of that time still being Mulder and Scully and recording the stuff for the games, shooting a movie in one break, doing audiobooks, doing adverts, doing it must have been really, really tedious.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, she just wants a fucking guest slot in Seinfeld or something like that.

SPEAKER_04

She probably just thought, can I can I just do like a six-week run in a play somewhere off the radar just just to kind of enjoy doing a bit of acting? Or maybe she wanted to spend time with her kids and go camping, or you know, just paint the front room. I don't know. Yeah. But but you know, imagine if it's your day off and you've got to go and do some more work for 12 hours a day. There comes a point where your delivery is gonna be a little bit dull and fucking.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, no, I get it. And the the problem is being in a show like X-Files that has a a nerdy fan base is even if you did get that six-week run in a play, 80% of the audience would be people like us. Absolutely. Not us, because we're far too cool, but people like us.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I wouldn't I wouldn't pay thousands of pounds to go to some slummy little off-Broadway theatre I'd want, you know. What what would you go to? I'd just I'd go and see Phantom again. I don't I don't see the point of having other things to go and see when you could just go and see Phantom every day.

SPEAKER_03

I I'm not I'm not a theatre boy. I just um I'm I just can't deal with it.

SPEAKER_04

What's the point of of ingesting media that you can't keep and re-ingest?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04

It happens once and then it's gone. Bullshit.

SPEAKER_03

I'm also I'm six foot three, and theatres have tiny little seats. They do. I find myself, I'm in a theatre, and within 20 minutes I'm just like, I am in agony because my my my knees are bashed up against the thing. I'm quite quite a broad man. And it's the most uncomfortable scenario not the most uncomfortable, dentistry's more uncomfortable, but you know. Needs must.

SPEAKER_04

I imagine those little seats, the the armrests must really dig into your hips, because it specifically in the like the west end of London, those theatre seats are really designed to get more seats in.

SPEAKER_03

And to get tiny little Victorian ladies in there. And I'm not a tiny little Victorian lady. I've often thought that about you. Has there ever been an X-Files play? That or X-Files the Musical sounds like the sort of batshit idea somebody would have done somewhere.

SPEAKER_04

It does sound like something that should have happened. Um especially in the wake of the the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode. You'd have expected a slew of copycat uh killings. But um I don't think it would have happened. I think probably which is ironic because Dikovny has subsequently released a couple of actually quite enjoyable albums that he's made. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

What sort of music is it? Is it dad rock?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it's it's him delivering songs. It's not so much singing as as being Agent Mulder with a guitar. Oh like Peter Capaldi when he's Yeah, kind of that thing. He in his head, he's like, he's Dylan, 66. Not you, Bob Dylan. I was gonna say. No, yeah. And John Nort 66. No, not yet. One No, but uh, you know, give it three years. And so he probably I don't know if he would have been into it at the time. I don't know if Gillian would have been. They could have done a brilliant musical X file, but I think it would have stretched the format a little bit too far.

SPEAKER_03

No, just a crossover with cops, that's all you need.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, and you you can't lay that accusation at the door of this. This doesn't stretch the format. What I what I like about it is that it, as I say, it it visits places where I now live. Like there's a a government worker in the Department of Energy who lives in Gaithersburg, which is where I live. I work in a brewery in Gathersburg when I'm not doing my actual proper serious job. It's a lovely little town full of quite affluent people. And it's you know, it's it's bizarre that something I used to listen to in this faraway, unknowable land is now where I live.

SPEAKER_03

Do you think because you listen to it when you sleep, it crept into your mind and then all of a sudden you found yourself living that life? In six months' time you'll be sending radioactive waste to people as well. Going, yeah, I just thought I just thought that seemed like a sensible thing to do. They they they killed my family.

SPEAKER_04

I didn't even mentally think about what I was doing. It was just some sort of bone-deep who knows? I mean, you know, they did say that if you're a you know a student revising for your exams, record some notes and listen to it while you sleep and it sinks in. Some stuff does get in subconsciously. I don't know that anything from this did. I've never visited a a military base under a a false pretense and tried to investigate something I wasn't necessarily cleared to. I've never lied to a congressional hearing Oh no, hang on. Yes, no, I have.

SPEAKER_03

You know, but who knows? Who knows indeed? Coming from Birmingham in the UK, that is never mentioned in any science fiction at any point. Like, there's just like or if it's mentioned, but nothing's set there, nothing goes there. There's never an alien invasion of the bull ring or something like that. No one's investigating strange goings on in Digboth, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04

So So let me tell you, Dylan, I used to feel much the same coming from Colchester. Until the Lodger and the subsequent story with the Cybermen in the department store.

SPEAKER_05

Of course.

SPEAKER_04

Which are both set So one day it will happen, and one day, a w what do you call someone from Birmingham? A Birminger. A Brummy. A Brummy. A Brummy will get their hands on the show and they will turn in an episode set very much in Birmingham. We can only hope. That's what's needed.

SPEAKER_03

Did you know that when Russell T. Davis took over the show and they knew it was going to go out to one of the the the regions, as it were, but they weren't sure where Birmingham was considered. Was Birmingham where they made Why Don't You?

SPEAKER_04

Uh I couldn't tell you that for certain. I feel like it would have been that or Cardiff.

SPEAKER_03

It's where they made Pebble Millet One.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, the the the the Alan Partridge's underpants of BBC output.

SPEAKER_03

And uh Brum and Rosie and Jim.

SPEAKER_04

Hmm. Well, I liked Brumm. But who didn't? It was about a talking car. Absolutely. Basically it was Bessie and Drag.

SPEAKER_03

Exactly. I notice we're not talking a lot about this audiobook here.

SPEAKER_04

Well, it's, you know, what is there to say for the listener who hasn't heard or read it? We don't want to lead you plot beat by plot beat through a fairly run-of-the-mill bit of detection.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

It's a really solid ex-file from the the early part of the the canon and the the franchise. And its enjoyment depends on how you get on with the prose, which is unchallenging and perfectly accessible. But if you're coming at it from the point of view of listening to Jillian Anderson reading it, as we've said, we have perhaps discovered in in our our middle age that it's not the most high-energy performance. But, you know, there's a lot of good stuff in it.

SPEAKER_03

It's robust. Yeah. It's a perfectly re-if you want an extra bit of X-Files and you're like, I'll listen to an audiobook or read a book, it's fine. It's but it's not it's not lore shattering, it's not canon busting, it's not the one where they finally fuck. It's just another bit of X-Files.

SPEAKER_04

I'm trying to think of an analogy because I did sort of observe that it's very much the X-Files equivalent of the Doctor Who New Adventures. So I'm trying to think what new adventure it would most be like.

SPEAKER_03

You want No, because it's it's not a new adventure, it's a missing adventure. That's what I would say.

SPEAKER_04

Well, you are now, you're right. And you're yeah.

SPEAKER_03

It's for people who want their X-Files like it used to be.

SPEAKER_04

Exact to the formula, nothing messed about with. It does exactly what you need if you really need more of the same thing.

SPEAKER_03

Exactly. Well, let's leave that there. But we must rate it. Is it a clanger, a banger, or an average meander?

SPEAKER_04

If you don't know anything about the secret nuclear above ground tests, it's a very educational and informative text. Otherwise, I think all things considered, one would have to come down on the side of this being. And this is in no way a judgment or a negative, but it's an average meander.

SPEAKER_03

Agreed. It's it's the most average of average meanders. It does nothing particularly run. It does nothing groundbreaking. It just is. And it's a perfectly enjoyable two and a half hours of audio. So the next thing we're going to look at is the X-Files, the film. Directed by Rob Bowman. Screenplay by Chris Carter. Story by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz. Based on the X-Files by Chris Carter. Produced by Chris Carter. And Daniel Sackheim. Distributed by 20th Century Fox. Released on June 19th, 1998. Now, the the the sci-fi landscape in the cinemas as well as the X-Files. You could go and see Blade, Godzilla, Armageddon, Dark City, Deep Impact, Deep Rising, The Faculty, Universal Soldier 2, Universal Soldier 3, Species 2, Star Trek Insurrection, and straight to video, Doctor Who spin-off mind game. While on television we had First Wave, Seven Days, Invasion Earth, Ultraviolet, Babylon 5, Space Island 1, Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek Voyager. Now you may say, Dylan, why did you throw in the Doctor Who spin-offs for both of the things we've covered? But if you Google science fiction films released in that year, Wikipedia gives you both of those. Good. They're of the same level as Dark City and Armageddon.

SPEAKER_04

Well maybe we'll come back to that. Because there's an awful lot in there that you mentioned that is disposable. Yeah. Like I don't think any of those films are kind of enduring classics of any genre. It's the it's all the sort of thing you'd watch on an aeroplane if you couldn't sleep.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. They're also, I remember them being massive at the time for like three or four weeks, because this was the time where films were still in cinemas for ages, and it was just like, what are you going to do on Saturday? Oh, I guess we'll go to the cinema. So there was a real buzz around them, even if they were like everybody slated Godzilla, but everybody went and watched it.

SPEAKER_04

But I had a very, very trying time with it. There's a there's a point in that film, it's already been going on for about four and a half hours, and you get the sense you're coming to the end, and the monster's destroyed, and you think, thank God for that. And then he comes back from the dead, and you're like, I actively hate this, and I want him to eat Matthew Broderick and everyone else. Jesus. And it's the same with most of those films. Armageddon, okay, it had its good points. It was basically a sort of two-hour pop video for Aerosmith, so that's fine. But yeah, and there was not a lot else going on there that appealed to me because I've never really been into sci-fi for sci-fi's sake. Yeah. I like I like a franchise, I like characters, I like a long arc, I like stories, but it doesn't have to be. If it's, you know, if you can tell that in The Sopranos, fine, I'll have the Sopranos. It doesn't need to be the Sopranos in space.

SPEAKER_03

See, uh I am the same, but I don't think I was around this time. I was 13, 14, whatever. And so I was very much sci-fi for sci-fi's sake because I was just so and I was buying DreamWatch and SFX and things like that. And it was just like, must consume as much of this thing as I love. Whereas now I'm, as you say, like, I want the characters and the ongoing arcs, and I will get that in any genre that happens to please me. But when you're a sort of like nerdy 14-year-old, I remember this summer quite clearly as like, look at all these amazing sci-fi films that actually aren't very good at all. Species 2, fuck yes, more aliens, more tits.

SPEAKER_02

Universal Soldier 2 and 3, massive hits.

SPEAKER_04

Whoa, good times. I think when you're a teenage boy, you just need really high stakes to get you to invest in things, and not not just financially, but emotionally. So it has to be aliens or or dragons or whatever, because the real world is just hopelessly boring and naff. And all you dream of in your free time. Is getting out there.

SPEAKER_03

When I am hung over and alone, I want nothing more than to watch something like Godzilla or Universal Soldier 3. It's not something I would ever get away with if my partner was there. Because you'd be like, we're not watching this shit.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, increasingly getting to that point in my marriage with Doctor Who. That's gonna clip my wings somewhat, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01

Well, quite.

SPEAKER_03

During the Ice Age in what becomes North Texas, a caveman encounters a deadly extraterrestrial organism that infects its host with a black oil-like virus. In 1998, a similar infection emerges when a boy falls into a mysterious hole, leading to the deaths of the rescuing firefighters and a government cover-up involving hazmat teams and a stage bombing. Mulder and Scully uncover inconsistencies while investigating the explosion, learning from a paranoid doctor that the victims were already dead before the blast. A Scully examines the bodies and finds evidence of an alien virus, shadowy figures, including the smoking man, oversees experiments on infected hosts, revealing a broader conspiracy involving alien life forms gestating within humans. Mulder and Scully's investigations take them to Texas, discovering a secret dome releasing swarms of bees, one of which later infects Scully, leading to her abduction. With help from allies and a dying informant, Mulder tracks her to an underground facility in Antarctica, where infected humans are stored. He rescues her and cures her using a vaccine, triggering chaos as alien organisms begin to emerge, and they narrowly escape as a spacecraft departs. Back in Washington, Scully's testimony is dismissed and the evidence erased, but she presents a single surviving bee as proof. Despite the cover-up, she resolves to continue working with Mulder, while elsewhere the conspiracy leaders acknowledge Mulder remains a threat as the X-Files unit is quietly reopened. So presumably you've seen this film before.

SPEAKER_04

I have seen this film on what I would charitably describe as a number of occasions. Uh a large number of occasions? I would certainly put it in the double figures number of occasions. But I'm not going to say whether that's 10 or 99.

SPEAKER_03

Right. I may have seen this. Again, I I it feels like the sort of thing I would have watched, but I had no particular memories of it. So I came to it sort of afresh. There was a one moment at the end where I was like, I recognise that, but then I was like, was it from the trailer? Who who who knows? I think I'd fallen out of love with the X-Files by this point, and it was just not something that was on my radar. So if I did see it, it would have been years later when somebody like it was on TV or someone lent me a video or a digital versatile disc. Yes. So yeah, it was quite interesting coming to it this time. And I have to say, I thought this was fucking brilliant. I didn't know what to expect, and movies based on TV shows, especially when it's the same characters, sometimes they can just be like, oh, it's a longer, slightly duller episode. But this, I sat down to watch it one night, not knowing what I was gonna get, and I had a fucking riot. I just think this is a brilliant movie. I cannot express how much I enjoyed it, so that's the end of the podcast.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, essentially it is, but let's do another 20 minutes of adding substance to our love for this film. At the time, I think it's a better film now than it was then, and I think it's a better time now. I also think it works better if you're uh not a fan. Because coming out in the summer of '98, it was between season five where they'd stopped filming in uh I want to say Vancouver, and the show was just about to move production to LA. And they'd done that thing they do every couple of years where someone shuts down the X-files to make a dramatic season-ending cliffhanger. Yeah. So, you know, you're coming into this film thinking, well, you've got to reopen the X-Files and you've got to do this, and I expect this, and blah, blah, blah. And it it as a as a fan, it it gave me enough of what I wanted and needed in some weird, insane, pathological way. But watching it now, it's just a really fun adventure.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And as as soon as you're not emotionally invested in it, it's really good.

SPEAKER_03

I think it's surprisingly accessible. I was a little bit worried that I'm like, this film, like, if it's the last thing that they do, it sort of makes sense. But for it to be this version in the middle, I'm a bit like, am I even going to understand what's happening here? And it is so accessible. Like, I would have no problem saying to somebody, this is if you're gonna watch the you want to get into the X-Files, this is a perfectly fine point to start, which is not an easy thing to do. You get the whole setup, and they're sort of separated at the start, because as you say, the X-Files are shut down. So it's just it does just enough to sort of set up almost a really soft reboot in a way for casual viewers such as myself, who perhaps have wandered away from the show after a few years.

SPEAKER_04

It's actually very sophisticated to exist after five years of continuity and with another, you know, however many more TV series, another six series still to come. Yeah. And for this to to holistically fit in perfectly. But also because they layer in this kind of one and dumb conspiracy into this movie, it it does it does exactly what the whole show does, but it does it all in two hours. So as you say, if you've not seen the show before, or if you just don't give a shit because you've got enough stuff to do already, this is perfect. So it's a yeah, it's a it's a really clever I assume by accident, but it's a really good bit of writing.

SPEAKER_03

So you so you mentioned this sort of one and done conspiracy. So this does this have any implications going forward? And is there lore in here that perhaps I wouldn't have understood?

SPEAKER_04

I don't think so. We have we have the conspiracy, the large group of uh old white dudes who like to hang out and smoke in large leather-bound libraries. And they would they will go on to recur. But the kind of main conspiratorial element in this film is the character of Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil, who uh Martin Landau, who is only in this film, and that character and his story kind of does the job of telling the viewer this is a a drama where we don't know how much of this guy we can take at face value and how much of it he's saying because he's crazy, and how much of it is he saying because he's being told to say it by someone else. So it perfectly captures that aura of paranoia that the show started out doing quite well.

SPEAKER_03

Does it feel like a A, a bigger story, but a B a sort of bigger production as well compared to what they were doing on telly at the time?

SPEAKER_04

I always felt it felt like it fell short of being a very successful movie at the time because it was essentially what we'd seen Chris Carter do every season finale. There'd be a two-parser or a three-parser. And this felt uh structurally of a piece with those. We have 45 minutes of this, we have 45 minutes of this, and then we have 45 minutes of this. But the production was extraordinary. Certainly in the last half hour, there is stuff going on there that uh of a like and a scale I've never seen since.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And even the the more mundane, you know, even when they're sitting in a a conference room in a government building, there's a depth of field. And, you know, there's a a fairly big explosion in the first 20 minutes, which at the time I thought was absolutely staggeringly well done.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, the that that big explosion sets it off and makes you go, this isn't this isn't your X-Files post-watershed nine o'clock thing. And I I think the budget is we've got more time to do this because they're not churning out 24 episodes a year or whatever. So, as you say, like the conference rooms with the depth of field and things like that, it's like all the shots are more considered. Whereas I get when TV's sort of churned out like that, everybody's doing the best they can, but you know, everybody just like a bit more time. And so there'll be parts of the episode they have to rush through behind the scenes. It's not that you can necessarily tell, and others whether like this is the money shot we're gonna spend a bit more time.

SPEAKER_04

Well, as a as an X-Files nerd, you you know that this was kind of filmed during the gap of the previous uh I think the end of series four into series five. So series five is like four episodes shorter than it normally would be because of I think uh production went overtime on on the movie. And you know, they're filming this in their summer holiday, in their break from being Mulder and Scully.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

And obviously, I think for most of the writers that's really not a problem. If they can if they can get even more money by writing something else in the gap, that's great. They'll they'll ha absolutely take that. But it's it's um a tribute to everyone that it was so fresh when it's in the midst of a very crushing production cycle.

SPEAKER_03

Do you think there was a need for an X-Files movie at the time? Was it a natural place for it to go?

SPEAKER_04

Not at all. And I've not really considered this, but it was a very successful TV show. It was created to work in that medium, but it was not something that necessarily lent itself to the big screen and being for a very different audience suddenly. There are countless episodes of the X-Files that would make great movies, but they are the kind of throwaway disposable monster of the week episodes where you've got spectacle and maybe, you know, horror and things that would really work. Which, you know, not talking about the second X-Files movie, but go and have a look at the second X-Files movie.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, I've seen that one.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. Now, this one, the bravery or stupidity, and it's Chris Carter, so I'm not prepared to make a decision on that. But the the the balls to make it a conspiracy thing and take it to the cinema audience and say, this is at the end of five years of TV. This is where we are, this is what we do. And he didn't go it it went further than the show had ever gone before. Not to give away too much, but there's a a scene at the end of the year.

SPEAKER_05

You didn't give it away. Can I? Yeah, give it away.

SPEAKER_04

It's only it's there might still oh, I feel bad. So there's there's what I would uh I believe is fashionably known as a a UFO at the end, which is amazing. But at the same time, you maybe think, well, maybe this is the two hours of X-Files where we have a massive space battle with aliens, and humanity rises up, and Mulder becomes a lord, and he has a a sword made of light, and he fights the you know, there was a a surprising amount of restraint on what I assume was a production typified by sort of LA white powder-infused confidence and money, and and a sense that we can't fail.

SPEAKER_03

I also think it's an unmistakably X-Files idea, and uh what you were saying about there's various other episodes that would make a good film. And you're right, say take something like Tombs. Everybody knows Tooms, but it was called Squeeze, isn't it? That that that that episode that would make a great horror film, but it doesn't have to be Mulder and Scully, it could be Inspector Jeff and PC Iron Shield, and they could do the same story over 90 minutes and make a creepy horror film, and it would be great. But whereas this, it feels like it has to be the X-Files, and while it's accessible, you do have to go in just knowing the basic setup that it's this guy who believes in aliens and everybody around him doesn't. But the conspiracy is that's peppered throughout, works really well. The sort of mission statement with the big explosion at the beginning, going, oh, you know, it's not the telly's X-Files, and then you're taken into this world where it is a bit more telly's X-Files, and then that last third where it's like the secret compounds under the ground and alien creatures running around, and there's fucking spaceships and explosions and things like that, and you're like, okay, this is this that they've really, as you say, by accident or by design, they've really made something that is uniquely X-Files but works for the big screen.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I have to say that I I suspect, sadly, it probably is by accident, because as the X-Files continued beyond this point, it became more and more about keeping the balls in the air and spinning the plates and doing the same things every year. We'll kill off this guy, but he'll be bang next year, we'll do this, but you come away from the X-Files thinking that maybe Chris Carter was all mouth and no trousers. But at this point we hadn't quite realised that and he gets away with it. And he turned in a brilliant film that um at one point pisses on Independence Day.

SPEAKER_03

I think when you're churning out that much TV or as we call it now, content, it's why people don't do this anymore. That like sometimes you're gonna get it so right, and sometimes you're gonna get it so wrong. And even if you went in with it all laid out, the need for it there to be more and more and more and more and more of it means ultimately it's going to be diluted at some point. And it's a miracle they managed to get it so right for this two hours. I've been listening to a podcast called uh The Cancelled Movie Report, which looks at movies that were, you know, got to the scripting stage but were never cancelled of big franchises and stuff. And inevitably, out of all of them, you know, it's a Ghostbuster sequel or an Indiana Jones sequel in the 90s, and you're thinking, I would love more of this. Inevitably, the reason it was cancelled is because it was shit. And so the odds are almost stacked against this to be any good, but it's but but it does it well. Let's jump in a little bit more into the direction and production values. So it's directed by someone I'm not particularly familiar with, Rob Bowman.

SPEAKER_04

So he directed a bunch of episodes on the on the TV, and increasingly he was someone that Chris Carter lent on for the really important episodes, the kind of two-part series opening or finales. He'd get the spectacle, and it was because he did such a good job with the higher stakes stuff that that Carter thought, I can't do absolutely everything. I can't get away with directing and writing and producing and everything in this film. I'm gonna have to let someone else do something.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

It took it took three weeks to get him to take the bread wig off because he was all about playing Scully. Uh he's very much the Nicholas Briggs of the uh of the X-Files world. But with the difference that he invented it and the skin in the game. So Bowman, I think, did a really strong directorial job. I think this is uh really well shot and well directed and well realized. Even, you know, we've got we've got spectacle, we've got the North Pole, and we've got huge snowy, icy vistas and massive alien spacecrafts, but we've got pity dark Washington, DC alleyways. Yeah. We've got fields of corn with these strange sort of plasticky tent things going on in them. There's sort of subterranean caves hidden underneath children's play areas, and everything is given the same kind of visual authenticity. It's it's really strong.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, uh it looks amazing. It it looks like a million dollars. I I said it before, everything was more considered, but they've really gone, it's not about everything being a big CGI shot because it's a oh, we've got all this money all of a sudden. It's just making the X-Files better than you've ever seen it before. And like as you said, those shots in the cornfield with the tents, and when you go in the tents, it's only a big white tent. But it's done so well, you're like, I've never seen anything like this in the X-Files before. Yeah. Because increasingly the X-Files is all about what's in the shadows, isn't it? Because it's a TV show, it's it feels more contained in a way. Um, so uh it was really nice to see them in just these expansive sets and locations that that added value. And look, he he does a great job at directing it. Um, as I said, I'm not familiar with him, but he did go on to his last movie was Electra, so perhaps unfortunately he was not quite the uh the box office drawer that it seemed like he was going to be after this, but there we go. Do Gillian Anderson and David DeCovney give you movie star vibes? Are they are they the sort of actor you can r lean on to lead a movie?

SPEAKER_04

I think this is the kind of tipping point in the history of the X-Files where it becomes increasingly apparent that Gillian Anderson is too good to be slumming it in this milieu for too much longer. Whereas I think David Dacovney and I love David Dekovny so much, but I think he's kind of bumping his head against the glass ceiling of what he can realistically achieve in life. He goes on to do another brilliant TV show, he he writes a couple of really quite good books, he does music, he's he's fine. But no, I don't think he's a he's a an A-list movie kind of kind of guy. And anyone who's seen any of his films will be able to corroborate that. He's very good in an ensemble, he even jokes about his limitations as an actor. There's a bit where they think there's a bomb in this building and he's sort of completely impassive, and Scully's like, Oh, you're you're panicking. He goes, No, you you'll know when I'm panicking because I make this face and doesn't move a muscle. Because his performance as Mulder in everything is Gillian Anderson's performance on the audio of Ground Zero. It's kind of I'm here, I'm saying the words, give me the money. Thank you. What now? Oh, is it an alien? Okay. You know, he looks he you know, he's a he's a he's a very handsome man. He's quirky enough to have something going on visually, he belongs on screen, but maybe it's more the character of Mulder doesn't really work in the cinema because he's a really two-dimensional guy, isn't he?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. How does it compare to the X-Files of the time? Like, as you said, it's between four and five or five and six, something like that?

SPEAKER_04

It was filmed between four and five, it was released between five and six. It's kind of looking forward because it's got the kind of big widescreen sunlight that we've not had in the X-Files before, because it was all shot in British Columbia and it was always raining and leafy and forests. Yeah. And then the X-Files moves to LA so that I think most of most of the production team, but certainly De Covney, wanted to be closer to home. And suddenly the X-Files became very filmic and very widescreen and very sunlit. So it kind of lets you lets you sort of dip your toe into the direction the show's going in. Narrative is like really superficial connective tissue between the two. If you want to imagine a an imaginary division, and this is the midpoint of televised X-Files, it fits perfectly in that gap with a very light connection to the future and the past. I think it probably works better as an X-Files for the cinema going audience who've not necessarily seen the show. I think they're getting probably more out of this than people like me did.

SPEAKER_03

I know there was another film sort of ten years later, but do you think there was room for more films like this, or do you think one and done was enough?

SPEAKER_04

I think they would have had to make a decision. Do we do do we carry on making X-Files movies that tell our ongoing conspiracy arc, which would have been a massive hiding to nothing because you'd have had diminishing returns straight out of the box. Or do we do Monster of the Week movies every couple of years, which probably would have had more longevity, but wouldn't really none of them would have been essential. Yeah. So I think I think because they couldn't decide which way to go, and it it didn't ultimately become a franchise, we didn't notice that we missed it. But I think compared with some of the crap that gets a fifth or a sixth movie, I think if they were all brilliantly conceived or brilliantly well written, or just had Gillian Anderson and David Dekovny acting in them, they could have fleeced us quite a lot more than they did.

SPEAKER_03

I think you're right. There's this thing of because X-Files is just ongoing, it's a nice little bonus thing. We're not too far away at that time from the Avengers film based on, you know, Steed and Peel. And it's like if you're an Avengers fan, you put so much more on that film being good because Avengers hasn't been running for 20 odd years at that point. Whereas whether this film works for you or not, it's like, well, there's another 24 episodes coming in a few months' time, so it doesn't matter. And you know it's going to carry on and on and on. So it is something for a mainstream audience more than the fans, I guess. And look, it seemed to have done pretty well at the box office, you know. So I'm surprised there wasn't at least rumblings of another one.

SPEAKER_04

So they they finally made the second X-Files movie about five years after production rapped on the show. And that should have felt like more of an event for that reason. But I remember at the time thinking this feels like a sort of fairly inessential cash-in. Yeah. So I think they knew they they had to strike while the iron was hot and they were in the absolute centre of of the global kind of culture. And if if not then, then when?

SPEAKER_03

Looking at it, the second film had half the budget of the first film.

SPEAKER_04

Interesting.

SPEAKER_03

This is I guess this is the show at its sort of highest power. By the time this show's finished, I'm guessing viewing figures have dropped off, reviews perhaps aren't as good. I know fans have their highs and lows and things like that, but it it feels a bit more more of a niche show by the time it ends.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it's it's it becomes something it becomes a bit of a marathon. You know, there's only so many times you can kill off the cigarette smoking man, or bring Krychek back from the dead again, or reveal that Jeffrey Spender's still alive. Mulder leaves, Mulder comes back, Scully leaves, Scully comes back, they close the X-Files, they open the X-Files, they they solve the conspiracy, they introduce a new conspiracy. At the end of nine years of that, I think even the cigarette smoking man would have been, Jesus Christ, not again.

SPEAKER_03

This is a celebration of this show's massive. The next one is sort of a last gasp of like, is there a bit more life? Could we do one of these every two years?

SPEAKER_04

It does feel like that. It's like you'd think by the time of the second film, it's either studio money fishing for can we get more life out of this? Can we throw more money at this movie and make it more of a thing and see if see if we can get a a franchise going here in the cinema? But yeah, no, it's it's sort of weirdly, it feels like the second movie was a a kind of passion project for Chris Carter, maybe, and he funded most of it. He's like one of the it's he's like Kevin Smith shooting clerks. He's doing it out of his own pocket on a 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning when no one's gonna walk past the shot he's using, you know. It's and it's uh a wholly different beast with a wholly different energy and vibe. But there is a a difficulty about the second film that this is isolated and insulated from because it's happening at the time when the X-Files is the biggest thing on the planet.

SPEAKER_03

So there's a few things that happen in this that I'm just sort of curious about because I'm not steeped in the law. They almost kiss. Do they ever fucking kiss?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, by season seven they're I think pretty pretty much openly kissing adjacent. Right. I think I think Mr. Sex might have paid them a visit. By season eight and nine, they're like having they have a kid together and they Do they? They do ultimately become a couple.

SPEAKER_03

Oh. I don't know how I feel about that. I suppose you could only have a story go on for so long of will they won't they?

SPEAKER_04

Well, I don't know. I think Chris Carter's decision was to to end it before it became an unbearable, stifling weight on the on the ongoing story. And it it it it is simply implausible that these two young, healthy people, who are both gorgeous, and in each other's company almost 24-7, wouldn't at some point have a bit of a snob.

SPEAKER_03

It's how we ended up having a kid, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_04

Absolutely. It just it just happens, guys. It just happens. But at the time the kiss was certainly in the in the trailers when it was shown out of context and you didn't realise how that scene was going to end, you're like, oh my god, and you confidently rock up at the cinema at eight o'clock in the morning because maybe you'll see her in her bra.

SPEAKER_05

Who knows?

SPEAKER_04

And then and then by the end of the film, she is completely naked, but you can't see anything, and she's crawling she's crawling through the North Pole wearing just a parker. We've all been there. She must have been cold. Well, yeah, we've all had some nights out.

SPEAKER_03

I went out in Blackpool once, you know.

SPEAKER_04

Good lord.

SPEAKER_03

This is unmistakably aliens. Obviously, Scully's passed out for most of it, and they are stalked by an alien in that that tunnel underneath the the North Pole. Yes. Is this the first time we properly see aliens? I I vaguely because I remember sorcers and shadows and things like that. But is this like the first time the show does balls deep, goes, This is aliens?

SPEAKER_04

This is the first time I think you see a living alien. There have been a couple of autopsies of the little Greys, but we it's never explicit. Is it genuine or is it something that's been done purely to force Mulder to believe in the existence of extraterrestrials? This is the first time we see them, I think, kind of animated and different and retooled for the big screen. And and by retooling them for the big screen, what I mean there is they've they've seen the film Aliens, and they've thought, yeah, we should have aliens from that. Put them in this. Yeah. Brilliant. Um suddenly they've got retractable claws and saliva and slightly bigger heads, and they can run about really fast and eat you. There's no sense prior to this movie that the aliens are gonna like bite anyone's face off. They seem to be as a sort of much more classy. You can imagine them perhaps in a nice velvet smoking jacket and a cigarello going, Oh, hello. Yes. We're from uh Thetis Prime. Yes, we've we've come to colonize your planet. Where's uh where would you recommend we go for dinner? But in this, the the aliens are very much, well we're flesh thing, we will kill you, we will eat you, we will we will have some slightly poorly realized black oil going up your skin and into your eyes. So it it is raising the stakes there, but but with the tools that we've already been given. Um so it's not adding anything, it's just portraying them in a slightly more terrifying way because they've suddenly got the budget to do that.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, absolutely. Uh one thing that uh I think really gets a kick up the arse or has s suddenly been given bigger tools is the music for the film, which is Mark Snow, who does the TV show.

SPEAKER_04

Well, I mean yeah. But also it's it's the and I can't remember really who else was on it apart from Noel Gallagher's got a song on the soundtrack album. In fact, his his song Tahoe Tirwaken plays over-the-end credits. It's that sort of guitar yellow. That's lovely. It was a big deal. Yeah, Mark Snow gets gets the big Murray Gold Orchestra moment. You can have, you know, a whole room of cellists doing your little TV theme. And it sounds glorious. And it's still a great soundtrack album.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, absolutely. It was just all of a sudden I was like, because you don't really hear the you hear a bit of the theme, but it doesn't open with, you know, your standard issue X-Files theme. But I was just like, oh, some somebody's got some money.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And it just, it's not intrusive or anything like that, but it just it just adds to the bigger scale of it, I think.

SPEAKER_04

And it adds to the kind of assured confidence of the production because they don't feel the need to put their little theme at the start.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04

There's obviously there's a there's a a wisdom and a sense of having achieved a certain position in the world that we don't need. Yeah, we can get away with a whistle of the da du. And that's all you need. And that's so good because of that. Yeah, it's it's it's really well done because it's really cleverly done.

SPEAKER_03

And it's got a soundtrack album as well that includes Fufu Fighters, Sting and Aswand, um, The Cure, The Cardigans, Bjork, and as you mentioned, Noel Gallagher.

SPEAKER_04

So it's got some of the biggest names in music and Sting.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, but like it's it's a as far as like sort of 90s alt rock goes, and alt pop, you've got a really good lineup of people there.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, you've got everyone you'd want, given that neither Blur nor Pulp are really going to turn in anything you could use in an X-Files movie. Unless it's an X-Files movie where they have to go to like Clackton, because there's a guy from the office who's reading Balzac, knocking back ProZac. You know. Yeah, given given which bands were active at the time this was made, and they they said, Well, we don't want the offspring, we don't want anything that's going to sound really badly dated in two years' time. So they've just accidentally ended up with a a really good collection of of artists. I mean, the cure for Christ's sake.

SPEAKER_03

Well, indeed. York. Yeah. The Cure song appears on their B-Sides collection, and I've listened to it many times, but I've never never realized it was from an X-Files movie. So there we go. Yeah, well well linking all the things I love together.

SPEAKER_04

Do you have much more you want to say on this movie? I would like to ask you, as someone who's not seen it a million times and isn't necessarily sure you saw it at the time it was released, what to you is the kind of key or the most memorable visual episode or or segment of the film? What's your what what's the best bit for you?

SPEAKER_03

Uh so I mean, visually, it's that stuff in the tents, which is very s simple and in the cornfields. Um, I just think it looks so cool. And then those tunnels underneath, it's all in the last third. That is for me, as I said earlier, the X-Files doing the stuff they can't do on TV. And I just think it suits the franchise. I don't think you want to go there every week, but if you've got a chance to do it every now and then, you do it, and by golly, do they do it well. As you said, it takes some restraints for it not to be like UFOs every five minutes and things like that, and the fact that Scully still misses it, I sort of laughed out loud uh because I just thought that would that that was so well done.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

It's one of those shows though that I think if you even have a passing interest, whether it's the film or whatever, there are certain key visuals that are stuck in your mind. For me, it's it's squeeze, which I know is the cliche, but then it's um when Scullies get subducted towards the end of one of the seasons and the sort of the the light and stuff around that, and then it's the episode where they're in a forest and there's people cocooned by these green insects and things like that. Those are sort of my core memories, and that weird thing that lived in the sewer and Janice from Friends was in the episodes. I think the big moments of this, I think if I'd seen it at the time, would be would have been just as impactful as those as those moments from from the TV show. But all in all, I'm so glad I watched it. I would have watched the second one straight away if everybody hadn't have told me don't bother with the second one. But it does make me want to jump back in and watch some, you know. I'm not gonna do a full rewatch, but I'll I think I'll stick on some X-Files every now and then. It's all on Disney Plus.

SPEAKER_04

So What you want to do, you want to get yourself a friend who's doing a show that is watching all of the X-Files. And just and just dip in and do one show in five so you watch like random X-files. Just I'll see if I can find anyone in that position, Joseph.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, if only we knew someone who was supposed to be here today.

SPEAKER_04

Uh he's supposed to be here right now on this call, but he's not.

SPEAKER_03

Who we've already delayed the podcast once for, and yet he's not here again. If only we knew someone like that, hey?

SPEAKER_04

If only, if only, hey, but uh but luckily we we we don't.

SPEAKER_02

Look, it took an hour and 15 minutes odd to slag him off. I think that's good going.

SPEAKER_04

Did you cut out that 20 minutes we did at the top?

SPEAKER_03

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04

Oh good. Because I I I'm never sure about using the C-word.

SPEAKER_03

Right. Well, if we're done, we must rate this. Is it a clanger, a banger, or an average meander?

SPEAKER_04

This is where your very simplistic scoring system breaks down because one's tempted to say that um uh you know, something like Citizen Kane or The Godfather or that that that lady in her room in Brussels is like a banger. And this is several orders of magnitude greater than any of those films. But for the sake of fitting into your narrow little structure, I would say this is this bangs with all the ferocity of Frank Thunderchucker Ferrer, the drummer from Guns N' Roses, book one.

SPEAKER_03

Look, I like simple parameters and I like things that rhyme, and so that's why it exists. And so it is a banger from me too. Look, if you want to know how many stars out of ten it is or something, go and listen to a different podcast. Go and listen to Strangers in Space for a nuanced review. I'm here to see whether we see underwear explosions, and that's about it. So, we come to the end of our journey through X-Files Extended Media. Oh no, it's been an absolute hoot to have you here and talk about these things. Uh, if people want to find you, where can they find you and whatever podcasting wares you have?

SPEAKER_04

God almighty. If you want to laugh, come and listen to the Electric Sodcast. If you want to hear me wang on about Doctor Who Books from the Wilderness era, listen to We're All Stories in the End. I'm on Strangers in Space, as indeed are you, sir.

SPEAKER_03

Indeed.

SPEAKER_04

Uh, in theory, I'm still part of All of Time and Space, if we can ever persuade Mark to sit down and watch a John Pertwe story. I'm part of uh Joe Ford's ongoing ex-hamster podcast. I mean, I'm just pretty much every podcast that isn't the news agents, basically.

SPEAKER_02

Are you part of the guilty feminist?

SPEAKER_03

I will be. Excellent. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as it helps people to find the pod. Look for TooHot for TV on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at TooHotTheNumber4 Pod. That's Too Hot the number four pod for the latest updates and additional content. Next time we'll be doing something a little different in an episode entitled We Heart the 90s. But until then, I've been Dylan. And I've been Agent Ian. And this has been Too Hot for TV. I can't remember what I'm doing next time, so I'll just drop that in at a later date, but it's gonna be fucking great. Um can't wait for that one. What a banger. Banger and a half.

SPEAKER_02

Uh for TB. I have a you see.

SPEAKER_03

Robert Smith's on my arm. Oh well.

SPEAKER_05

Well look at him.

SPEAKER_03

There he is. Um that's a visual thing, I'll cut that out.

SPEAKER_04

Um you'd still be checking under your bed to this very day.

SPEAKER_03

I know, and there's there's only drawers under my bed now, full of more bedding to put on the bed. It's a bed containing bed thing.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, actually we've got the same. We've got these zip-up bags and occasionally whatever the cat puts under the bits of my property, iPhones, you know, keys, the treasure of the Sierra Madre, whatever.