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Mixed:
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Negative:
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Critic Reviews
Jun 13, 2013
Season 8 Review:
All this tension turns out to be great for the show's pulse, which had been fluttering last season. In too many of season 7's adventures, Duchovny and Anderson looked as if they'd been asked to go investigate who shot J.R. Ewing; their boredom was showing. ... [This season's first two episodes discover] a new force field of energy.
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IndieWireDec 15, 2017
Season 11 Review:
Season 11 so far isn’t flawless, but it’s a lively, character-focused affair that feels far more unified than we’d ever anticipated, a massive improvement over Season 10 that gives us genuine hope for the second half. For the first time in a while, we’re truly excited to see more.
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Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
But these episodes were produced in 2017, a year overflowing with discussions about the manipulation of news and information and all the ways in which far-fetched falsehoods found purchase with a public hooked on echo chambers and siloed into tribes by social media. ... That may be why these new X-Files episodes feel sharper, tighter and smarter than the first attempt at its revival.
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Jan 2, 2018
Season 11 Review:
What’s striking about watching The X-Files in 2018 is just how rejuvenated it feels. While it’s never going to hit the heights of the third or fourth season from the original series (which aired from 1993 to 2002), the 2018 iteration is a damn sight better than the 2016 one.
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Feb 20, 2013
Season 1 Review:
But the paranormal is not what counts. It's the FBI agents who matter -- they're one of TV's most interesting twentysomething couples. [10 Sept 1993, p.1D]
Feb 20, 2013
Season 1 Review:
The X-Files gets off to a pleasingly creepy start tonight. But even spookier is the thought that some people will mistake it for a documentary. [10 Sept 1993, p.E1]
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
A fun, intriguing new drama...Inspiration is allowed to take all sorts of liberties. Fortunately, the production values of the show are high and no attempts are made to portray aliens on screen, for instance. The director wisely lets us imagine an unexplained power source with a whirl of wind rather than cheap-looking spaceships or funny-looking men with antennae heads. [8 Sept 1993, p.1F]
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
Some UFO cliches - bright lights, mysterious marks, lost time - turn up here (could they be cliches because they're...true?), but intelligent writing and sharp plotting lift the series far above the standard for the genre. The lead characters have a quirky chemistry that (refreshingly) isn't built on the "squabble and kiss" standard. (They're both pretty appealing, however, and if they should eventually kiss, I for one wouldn't mind.) [9 Sept 1993, p.06G]
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
[Mulder and Scully] are a lively team - look for love to blossom if ratings sag - and the show has some clever dialogue, a handsome look, unlimited plots (I'd imagine) and, of course, the specter of Big Brother keeping secrets from us all. [10 Sept 1993, p.Tempo 1]
Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
The mythology arc is absolute rubbish. Fortunately, this new season appears to suspect that and, after that rocky opener, gets down to business. Soon enough, Scully and Mulder are puzzling over a simulated world where great brains like Steve Jobs “live” for eternity. A strange doppelgänger is stalking people. That sounds like a job for the X-Files team. The best of the five offered for review is very good indeed, and it too is a curtain call from an old friend: Darin Morgan.
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Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
If this truly is the last season of The X-Files--and star Gillian Anderson has said it is, at least for her--the Fox sci-fi conspiracy thriller is going out giving what fans want. Mostly. In this, its 11th season, the show brings back familiar faces, opens some new mysteries, solves others and gives plenty of reasons to ship FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson)’s quirky relationship to the stars and back.
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Jan 25, 2016
Season 10 Review:
Other than a few missteps here and ther --Why would someone who claims to have been abducted by aliens several times live in the middle of nowhere away from people and protection?--the reboot feels like Linus’ blanket, warm and comforting. Duchovny and Anderson slip easily back into the give-and-take which helped make the original series so darn entertaining.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
In the opener, “My Struggle,” Carter plays to fan expectations on all fronts as he suggests only the most sinister conspiracy ever, one that manages to shake the typically unflappable Mulder and could up-end the premise of the entire series. It’s just that juicy.... [The second episode is] a perfectly serviceable monster-of-the-week tale. It also features some dopey reveries about Scully and Mulder’s lost son William.
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Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
David Duchovny from "Red Shoe Diaries," "Twin Peaks" and the current film "Kalifornia" combines an off-center earnestness with a weird sense of humor to make Mulder likable and convincing. As Scully, Gillian Anderson provides a cool, logical counterpart for Spooky. It's a perfectly balanced pairing, with only a hint of sexual tension. [10 Sept 1993, p.61]
Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
Carter’s mythology for the series as a whole has never seemed more superfluous, and the episodes still linger too long on the confabulations of the paranoid. But even when stripped down to its bare bones, The X-Files has plenty to offer its audience. ... It’s not just the vivid backdrop [of the current world] that makes this season of The X-Files work, though. The episodes released for critics are just better episodes than the first time around.
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Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
The good news is that a longer season gives other writers more time, and that if anything, leads Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny seem more comfortable this time out as partners in spooky crime fighting and something more than pals. It comes off less as an exercise in brand revival and more a genuine new season of The X-Files.
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Jan 2, 2018
Season 11 Review:
Midway through the first episode of the 11th season of “The X-Files,” FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) clutches her head and moans, “What’s going on here?” We can sympathize. Up until then, the episode had played like a frenetic trailer, filled with crazy action and angst. In subsequent episodes, the Chris Carter series settles down to familiar entertaining territory, but there is a danger you might turn it off before then.
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UPROXXJan 2, 2018
Season 11 Review:
It’s not peak, season three X-Files, because too much time has passed, too many stories have been told, and the world is too different from the one in which Mulder and Scully first partnered. But, the mythology episode aside, it’s much better than it has any business being, particularly given what we got two years ago.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
It starts well enough, with effects-filled flashbacks to Roswell 1947 and a call from Assistant Director Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) that brings the old team back together--Scully in her scrubs helping put ears on earless children, and Mulder an Internet-perusing recluse who dresses himself from the Travis Bickle Catalog for Men. But it collapses into poorly motivated, out-of-nowhere speechifying, accompanied by stock footage of old puzzling phenomena. Fortunately the other two episodes push the right buttons.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
The first episode is called “My Struggle,” which aptly describes the experience of sitting through it. It lumbers. It plods. The actors chew sawdusty mouthfuls of expository dialogue.... Thankfully, the second episode shakes the dourness and gives Mulder and Scully more room to breathe. But it’s the third--a comic palate-cleanser in the “monster of the week” vein--that finally recreates the show’s oddball delights.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
This first hour is all about reinvention. It's a rather clunky attempt to remake the 1993-2002 vehicle in a manner that will please loyal fans and new viewers. The second episode, with guest star Doug Savant ("Desperate Housewives"), pushes this redesigned vehicle into a higher gear.... Now this is the X-Files we fondly remember. Can they push this to yet a higher gear? Why, yes, they can, and they do with the third episode.
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Jan 19, 2016
Season 10 Review:
[Chris Carter has] brought back and distilled the show into six hours of pure X-Files, good and bad. Duchovny and Anderson are entertaining and reliably classic (if unsurprising), conspiracies are discussed in clandestine secrecy (if confusingly), flashbacks reveal exciting truths (that feel more important to the characters than maybe to you), and Mulder’s extraterrestrial friends feel tantalizingly closer than ever (and then they aren’t, again).
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Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
It's all played with suitably creepy seriousness, but without the self- conscious weirdness that made the later-day "Twin Peaks" so tedious. Duchovny and Anderson anchor the story through steady performances; we're as interested in what happens to them as in what happened to the teens...It's all pretty silly stuff, but it's silliness done well. If you're willing to give yourself over to it, it should hold your attention -- which is more than one can say for most of the season's new offerings. [10 Sept 1993, p.Ent 20]
Uncle BarkyJan 3, 2018
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
Something's going on here, but unfortunately not between the two bland lead actors. Duchovny makes a peculiar hero, too laconic even when discussing his passion for tracking aliens. His character needs oomph, but The X-Files already has a nicely offbeat tone. Maybe this is how Fox will revive its still-lamented Alien Nation series. [10 Sept, 1993 p.Life 3D]
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