I purchased the first five seasons on disc, and remember the third season as being the show’s peak, with the four “Darin Morgan” episodes being their best. So that’s what I’m most looking forward to rewatching.

At the very least, after the first movie (which is no classic–does anyone even remember how hyped it was in summer 1998?–but the second one was flat-out worthless) I would certainly have to give a second pass to Vince Gilligan’s “X-Cops” and the episode he wrote with Bryan Cranston as the bigot whose head was going to explode and is responsible for Breaking Bad, but which I recall not really being that great of an episode. If I’m not mistaken, the first thing Gilligan ever wrote was the episode that had people stepping into their shadows and dying. Bzzzzzt!

The best mytharc episodes, to my knowledge, are Gilligan’s “Paper Hearts” and the “Nisei/731” two parter. I’m going through some of the better ones right now–“Duane Barry” and “Ascension,” with the memorable visual of Mulder scaling that amusment-park car in the sky, I’d remembered that but not where it was from. Nice to see Steve Railsback too, poor bastard got typecast all the time after playing Charlie Manson (but he IS the best remembered screen Manson.)

I remember the last two seasons as being a waste of many actors–Robert Patrick wasn’t used that well, Annabeth Gish was basically a failure and I remember people like Lucy Lawless and Cary Elwes being put to waste too, though you do get to see Aaron Paul turn up as a Jackass parody. There were also episodes that retreaded earlier episodes. Those seasons weren’t terribly good and the show probably should have quit after season 6, but I maintain that they’re not as miserable as the seventh season.

It is possible that I may not hate season 7 as much this time around, because I hated Mad Men’s season 6 the first time but felt I’d been hard on it in retrospect the second time around; ditto for the last season of The Wire.