It seems like a good time, right before the season five finale and the first feature film, to write about serialised television, because for the most part, The X-Files isn't. Except when it is. Obviously.
So I don't know what I'm really expecting going into this finale. I don't know what I really can expect because the show doesn't really divide seasons the way I'm used to shows doing.
It's serialised for sure, at least within the mythology episodes, but the mythology of the show represents a long arc that will presumably last for the entire duration of the series. While other shows I've watched have had certain constants and over-arcing plots, usually each season has one or two primary goals that are achieved by the finale.
The X-Files doesn't do that, at least not entirely. And I don't know whether that's a product of not really having a specific long term plan (which I'm told they didn't) or of knowing long enough in advance that the show would be renewed for another season. It's a lot easier to end a season with a cliffhanger if you know you'll be able to continue it in three months.
What this show does have, though, is lots of character development outside the mythology episodes, and plenty of movement towards some kind of eventual resolution. It's like solving a puzzle from the inside out, instead of doing the edges first. And in this case, you don't know how many pieces there are in the puzzle, someone just keeps handing you new ones and you expand the puzzle outward hoping at some point you get an edge piece.
And The X-Files also often maintains certain themes within each season, though I'd say so far the seasons are only very loosely held together. There's no reason an episode like 'Kill Switch' or 'Mind's Eye' couldn't have aired in season one. They wouldn't have felt out of place there. Certain episodes, even those that don't directly deal with the series mythology, can't be placed earlier - 'Revelations' and 'All Souls' depend a lot on Scully's development, and I think the humorous episodes like 'Bad Blood' and 'War of the Coprophages' couldn't have worked when the show was just trying to establish itself - well, no, they could, but then people might have expected too much comedy from it.
But suffice it to say, this isn't what I'm used to in television. I enjoy this show a lot, and can't wait to watch more, but even after nearly five full seasons, I still find myself wondering why we even bother dividing into seasons at this point, when we have the entire series available. It's not like we have to wait a week for the next episode, or worse, three months for a season première. This show is more likely 202 episodes, one right after the other.
And often there's enough suspense in the finale that it's hard to wait for the next season to start. While that's true in more continuously serialised shows, as well, they've done a decent job here of just enough serialisation to torture people for the three month break between seasons that we, thankfully, do not have to endure.
The other thing is I'm very used to much more segmented shows with internal arcs throughout each season. I just watched Fringe, which had fairly self-contained seasons, both thematically and plot-wise. Each season was cohesive in its own way (even four, which I thought was all over the place, still maintained a vague sense of theme) and still led reasonably well into the following season.
One thing I think that format produces in fantasy and science fiction is an eerie sort of mystery at the beginning of each new season. There's a continuation from whatever they set up at the end of the last season, but there's an excitement about something new and a nervous feeling about exactly what that might bring. I don't necessarily feel that when watching The X-Files because the beginnings of the seasons are much more direct continuations of the previous season finale.
I don't anticipate the style changing at all, even though television had begun to become more serialised in the late 1990s. By this point, they've found something that worked extremely well, and it still does. I certainly wouldn't object to more serialisation, but as long as the character development is there throughout, I'll continue to enjoy this show.
No comments:
Post a Comment