-Posting this here because you’re likely the only person who will even remotely care.

-That RHCP album from 2006 was a double, though it wasn’t originally intended to be. They did get some controversial press that year because the single “Dani California” that was released from the album, you may remember, was accused of being ripped off from Tom Petty.
-While I can’t really say I’m a “fan” of RHCP I will state that if Blood Sugar Sex Magik had ended with “Under The Bridge” (a song I still really like, God help me, even if I’m far too old for it), it’d be a reasonably strong album; instead, it goes on for about another thirty minutes with six more songs, none of which are terribly good.

-I’d now say that the first five seasons of The X-Files rate about three and a half stars, and seasons six through nine merit one and a half stars, maybe two stars if I feel like being nice and saying that those seasons are mostly just middling and forgettable rather than artistically embarrassing. I didn’t care for seasons six through nine back in 2014 to begin with, and barely remembered anything from them, but I seem to recall holding out some hope while watching them the first time that I could name some nice things about them when it was all over with, whereas this time I was just waiting for it all to be over.

-The “monster of the week” episodes have taken a hit in my mind because I often find myself disinterested in the clues that Mulder and Scully discover so they can solve the mystery or whatever. I’ll get to the end of an episode and realize I’d forgotten about clues, supporting characters, who did what, etc. Honestly, maybe I’m just getting too damn old to get invested in a TV show; I’m already well aware this has been an increasing issue with me. The suspension of disbelief regarding what Mulder and Scully go through with all these monsters is often embarrassing and eye-rolling too, but I think it kind of was the first time I watched the show, too. But pair that with me not getting into a show’s suspense and you’ve got kind of a bigger problem, y’know?

-Then there’s the mytharc, which everyone, even fans, have always considered a thing that collapses well before the show ends, but there’s disagreement on when it collapsed. These episodes have taken a hit with me too, if only because this time I found it obnoxious to keep track of what was going on in them, and just plain didn’t find a lot of them exciting this time around (most of the really good ones are, of course, in the first three seasons or so, before they really started having to explain shit) and re-reading some boards and such makes it clear that there were quite a few continuity errors concerning mytharc details, shades of Lost. And the show ends with little more than Mulder and Scully escaping, the big bad cigarette guy blown to bits by helicopters, and a mild resolving of Mulder and Scully’s disagreement, but, y’know, ALIEN COLONIZATION IN THE YEAR 2012 IS STILL SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPENING. Yeah, what happened to that, huh? Doesn’t matter as long as the heroes are still alive? The point is, I don’t think I could pass a multiple choice test on the mytharc of this show and it’s even like it’s a brain-twister. Ask me what the “black oil” did, or who “Knowle Rohrer” was, or how the whole Mulder’s-sister thing played out, or what happened to Mulder OR Scully when they were abducted by aliens, and I honestly might blow the questions!

-The best monster in the show’s history, if not the best episode (it really isn’t), remains its first monster: Eugene Victor Tooms, played by the super creepy Doug Hutchison, who went on to play the redneck who rapes Samuel L. Jackson’s daughter at the beginning of A Time To Kill, the creepy guard in The Green Mile, a couple characters on Lost and 24, and then who torpedoed his entire career by marrying a 16 year old Instagram starfucker. Gillian Anderson gave a hilarious AMA where she said that he invited her to his trailer and she said no.

-The show’s best episode is now probably one of Vince Gilligan’s, “Paper Hearts” from season 4, by far the best episode concerning Mulder’s sister (most others now bore me) and genuinely eerie all the way through. I always liked that one and it completely holds up. The other really great mytharc episodes are “The Erlenmeyer Flask” which closes season 1, and “Nisei/731” a two parter from season 3 that had great suspense on a train. I still like the characters of the Cigarette Smoking Man and Alex Krycek, but most other recurring characters on the show sucked. The Lone Gunmen aren’t terribly clever (and have not aged well) and I still laugh thinking about how Mimi Rogers’ character was called “Bigtits McPlotdevice” on the AV Club comments sections.

-The best standalones, then, are probably “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” featuring Peter Boyle, though NOT “War Of The Coprophages” from the same writer, which played like somebody wanted to do the mall scenes from Dawn Of The Dead, but with cockroaches, and which seems really obvious to me now. That’s considered one of the show’s classics. Other strong standalones are “Roland” with Zjelko Ivanek, “Pusher,” and the carnival episode “Humbug.”

-That leaves the saddest admission in this post: not only do I no longer consider “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” the best episode of the show, I no longer even think it’s that great. The first time I saw it, I was blown away; this time, while I certainly don’t hate the episode, it seemed now that all the “brilliance” was crammed into the last few minutes (the final shot is still pretty great, and I’d never forgotten THAT); much of the rest of it is a parody of no particular mind-blowing power. Maybe if I watch again it’ll get better again, but for now, the magic seems gone.

-I remain stunned at some of the gory gross-out stuff they got on the air; “Home” is the most infamous, and it’s certainly the grimmest and most unpleasant episode, but in addition to the decapitations they got away with, there’s also that disgusting “fat-sucked half-corpse” in “2Shy,” a girl giving birth to a big bloody puddle of SNAKES in some later-season episode which splatter all over the floor, and a picture of a woman with her throat slashed that was gorier than the pics of the dead Nicole Brown Simpson that circulated back in the day. Of course Hannibal has since happened…

-If I had to name any keepers from the last four seasons, I think I’d pick “Theef” (which has Billy Drago from The Untouchables playing a creepy redneck monster) and maybe “Hungry,” which had this good supporting performance from this Tobey Maguire/Jake Gyllenhaal-esque actor as a picked-on loser who also has vampire monster ability. It has a lame ending, but it stuck out as being watchable to me this time. Maybe season 9’s “Aubrey Pauley,” about Annabeth Gish’s character in a weird quasi-afterlife state, was alright, but just alright. All I remembered from season 9 the first time around was that Cary Elwes turned up as a (dull) recurring character, Aaron Paul played a jackass, the Lone Gunmen touchingly die (their only good scene in the entire series, IMO) Lucy Lawless was in there somewhere (though I’d forgotten completely what she did), the second to last episode involved the house from the Brady Bunch, there were a number of graphic on-screen decapitations that the show somehow got away with, and Cigarette Smoking Man being killed with a closeup of his skull melting into bad CGI flames, Terminator style. I guess the series finale serves its purpose well enough, so that the show didn’t have to go out on an embarrassment, but it’s also way too long. Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish were not the problem with the last two seasons, but they didn’t really save the show, either. Since Patrick is clearly a better actor than Dvaid Duchovny, that really says something about the extent to which this was Duchovny’s show.

-Although seasons 8 and 9 are usually written off as the worst, I’d have to say season 7 is my pick for the bottom of the barrel. The show still had a bit of steam to burn and was willing to take risks, but season 7 has by far the biggest number of belly-flop episodes, starting with the two “Sixth Extinction” episodes that begin the season–the very worst of the mytharc episodes, trying to work Biblical prophecy and spaceships in fucking Africa into the already bloated mythology until I rolled my eyes at how badly it was failing. Then there’s the Millennium cross-over episode, which cancels any chance of me ever watching that show by amounting to little more than Mulder and Lance Henriksen killing a bunch of zombies in a basement. Two miserably hated episodes, the video-game spoof “First Person Shooter” and the Kathy Griffin mess “Fight Club,” were both even worse than before–I think I defended FPS the first time around, but God knows what I was thinking. Finally, there’s the “Sein Und Zeit/Closure” episode, where Mulder’s sister’s fate is “revealed,” only I had completely forgotten what happened to her, just that the episode ended with Mulder hugging a girl’s ghost in some sort of Touched By An Angel type mess. Rewatching the episodes, I STILL don’t think I could tell you what happened to her! The series finale says she died in 1987, but from what? We’re told by that old nurse lady that she escaped from a torture hospital, then the Cigarette Smoking Man had her, and she died....how? I had to look it up on Wikipedia! The episode is a two-part mess anyway, only interesting in that a)the show interestingly contrasts Mulder giving up the hunt with the Silence Of The Lambs guy not giving it up, and that Duchovny doesn’t blow the sad part at the end like he typically would. So yeah, if you want the show still having some creative juice but falling on its face, try season 7, and if you want the show running on fumes, seasons 8 and 9 are your man.

-Significantly, I also failed to come around on three fan-favorite episodes that I don’t recall liking the first-time. One is the fifth season’s “Post-Modern Prometheus,” which has an interesting black-and-white cinematography to it but doesn’t actually have a point aside from a lame Cher joke and “watch these dumb redneck townsfolk be mean to this disfigured guy!” The other two both belong to Vince Gilligan: season 6’s “Drive” which is the one with Bryan Cranston playing a bigot with an evil chip in his head (it really generates very little real suspense and fans seem to like the Cranston character far too much) and season 7’s “X-Cops,” filmed like an episode of you-know-what and serving as little more than a generic, obvious parody. I doubt I’ll ever like these episodes; fortunately, in the future, if I give this show a third viewing I really will stop with the first movie like I should have this time.

-To be fair, a couple of the mytharc episodes after “Sixth Extinction” like “En Ami” and “Requiem” are at least a bit bearable, but it’s obvious by then that nobody was going to figure out how to piece the mytharc back together.

-The other terrible episodes that have always been terrible weren’t any better this time; obviously, little needs to be said for “Space” (an episode I used to consider the worst episode of TV I’ve ever seen, but that’s probably now “Manbearpig,” and “Spock’s Brain” is more incompetent) “Jersey Devil,” “Ghost In The Machine,” “Teso Des Bichos,” etc. though I feel that the much-hated “3” could have been in the oven a bit longer. There’s an episode with Kurtwood Smith as a guest star that I forget the name of that struck me as being a big fat mess, the William Gibson episodes still weren’t very good, and the Stephen King episode was even worse than before, a strong contender for the show’s worst. There’s also a really stupid episode in I think season 8 called “Badlaa” about a little disfigured Indian guy who crawls up people’s butts. Yeah, really.

-Cliches on the show that need to die: Mulder having to rescue Scully, either one of them ending up in the hospital whenever it’s time to concentrate on the other character, blood splattering on walls, a stinger at the end indicating what whatever monster they were hunting is still alive or had babies or something and will continue on, people surviving or having barely credible reactions to things that would make most people’s heads explode. I could list more.

-The first movie was never any sort of a classic, but at least it’s sort of interesting to see the big-budget summer-movie framework they were working in and the spaceship setpiece in Antarctica at the end is actually pretty nice to watch. I’d forgotten about Martin Landau being in it, and that it opens with not one but TWO awkward framing devices (the kids discovering a monster in Texas, then Terry O’Quinn from Lost deciding to get killed by the bomb). I’d forgotten the second movie ENTIRELY (just that it took place in the cold and that people hadn’t liked it very much) and wrote it off just as much, but it’s not so much that it’s bad as that it’s a bore and easily the least necessary X-Files thing there was. It really just doesn’t serve any particular purpose at all, with Mulder and Scully having their usual boring disagreements while hunting down a monster that was just some Russian guy stealing human heads so he can graft them on to other people’s bodies. I hadn’t even remembered what the monster was, I misremembered it as being some sort of gender bender thing, but that turned out to have nothing to do with it. Billy Connolly could have been used well in this movie but he’s put to waste.

-If anybody here watched the six-part “EVENT SERIES” from a few years back, or “Season 11,” let me know if they were worth it, but I’m not holding my breath–I bet none of you gave a shit at all.