The X-Files Friday Feature: Midpoint

What incredible timing. By watching four episodes a week and pairing the two part episodes, I've managed to finish season four on a Thursday.

More importantly, I've very nearly reached the halfway point (the actual halfway point will be after S5E4 or S5E5, depending on how you count the movies) of the series. It's time to revisit a few things.

When I started watching this show, I really had no idea what to expect. You saw that post - I knew basically nothing. Mulder, Scully, aliens? I'd come into this as a fan of serialised television from later eras, which I'm sure had a little to do with my early reaction to the significant number of case of the week episodes.

But somewhere along the way, the characters really started developing, and I started to really care for Scully and Mulder. And feeling other things - loathing, disgust - for the Smoking Man and his associates. I mean, I initially thought he was just creepy, and then he turned out to actually be evil.

I never even considered it. I guess it didn't even really occur to me that there would be that much of a serialised plot. And even once I saw the opening credits at the beginning and noticed that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were the only full time actors in the series, I didn't even really expect that many recurring characters to show up, especially outside the mythology episodes.

But there were, and they've sometimes shown up when I least expected them to. But their presence almost always makes things interesting.

And another thing I've noticed is that because only maybe a third of the episodes are part of the serialisation, there's often little other cohesion to each season. I don't know that I could really come up with a singular description of any season of the show I've seen so far, since in terms of a long arc, we're dealing with a very long arc. There aren't really any big bads or cases that take Mulder and Scully into a climactic season finale, although the finales frequently are very tense and dramatic.

So in a way, being halfway through the series is a lot more meaningful than on a show where the seasons are more or less self-contained. The plot is very well developed at this point. We know who the villains are, and we know who the good guys are. Maybe. I'm still not a hundred per cent sure on Skinner.

There are, as far as I can tell, five distinct conspiracy plots running through the series at this point:

• The black oozing goo from 'Piper Maru'/'Apocryphy' and 'Tunguska'/'Terma'
• The 'ordinary' alien plot from 'Fallen Angel', 'E.B.E', 'The Erlenmeyer Flask', 'Tempus Fugit'/'Max', and maybe 'Gethsemane'
• Scully's abduction and cancer, begun in 'Duane Barry'/'Ascension' and continuing in 'One Breath', 'Nisei'/'731', and 'Memento Mori'
• The clones thread running through 'Colony'/'End Game', 'Talitha Cumi', 'Herrenvolk', and 'Zero Sum'
• The secret experimentation thread running through both mythology episodes like 'The Blessing Way' and 'Paper Clip', but also even non-mythology episodes like 'Blood' and 'Wetwired'

Some of those plots intersect - the experimentation thread is obviously connected to Scully's abduction and cancer, and the clones are also connected to it in some way. I'm not sure where the alien bodies and the black oozing goo fit in, though, other than that some of the same people who are opposing Mulder and Scully in their investigations of the other conspiracies also seem to frequently get in their way on those, as well. Like Krycek, who seems to have his fingers in everything and can never be trusted.

I think at least Scully's cancer plot will be somehow resolved soon. No later than the end of season five, anyway. It's not really the kind of thing they can drag out. The rest, though, will probably converge towards the end of the series, assuming the series is brought to a reasonable conclusion and doesn't just end out of nowhere.

There are a few episodes over 100 left - even that surprises me. The sheer length of this show. I've seen nearly 100 episodes and there are still over 100 remaining.

And this has taken me what, about five months? I guess maybe January doesn't count, since I started the blog 16 episodes in? Either way, it looks like somewhere around the end of October or the beginning of November, I should be done. I'd say I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I like this show. It's not a slog at all, and I just want to know what happens next.

I'm pretty sure I'll not want it to be over, even once it is.