Gen X-Files: a Rewatch Podcast

One brother is frozen in a tube. The other is having a very bad week at work.This week, we’re covering The X-Files season 1, episode 23, “Roland,” as Mulder and Scully investigate an aerospace lab where professional jealousy has turned deadly. Join longtime fans Dash and Melz and Dash’s mom Angel, our resident first-time watcher, for killer wind tunnels, stolen research, and one dead (?) scientist with some extremely unresolved issues.We talk about Željko Ivanek’s performance, Mulder’s gentler side, and why Roland and Tracy give this strange little murder mystery its heart. There’s also that final look in the mirror to debate, some excellent wordless acting to appreciate, and the question of whether “solved” means anything when you have to put it in an official report. Along the way, True Blood meets Blue Bloods, a Lexus receives a threat, and our cryogenics discussion somehow leads to Sinbad’s Shazaam and a man named Walter Grieselbeef.No X-Files homework required. We recap the episode as we go, so pull up a chair and get into it with us.If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Shoot us an email at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter, @GenXFilesPod

Can a murdered cop reincarnate through conception and come back as a deeply unsettling eight-year-old girl?Dash and Melz (longtime fans and couple) and Angel (first-time watcher and Dash’s mom) are digging into “Born Again,” the episode that sends Mulder and Scully to Buffalo for a creepy kid, a murdered police officer, some very suspicious former partners, and what may be the most complicated case of Ghost Jacking yet.Meanwhile, Angel is immediately onboard with creepy-kid X-Files, we try to figure out exactly how reincarnation-by-conception is supposed to work, and everybody involved in making this episode apparently likes it a whole lot less than we do.Also: Pillsbury Alibi Dust, Mulder and Langly’s 4/20 plans, the question of just how solved this case actually is, and a surprisingly serious conversation about whether a dead man’s soul can hitch a sperm ride at the exact moment of climax. Basically, way more paranormal reproductive science than anyone asked for.If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter @GenXFilesPod.

Eugene Victor Tooms is back, he’s hungry for liver, and somehow he’s not even the weirdest thing we talk about this week.Dash and Melz (longtime fans and couple) and Angel (first-time watcher and Dash’s mom) are digging into “Tooms,” the episode that gives us the return of our favorite stretchy yellow-eyed sewer freak, the arrival of Assistant Director Walter Skinner, and the Cigarette Smoking Man lurking silently in the corner like tobacco-scented bad news.Meanwhile, Angel predicts “alien pimples that have men hiding in them,” Mulder finds a genuine secret mall apartment, Scully likes Mulder enough to make him a sandwich, and we try to figure out how a man who should be approximately 900 years old was still working as a sheriff.Also: a childhood encounter with a horrifyingly flat rat, the Roto-Rooter Tooms Trapper, Skinner sex logistics, whether Tooms goos when he goons, and the important realization that nothing makes sense and Scully writes it down.Plus, Angel gives Cigarette Smoking Man a prognosis that’s hard to argue with.If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter @GenXFilesPod

The X-Files Season 1, Episode 20: Darkness Falls. This week on the podcast, Dash & Melz, long-time fans and couple, and Angel, first-time watcher and Dash’s mom, head into the Washington forest, where Mulder and Scully investigate a missing logging crew and discover something ancient, glowing, and very hungry.Along the way, we question the episode’s increasingly confusing rules about light and shadow, discover Mulder’s weakness for loggers, investigate a suspiciously rubber tree, and gaze at an aura farming environmentalist. Angel, meanwhile, is still trying to determine whether FOX sold her an episode about gigantic spiders from space.Never seen The X-Files? You’re good. Angel is watching for the first time.If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected]

The X Files Season 1, Episode 19: Shapes. This week, Dash & Melz, long time fans and couple, and Angel, first time watcher and Dash’s mom, head to Montana, where a rancher shoots a man he swears was a wild animal. Mulder finds shed skin, changing footprints, mysterious fangs, and an old X File pointing to something that has been happening here for a very long time. Whatever it is, everyone seems extremely committed to it not being a werewolf.Along the way, Lyle Parker shows us his deeply emotional poetry, Scully takes repeated psychic damage, Discount Sam Elliott makes his wrestling debut, and Mulder is especially smelly. We also encounter the origin of scrapbooking, a rodeo poetry reading, vegetarian vampires, cows containing multiple seas, and one mountain lion who keeps getting blamed for absolutely everything.Somewhere in all of this, we start wondering how much weird shit Scully is expected to look directly at before she is allowed to admit something strange might be happening. Angel, meanwhile, cuts through the entire debate with the definitive review of Shapes: “It ain’t a werewolf, but it was a good werewolf story.” Never seen The X Files? You’re good. Angel is watching for the first time. If you’re reading this, you’re a friend.Questions, suggestions, hypnoregressions? Drop us a line at [email protected]