In anticipation of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, Fox compelled creator Chris Carter and executive producer Frank Spotnitz to select eight noteworthy episodes to serve as a primer to the series.  Their selections, packaged with explanatory introductions from Carter and Spotnitz, a WonderCon panel with the writers as well as David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, and a trailer for the new film was released as The X-Files: Revelations… something of a curious title given that the installments within neither offer new insights into the enigmatic series, nor include the third season episode “Revelations.”  Still, the assemblage is an excellent starting point for immersing a new viewer (or reacquainting an old one) with the Mulder-Scully era of the long running series.

As one might expect, the anthology opens with the pilot, which Fox originally aired on the 10th September 1993.  Fifteen years on, it’s hard to remember how bright network television was before The X-Files.  FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) are cloaked in shadows as they investigate teenage disappearances in the quiet town of Bellefleur, Oregon.  Carter’s script quickly establishes a pair of iconic TV characters with Mulder, the believer in paranormal phenomena, contrasted against Scully’s hard science background and dogged skepticism.  The next episode on the set, “Beyond the Sea,” takes character development to a new level as the viewer is introduced to Scully’s family in a haunting episode that finds her recently deceased father’s spirit possibly communicating via serial killer Luther Lee Boggs (Brad Dourif).  Extraordinary performances from Anderson and Dourif not only raise the bar for the show’s acting but the script, by co-executive producers Glen Morgan and James Wong, takes the first step away from a procedural format toward a more character-driven concept.

Season two is represented by “The Host,” a Carter-scripted investigation that finds the agents hunting a giant flukeman (Darin Morgan) in the sewers of New Jersey.  Though 2001’s “Badlaa” would eventually eclipse the gross-out quotient of this episode, it’s still an excellent representative of the standalone scary stories that served as the series’ bread and butter.  Year three’s Emmy-winning “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” is next up, illustrating the elasticity of the series’ format with an offbeat story from Darin Morgan.  Morgan’s Emmy win, along with Peter Boyle’s statuette for best guest actor are emblematic of the episode’s melancholy charms. 

 

“Memento Mori,” the most poignant entry in the series’ ongoing mythology opens the second disc with the discovery of Scully’s inoperable brain tumor.  Nominated for a writing Emmy in 1997, the episode finds Mulder and Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) going to extreme measures to save their friend and signals the peak of the show’s enigmatic stories underpinned with strong emotional subtexts.  The black and white Frankenstein pastiche, “The Post-modern Prometheus” follows with Mulder and Scully pursuing a deformed creature bedeviling a Jerry Springer-obsessed town with unwanted pregnancies.  Carter wrote and directed the episode, which owes much to comic books and Universal horror films, but features at its heart, the story of a misfit looking for love.  Watch for future series regular Chris Owen playing the sympathetic monster, and, in the final moments, one of the series’ most outrageous cameos (albeit a faked cameo, as is explained in the introduction).

Season five gets a second helping as Vince Gilligan’s “Bad Blood” continues Darin Morgan’s forays into humor.  Mulder and Scully both recount a tale of rural Texas vampirism from their own highly-skewed perspectives in a story that illustrates what the characters really think of one another.  Tragically, a sequence wherein Scully arrives at the FBI parking lot to find Mulder’s land yacht badly parked across the one empty unassigned space was cut from the episode – likely a victim of production time constraints, but absolutely hysterical on the page.  The set concludes with an episode that rarely finds its way onto top ten lists.  Spotnitz fondly thinks of “Milagro” as a metaphor for writing The X-Files.  The story concerns Mulder’s novelist neighbor (James Hawkes), who becomes obsessed with Scully and can conjure fictional characters into reality in an atmospheric episode that first suggests in dialogue that Mulder and Scully share more than a professional relationship.

 

The transfers are crisp and clean with “Beyond the Sea” looking notably freer of compression artifacts than it appeared on the original first season DVD release.  The last three episodes are in anamorphic widescreen despite Fox originally airing them in a 4:3 ratio.  Stereo sound decodes to a serviceable Dolby Surround mix, but The X-Files could really do with a 5.1 upgrade before it hits Blu-Ray.  Look for an amusing appearance by Anderson in Carter’s introduction to “Milagro” that belies Agent Scully’s all business façade.