September 10, 2019: A Green and Black Autumn

The entire show in one frame.

I think The X-Files might ruin my Halloween Season. I like writing sentences that have never been written before. See, a couple of months ago, my wife Lindsey suddenly started watching the show from Episode 1. She’d never seen it before. I mean, she knew how much I dug the show, and I showed her a few key episodes early in our relationship, but even I have never tried to convince her to re-watch it from Pilot. I don’t even think I ever wanted to.

And I’m still not sure why she started watching it, but I like that she’s doing it. I foresaw her throwing an episode or two on every other night or so, me joining her for my favorites, and us talking about the show a lot. Otherwise I’d watch her journey from afar.

But, little did I know it, just a few notes form Mark Snow’s theme would pull me to the couch more often than not no matter what I was doing. Even for that gender-bending Amish episode I never really liked (I just need more of the concept fill out, dammit).

And now, when we should be filling our evenings with seasonal programming, we often still want to watch The X-Files. And I know I could do worse than watch a spooky show like that during the season, but The X-Files was never seasonal watching to me, although for a while there it was impossible to avoid photos of couples being Mulder and Scully for Halloween.

I mean, there isn’t really a full-on Halloween episode of The X-Files, even though there are two Christmas ones. The show evokes a lot of things for me, but not Halloween.

And all that to say that tonight we watched The X-Files. Despite everything I just wrote, it was a good night for it. Today is the 26th anniversary of the show’s debut, and while I kinda hate the empty pop culture anniversary-ing that the socials thrust upon us, I remember exactly where I was when this show first hit the world…sitting on a couch and watching it while my family fluttered around me not watching it. That moment in my parent’s basement is frozen in my brain…long before my long Halloween seasons and OTIS and New England and wife and kids.

Of course, because she’s watching them in order, we didn’t pick the episode we watched, which happened to be Soft Light, near the end of Season 2. The one with Tony Shalhoub walking around with a black hole shadow. An interesting episode, for sure, but more a science fiction episode and the least spooky in a series that’s like 99% spooky episodes. Oh well.

Also, this entry is a warning that we’ll probably be doing that throughout the season, meaning this might turn into an X-Files blog.