x-files – technology

Last summer, we had watched seasons one and two of the x-files. In my case, most of these episodes were ones that I had never before seen. I had mainly started watching regularly with season three. Both of the episodes I had seen in season one had to do with Mulder chasing UFOs and even though I remember faithfully watching the Project UFO TV series about Project Blue Book I didn’t see the appeal of an updated version.

When Shan showed me some of the humor in other episodes, ‘Humbug’, and ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’, she was able to convince me that the series was worth another look. We had many years of enjoyment out of it before it started to spiral into a repetition of alien conspiracy stories without much of the humor that we had earlier enjoyed.
I found out much later that both of those episodes were written by Darin Morgan, who had played the Flukeman before being given a chance at writing episodes. Some of his other episodes were ‘War of the Coprophages’ and ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’.

Rewatching the first two seasons in a block, you can really tell that the show came out just ahead of the technology that would have made it irrelevant. In the first season, they had to borrow flashlights, and those one were large models. Scully’s cell phone doesn’t show up until the end of the first season and Mulder doesn’t get his until deep into the second season. How much would have changed if Mulder could have just take a photo with his camera phone and sent it off to Scully when he found the warehouse of aliens in tanks?