It was a paranormal mystery series studded with conspiracy, violence, and darkness, but The X-Filesalways shone brightest to me when it did comedy. “War of the Coprophages,” a season three monster-of-the-week tale of killer cockroaches from outer space (or are they?), is a case in point.
Tag: x-files
Twilight Time
For years I have thought that William Gibson is our most insightful fiction writer on material things and what it is like to live with them, but also, and not paradoxically, on immaterial things and what it is like to live with them. The same writer who gave us “cyberspace” (the term, and also the first visions of what it could be like, in the 1984 Neuromancer) also gave us a Japanese reproduction of an American bomber jacket so lovingly described that readers got emotional when an antagonist made a hole in it with a lit cigarette (in 2003’s Pattern Recognition).
The Truth Is Nowhere
The X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” is an exercise in metafiction that reflects the 1990s withdrawal into private subjectivity. The episode is framed by the title character’s investigations into what appears at first to be an alien abduction. Novelist Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) interviews Dana Scully for his book—From Outer Space—which he touts as the first “nonfiction science fiction.”
You Can’t Go Home Again
By Yuly Restrepo Garcés “Home,” the second episode of season four of The X-Files, and one of its most controversial, makes its intentions known from its first sequence: a disturbing home birth during a dark and stormy night is quickly followed by the burial of the baby, who is born with so many deformities that its survival will… Continue reading You Can’t Go Home Again