The X-Files - The Complete Third Season
Comfortable within its universe, the series starts to play with its own concepts.
By its third season, The X-Files finally reached a respectable degree of creative maturity.
The cast and crew were probably feeling comfortable within the show’s concepts and that domination left them free to experiment, producing remarkable episodes, in which the writers created very intelligent (and new) approaches to those ideas.
A perfect example is the episode "Jose Chung’s 'From Outer Space,'” which portraits a writer, Jose Chung, interviewing Scully for his next book, which he claims to be an entirely new literary genre, “the non-fiction science fiction,” based on strange UFO-related events in a small town.
For someone who never watched The X-Files, this episode would be the best one with which to start. It condenses the whole series’ philosophy in a perfect way. It is a well humored episode which makes fun, not only of the main characters' personalities, but of common characters related to UFOs - nerds, men in black or simply, completely crazy people.
This season begins finishing the plot started in the final episode of the previous one. "The Blessing Way” and "Paper Clip" are part of the series’ main plot. Mulder and Scully will solve the mysteries opened in the last season, which only leads to more questions.
"Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose" tells the story of a serial killer who murders fortune-tellers. Mulder and Scully find a genuine clairvoyant who can predict the people’s deaths, wonderfully played by Peter Boyle, to help them find the murderer before he, himself, becomes the next victim. One of the season’s best episodes.
In "War of the Coprophages," Mulder is investigating UFO sightings in a small scientific community in Massachusetts, when he comes upon strange cases of people being killed by cockroaches. Another very clever episode in which nothing is what it seems to be.
"Nisei" and "731" follow the series' main plots, providing some explanations about Scully’s abduction while combining Japanese diplomats with alien autopsies.
"Teso Dos Bichos" shows the aftermath of the finding of an Amaru mummy during an excavation in South America. The mummy was an ancient sorcerer and everybody who disturbed her rest will pay an expensive price for their insolence—a new way to tell the old story of a mummy’s curse.
Chinese ghost stories are the focus of "Hell Money," where Mulder and Scully investigate strange deaths related to phantasmagoric sights in Chinatown during the Chinese festival of the hungry ghosts. An investigation leads them to unveil a conspiracy of very real people using the desperation of weak people to obtain profit.
"Syzygy" is another comic episode. Mulder and Scully travel to a small town to investigate strange murders of teenagers that seem to be related to satanic cults. But soon they’ll realize that everybody’s behavior is being strangely affected, including their own.
It’s amazing to realize that The X-Files continued to show improvements, since the previous, and through the entire third season.
The viewers are the ones who benefit from this kind of creative control by the cast and crew, receiving an enormous variety of episodes that dared to experiment with new approaches.
This kind of creative diversity definitely contributed to keeping them connected to the show without risking being bored by repetitiousness.
Written by: Edward Olivier
Reviewers Rating: 9
Reader's Rating: 10.00
Reader's Votes: 1
Added: 7-Jun-2007
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