Things I've Noticed: Sometimes watching The X-Files takes some explaining

For the last couple of years my wife and I have been re-watching The X-Files with our youngest daughter, who is working her way through the series for her first time.  The show is both a lot of fun due to the surprise cameos made by all sorts of people before they were famous, and for the storylines themselves.

When watching the series with our teen daughter (born in 1997), we've tried our best to explain to our daughter just how big a show this was in its day.

Today we checked out the season seven episode X-Cops, which crossed over with the hugely popular reality show COPS - which took a little bit of describing as well - following beat cops around through the events of a tour, blurred out bystanders and suspects, and the regular interaction with the cameraman filming.

It's kind of tricky, for an episode which only takes 45 minutes to watch, we end up spending about fifteen giving our daughter backstory and context for what she is seeing.  At the same time, she seems to be tolerating all this, and is probably much more knowledgable about late '90s pop culture than a lot of her high school-aged friends.

Series Review: Millennium

One of the joys of watching classic television with my kids is it allows me to revisit personal favourites of my own childhood.  When they were younger we watched all of classic Star Trek (including the cartoon and a number of the movies), and I found the show held up extremely well to multiple viewings, and even the outdated effects didn't obstruct my kids enjoyment of the engaging story lines and characters.

For the past few years my wife and youngest daughter have been watching The X-Files together, and as they got closer and closer to the point where I stopped watching (end of season 6), the more excited I've become to finally catch up on a show I left behind years ago.

But being the orderly guy I am, I suggested that before they hit season seven, we check out the short-lived sister series Millennium (1996-99), which focused on Frank Black, an ex-FBI agent who had the ability to see inside the mind of killers and worked now as a consultant with an organization called The Millennium Group.

Starring Lance Henriksen as Frank, the show focused on both a "killer of the week" type story like many procedurals, but also chose to examine the millennial fear that existed in the era leading up to the year 2000.  What I loved about the show at the time was how Frank balanced the dark and horrible aspects of his job with a family life, and how (introduced early in the first season) his young daughter also seemed to have a similar ability to his.

Although the show ended after only three seasons, there was a finale built into the seventh season of Tthe X-Files (which I haven't seen yet), but the show works well on its own, with each season having its own distinct feel and a number of really creepy standout episodes.

Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Sixteen

They Knew All Along!

One of the interesting things of any continuing series is you get to ask the question of how the series effects and is affected by the larger world. In the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, for example, there comes a point where the original victims of the killer have all run out (mild 20+ year spoiler) as the killer was targeting the children of the people who had killed him years before.

In the world of Hack/Slash, wherein a number of killers have risen from the grave and then proceed to kill all sorts of victims, the question has to be asked? Hasn’t anyone put this together other than our protagonists Cassie and Vlad?

The answer is a definite yes, both in a good and bad way.

The good way is the creation of an organization (starting out as two people) called Hack/Slash Inc., which is basically made up of people who have been saved by Cassie and Vlad over the years and are now working to network with other survivors and help Cassie find more Slashers as she travels the world.

The bad way (and a really common way in Science Fiction and Science Fiction-themed Horror, seen in films ranging from Alien (1979) to The X-Files (1993-2002) and Resident Evil (2002)) is that of government and corporate agencies looking to somehow capitalize on the phenomenon of Slashers, which they have renamed Revenants, for personal gain. “…These are organizations populated by utilitarian capitalists, power-hungry careerists or selfish research scientists” (Parker, 2000, 81)  In the world of Hack/Slash, this begins as a private company, then becomes a shadowy agency and later may even involve Cassie in a way she could never expect.

As the series moves form one-shots to a continuing storyline, the world of Hack/Slash began to grow into new and intriguing ways, and a big part of these involve making Slashers a phenomenon that exist beyond Cassie and Vlad's experience.

WORKS CITED
Parker, M. (2000). Manufacturing bodies: Flesh, organization, cyborgs. Body and organization. London: Sage Publications, 71-86.

IMAGE USED
Hack/Slash: Slice Hard. Retrieved Online at : http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/1/10162/216736-19305-115843-2-hack--slash--slice.jpg

Bookmonkey's Top Five Episodes of The Avengers

So a few months back my friend Ron lent me the DVD boxed set, The Avengers: The Complete Emma Peel Mega-set, which contained 54 episodes of the classic '60s series, including three lost episodes of the Ian Keel years (season one) and an Emma Peel cameo episode of The New Avengers (I'm pretty sure they just used archival footage and another actress to do the voice). Anyway, after finishing this thoughouly fun show (and I recommend the entire series to anyone who is interested, I thought I would give my top five personal favourite episodes.

For a brief taste of what to expect from The Avengers, I recommend you head to YouTube and check out The Case of the Missing Corpse Basically this three minute short was created to advertise the fact that the show would now be in colour, and in those three minutes it explains the plot of pretty much any episode of the series.

5. The Man Eater of Surrey Green - Ages before Mulder and Scully took years to stop an alien invasion plot in The X-Files, Steed and Peel faced down a mind controlling plant from outer space with plans of world domination in one episode. This episode features monsters from outer space, a terrifying conspiracy and a race against the extinction of mankind.

4. The Gravediggers - This episode has everything I’ve grown to love about The Avengers, eccentric millionaires, the promise of an invading army and one of the best climaxes I’ve ever seen. To save Mrs. Peel, who has been tied to a train track, Steed must fight off three brutes and stop the train, which, by the way is one of those mini trains for little kids you find at amusement parks.

3. Too Many Christmas Trees - Possibly the creepiest Christmas themed episode of anything I’ve ever seen, it has a happy shout out to Steed’s previous partner, Cathy Gale, a very Dickensian Christmas party and the creepiest Santa I’ve seen since The Nightmare Before Christmas.

2. The House that Jack Built - An Emma Peel-focused episode, this one involves her inheriting a house from an aunt and finding out that the house is a lot deadlier than she thinks. This episode finally gave some back story to the character and had a really interesting concept.

1. The Girl From Auntie - My hands-down, favourite episode of the series, this John Steed-focused episode has an Emma Peel impostor, and rather than simply arresting her or what have you, Steed simply partners up with this girl and gets her help to find the real Mrs. Peel. The entire episode was hilarious, involving Russian agents, a knitting circle and an auction house that can get you anything you desire.

I'm really glad I got the opportunity to check out this series as I was vaguely familiar with it before hand, but can now say I've seen a lot of really great '60s television, as well as an introduction to a sub-genre of Science Fiction I had never heard of before; Spy-Fi, wherein espionage stories are told which involve science-fiction technology or concepts.