The X-Files - The Complete Fifth Season

Rating:
Summary: Another season of consistently brilliant story telling
Review: What is astonishing in looking back at the first five seasons of THE X-FILES is how amazingly consistent the show was. With most shows you can clearly demarcate the better from the worst seasons, but this show hit the ground running in its first season and never really eased up. Apart from adding touches of comedy in Season Three, the first five seasons are masterpieces of consistency. Over the course of time the show managed to build up a massive back-story, often leaping back a few decades to detail events in the past (including an excellent episode that not only deals with Mulder's father, but pays homage to one of the few shows that could be a precursor to THE X-FILES by guest starring THE NIGHT STALKER's leading man Darren McGavin). There are a number of outstanding stand alone episodes, and several that I personally find scarier than anything in the first four seasons. One early episode finds Mulder and Scully lost in a swamp with chameleon-like creatures that can strike almost at will (with more of the flirtation that left fans wondering if there was potential romance in the wings). Another very funny episode in black and white deals with "The Great Mutato," a take off on bad 1950s Sci-fi films. But the best comic episode of the season is easily one set in Texas with Luke Wilson and vampires, a RASHOMON type story in which we witness the same story first from Scully's and then from Mulder's point of view (the former presenting Luke Wilson as the apex of male attractiveness, while Mulder presents him as a doofus with buck teeth and possibly some idiocy in the family line). There is also an amazing episode with Lily Taylor guest starring as a blind woman who has the ability to see things remotely through the eyes of the man who biologically fathered her.

As with the former seasons, the most engrossing parts of the season dealt with ongoing plot lines. Season Four ended with Mulder apparently dead (though who really believed that?) and Scully in desperate shape because of her cancer). After a very, very funny first episode that provided comic relief after the cliffhanger ending of Season Four as well as dealing with both the creation of the Lone Gunmen and Mulder's involvement with the X-Files. And in an absolutely stunning episode sequence Scully, who was rendered barren by the procedures performed upon her during her abduction, discovers that she has a child that she is the genetic mother of. The Smoking Man is revealed to be Mulder's father, but then later not to be Mulder's father. Or perhaps Mulder's father, and the father of both his brother and his sister, or perhaps not. Just who Cancer Man fathered is a complex mystery at the end of Season Five. We get endless amounts of increased by increasingly unilluminating details about government conspiracies and plots. As I've pointed out in previous reviews, this highlights the only real weakness the show ever had: a tendency to pile one mysterious plot element onto another without resolving previous ones, and introducing apparently conflicting plot details, as the Smoking Man's role as potential father demonstrates. Unfortunately, subsequent seasons did less to resolve these tensions than to multiply them.

The season ends with a wonderful episode about a small child with psychic ability who Mulder and Scully (and Mulder's old flame, played by Mimi Rogers), the most intense heightening tease hitherto that Mulder and Scully might have feelings for one another that their professional relationship has forced them to ignore (more in a second), and the reappearance of the Smoking Man who not only steals the child but sets fire to Mulder and Scully's office, destroying the X-Files. The final image of the season consists of an utterly despondent Mulder laying on his couch with a solicitous Scully sadly watching over him. Nonetheless, fans wanting to see something happen between Mulder and Scully were encouraged by the words of the boy who tells Mulder with both Scully and Mimi Rogers's character present that one of the two women was thinking about him, and that he was thinking about one of them, and also by the look of implied emotional devastation (which she typically refuses to express) when Scully walks by a door and sees Mulder and her old flame holding hands. Though the X-Files are ashes, the viewer still feels that Season Six will not only begin with the X-Files being resurrected, but with Mulder and Scully, whom we all assume were thinking of one another, might finally be coaxed to break the cold reserve that exists between them.

Rating:
Summary: great season but...whats on the horizon after this???
Review: You dont really need to see this seasons' dvd's to review this if you have already seen it on tv. I would have to say that season five is a pretty decent season, however, it was a sign of things to come...it was the season (also noted the shortest season,in at only 20 episodes thus far) that showed The X-files car gas meter was almost on 'E'. The episodes were great. I mean... 'Detour' was SUPERB!!! And 'Chinga' co-written with Stephen King and Chris Carter was respectfully done. But like I said, this was the season that showed signs of the series slowing down, losing it's momentum, BUT STILL A GREAT SEASON NONE THE LESS!! I RECCOMMEND! I STILL PLAN ON COMPLETEING MY COLLECTION ON DVD IT'S THAT GREAT!!!!