Ancient Murderers, Little Grey Men, And A Lotta Sexual Tension: The 10 Best ‘X-Files’ Episodes
It's one of the most iconic TV shows, and it still holds up.
No modern show has been able to precisely replicate the dark magic of The X-Files.
Of course, many have tried. In the years since the adventures of Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) first debuted, modern genre television has become a booming business, with everything from Supernatural to Lost following in the footsteps of Chris Carter‘s masterpiece. But every attempt has failed.
Hell, even The X-Files reboot fell short of the original’s magic, becoming a pale imitation of itself, more by-the-numbers exercise in nostalgia than boundary-pushing masterwork.
No matter. The original run of the show remains one of the great achievements of the form, a multi-part tale that always balanced the human with the extraterrestrial, telling stories that are as deeply unnerving as they are full of a warm, crackling life.
The grotesquerie of the thing is a key part of the appeal, of course — it’s impossible to talk about The X-Files without talking about the deep psychological traumas it afflicted onto children around the world. But at the heart of it, The X-Files is a show about belief; about love; about friendship. And about two shockingly different understandings of the world — Mulder’s and Scully’s — finding some strange balance in one another.
Here then, are the 10 best episodes of The X-Files.
#10. Pusher
The X-Files is proof that a show is only ever as good as its villains, with both Eugene Tooms and the Cigarette Smoking Man entering the canon as some of the all-time great small screen baddies (more on both of them later). But Pusher, the dark heart of the episode of the same name, might be one of the most complex antagonists of the entire series.
A so-called “little man” with the psychic ability to disrupt the world around him, Pusher is the perfect illustration of how absolute power corrupts absolutely; an ordinary person ruined by his own extraordinary abilities. The result? A treatise on power, pain, resilience, and catharsis.
Oh, and Walter Skinner getting beaten up, for a change.
#9. The Pine Bluff Variant
If you’re looking to get someone into The X-Files, The Pine Bluff Variant is a perfect place to start.
On the one hand, it’s a full-blasted assault on the US government’s insidious tendency to disrupt foreign powers from the inside. On the other hand, it’s stuffed full of hideously gloopy skeletons and a biological weapon that causes human flesh to evaporate.
How better to nail what The X-Files is about, a work of art both giddily obsessed with the very stupid, and the very, very smart?
#8. The Post-Modern Prometheus
The story of Frankenstein and his monster has been told and re-told so many times that it’s become a means by which storytellers can slot themselves into horror history without having to try very hard. But The Post-Modern Prometheus, the X-Files take on the story, is not so lazy.
Sure, the episode spends a lot of time sticking close to the cliches of the tale, complete with a black and white look and great claps of thunder. But it also knows exactly when it’s time to pull away, inserting the legacy of Cher into a story about outsiders and acceptance.
The result: one of the wittiest episodes of the entire series, a delightful, heartwarming exercise in subverting cliches.
#7. Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose
The X-Files is a show saturated with death and disease, obsessed both with murderers and with dispatching them in increasingly inventive and unpleasant ways.
In Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, however, the tone is different — more elegiac, thoughtful. The titular Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle, in a performance that would win him an Emmy) is haunted by death. But that knowledge of mortality doesn’t send him barmy, as it does with so many of the show’s antagonists. Instead, it makes him more thoughtful; kinder; calmer.
Thus, his own end, when it comes, might be the single most effecting moment in the show’s history — a man coming to terms with not just his end, but the end that all human beings face. And doing so not with despair, but with great kindness. Genre television is so rarely this thoughtful, or this deeply-felt.
#6. Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man
Chris Carter never met a conspiracy theory that he couldn’t get behind, and in Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, those theories are itemised, one by one. But the episode isn’t just a collection of tin foil-capped digressions. Instead, it’s a process of codifying the show’s main antagonist into pure mythology.
Transforming from glorified extra into criminal mastermind, the Cigarette Smoking Man becomes more than a man; not just a grinning sociopath, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, but the pure force of American evil. And, by elevating him, the show elevated itself — no longer a story of two friends fighting for the truth, but two friends fighting for control over the very psyche of the United States itself.
#5. Folie à Deux
The X-Files has always excelled at rug-pulling, presenting the audience with a premise only to almost immediately turn its on its head. But in Folie a Deux, that is taken to the next level. Is Gary Lambert, a mild-mannered office worker who believes that his boss is secretly an evil alien, mad? Or is he simply staring through a flimsy veil, glimpsing at the truth beneath?
The show won’t tell you; at least, not until the very end, by which stage your entire method of gathering truths has been totally upended anyway. And isn’t that what The X-Files is about anyway? Subverting the very nature of the world as we see it?
#4. Jose Chung’s From Outer Space
The X-Files‘ relationship with comedy has always been scattershot.
Some of the most ridiculous episodes have a tendency to play things totally straight (looking at you, Kill Switch), while attempts at straight-up hilarity often fall cringily short (the reboot is particularly guilty of this crime, hamming up already dorky premises for the cheapest of laughs.)
Consider Jose Chung’s From Outer Space the exception to that particular rule then. 40 minutes of pure, unbridled insanity, the episode sees the writers room lean sharply into every single B-movie cliche.
In the process, they steer the ship as close as it ever got to the pleasures of ’50s sci-fi shlock, paying equal homage to Ed Wood and Forbidden Planet. But this is not simply an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it’s the show at its loosest and most freewheeling; proof, if ever more was needed, that more TV should stop being afraid of making fun of itself.
#3. Squeeze
How many grown adults still bear the psychic scars from the first time they clapped eyes upon the blank visage of Eugene Tooms staring at the camera from the darkness of a gutter?
Squeeze isn’t just the most unnerving episode in X-Files history. It’s the most unnerving entry in the annals of modern American television, an utterly bonkers mini-slasher film about an ancient serial killer that can stretch his unassuming form through air vents and chimneys. Still, to this day, the image of Tooms slowly licking newspaper, building his nest, haunts an entire generation like a curse.
#2. Hungry
It’s typical of the X-Files‘s lopsided brilliance that one of the very best episodes of the show utterly backgrounds everything that otherwise makes it special. Hunger is a complete inversion of the monster of the week formula, relegating Mulder and Scully to vaguely-defined antagonists, and throwing the entire narrative focus behind the creature itself.
As a result, it’s also one of the most emotionally effective stories in the series’ entire run, a heartbreaking look at one man’s tragic attempt to escape from his own inhumanity, and to fit in with a society that reviles him. That he fails, ultimately, isn’t seen as an indictment on him. It’s an indictment on the rest of us.
#1. Home
Thank God that Home premiered before the ubiquity of the internet: can you imagine the raft of hot takes and digital moaning that the episode would prompt if it came out today? After all, there are a few more abrupt tonal left-turns, not just in the history of the show, but in the history of modern television. Gone is the creepy but non-confrontational style of usual proceedings, swapped out for an hour of gruelling terror.
But amidst all the violence and the horror is one of the most exemplary take-downs of the American dream in modern TV. It’s a room of writers looking deep into the heart of the country around them, and being disgusted with what they see. It’s A Serbian Film on a small scale. And it’s an indictment of everything wrong with modern life. There have been no greater risks on the small screen.
Seasons one to five of The X-Files are coming to SBS On Demand on October 24.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee who has watched The X-Files more times than he would care to admit. He tweets @Joe_O_Earp.