Rating: 
Summary: A Must have for anyone!
Review: This DVD collection is going to be a must have for anyone. This show was the best sci-fi, and drama for that matter, that has been on tv in generations. The X-Files was unique, unlike a show such as Star Trek, because it could appeal to the viewer who, much like myself, didn't even like the sci-fi genre in general. It did much more than what the usual sci-fi show does, because it was creative, and told a story. The plot lines would always through the viewer for loops that always kept the viewer coming back for more. The good thing about the plot lines was that you didn't have to have seen every episode to get interested in a particular episode, and not be lost as to what was going on. This is the perfect way to watch a classic television show. With the emergence of DVD, I think that more tv series will be put on DVD collections as this show is. The DVD makes it so easy to access any episode, or any feature that you could desire, and all with the click of a button. This is the way you should watch this classic series. Buy this set when it is released and enjoy every classic episode, without commericials and with all the bonus features that DVD's can offer!
Rating: 
Summary: Very good season.. but slightly overrated
Review: Up until recently, I never watched a single episode of the X-Files. However, now that the DVD sets have been reduced in price, I had the opportunity to start watching the show. After watching the first three seasons of The X-Files, I was hooked and I became a big fan of the show. I also noticed the growing trend, that each season seemed to be better than the last. Unfortunately, the fourth season seems to take a step back from the stellar third season. Don't get me wrong. The fourth season of The X-Files is still very good and filled with plenty of solid episodes. But the reason that I feel season four is slightly overrated, is because it is considered by many to be the best season of the entire show. It did not quite live up to season three, because the third season was great from start to finish. The mythology episodes usually serve as the best episodes and really drive the show. However, the mythology of season four for the most part, turned out to be quite boring: "Tunguska", "Terma", "Tempus Fugit", and "Max". What really ended up saving the season overall, was top notch stand alone episodes like "Home", "Small Potatoes", "Leonard Betts", "Paper Hearts", "Never Again", "Synchrony", and "Zero Sum". There were four really good mythology episodes however. "Memento Mori" focused on Scully's cancer, "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" in which we learn all about the CSM's past, "Demons" in which Mulder tries to learn more about what happened to his sister Samantha, and the season finale "Gethsemane" in which Mulder's beliefs are put into question. Overall, this is definately a set worth owning for fans of the show. The season as a whole turned out to be very good, and the DVD set was great once again. The fourth season DVD set offers top notch picture and sound quality. You also get a documentary discussing season four as a whole, deleted scenes with commentary from series creator Chris Carter, commentary on "Home" and "Small Potatoes" from the writers of those particular episodes, and behind the truth spots from F/X. The only thing I missed that the three previous sets provided, was Chris Carter going over his favorite episodes from the season. It is a shame that this was done for the first three seasons only. Solid 4 stars....
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding season
Review: With season four of the series, the stand alone episodes and mythology episodes took a creative leap forward. While this isn't the best season, it still caught the show in peak form. Among the stand out episodes this season are"Paper Hearts" and "Memento Mori" The first captures everything that worked well on "The X-Files". It's about a child serial killer who has more victims than he's admitted to killing. Mulder and Scully become involved when Mulder begins having dreams telling him where another victim is buried. The killer maniuplates Mulder using information he's learned about his sister's abduction and Mulder's guilt to arrange to get out of jail and lead them to one of his victims...Mulder's sister (or so he claims). It's an intense, emotionally powerful and scary episode all wrapped up into one. The second "Memento Mori" focuses on how Scully deals with some very bad information about her health. The show focuses much more on the rich characterizations of the show. Also, the tongue in cheek episode "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" suggests that the CSM was involved in everything from JFK's assassination to why the Bills kept losing the Superbowl. Other episodes such as that involving Leonard Betts which leads to some bad news for Scully and even the convoluted mythology episodes all have resonance and power. We also meet Jeremiah Smith (the marvelous Roy Thinnes who was in one of my favorite shows from childhood "The Invaders"--by the way Fox where is that one DVD?)who cures with the touch of a hand. Strangely, though, there's more than a handful of Jeremiah Smiths and they all work in the social security office gathering information. For what you ask? You'll have to watch the episodes to find out. The grand finale for season 4 was a suspenseful cliff hanger that threw everything you knew about the show into a torando of new information and misinformation. Mulder, Scully and the audience really didn't know which way was up at the end of "Gethsemane". Picture quality on season four is actually better than on seasons one and two. I have to disagree with Mitch who wrote that season four is something of a let down. For me, it continued a string of outstanding seasons that became the foundation for one of the best shows on television. Chris Carter, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban and Howard Gordon all contributed great scripts during this season (frequently co-writing many of them). I'm not surprised to see that Spotnitz and Shiban had the same writing instructor at the AFI. It's clear these talented writer/producers learned a thing or two that helped focus their tremendous talent during this season. The imperfections of season four are few and far between. There are a few episodes that just barely missed the boat in the quality department and those few that did only missed it by a beat or two. "Home" a controverisal episode that got Fox into hot water is a tad overrated and, for my money, one of the lesser episodes this season. It pushed the envelope but dramatically didn't have the pay off it could or should had. It's an example of an interesting concept that just doesn't gel as an episode. The extras include two episodes with commentary, deleted scenes (which can be viewed as part of the episode if you go to the special features menu for that particularly episode), a documentar/featurette (depends on how you define it) on the series and a booklet with the titles (which is helpful for me since I can rarely remember the titles of these episodes),credits and a photo from the episode as well as a listing of the full episodes and their air date through season 7. The show continued on with a string out strong seasons through season 6. Season 7 had a number of great episodes but the show was beginning to run out of steam and the uncertainty about Duchovny's part in the show clearly had an impact. Season 8 picked up steam again with a pair of fresh characters (Agent Dogget played by Robert Patrick does a great job being the skeptic to Scully's believer. Agent Reyes introduced mid-season acts as a nice counter balance to both). While season 9 didn't quite live up to the other seasons, it had a number of fine episodes in it as well. Luckily, Carter pulled the plug just at the right time for the show. With "The X-Files" movie set for release in 2006 (Carter and his crew are in pre-production as of mid-2004), ther's bound to be renewed interest in the series. Hopefully, Carter can come up with a movie that can stand up to the best two or three part episodes that ran throughout the best seasons.
Rating:
Summary: Season 4 -- "The X-Files" at the Peak of its Popularity
Review: For three years, which spanned Seasons 3 through 5, "The X-Files" was Chris Carter's baby. Seasons 1 and 2 were good in their own right, building up the show and setting the stage for what was to come. Season 6 was still good, although the move to Los Angeles no doubt killed off some of "The X-Files" atmosphere. Season 7 was a definite improvement, although episodes like "Chimera" and "Fight Club" were showing just how much the show was starting to age. And Seasons 8 and 9 were okay; the former still had the ability to deliver the goods on occasion, while the latter has just been a disaster. Season 4 was right smack in the middle of "The X-Files" sky-rocketing popularity. Ground-breaking episodes seemingly popped up almost every week. Just a few worth mentioning include: "Tunguska"/"Terma"; "Memento Mori"; and "Gethsemane." But every season of "The X-Files has had its share of bombs, and Season 4 is no exception: "Sanguinarium"; "El Mundo Gira"; and "Synchrony." The DVD set is just awesome - you get all 24 episodes in as clear a picture as you will ever find. Where I come from, the channel "The X-Files" airs on isn't exactly clear, so to watch these episodes again in all their picture-perfect glory was quite the shock. There are seven disks in this set, the first six housing four episodes each. The seventh disk hosts a set of extras, including interviews with the cast and crew, special FX spots and all the promotional spots you saw on FOX back during Season 4's run. This set may be a little pricey, but it's well worth it, in my opinion. Here's hoping that Seasons 1 though 8 make it to DVD and allow us to relive the memories of our favorite TV show all over again. Don't even get me started on Season 9. I've given it one too many chances, and even a die-hard fan like me doesn't want to remember what the show has become. If you want classic Mulder and Scully, if you want "The X-Files" that delivers the goods, pick up the DVD sets for Seasons 1 through 8, especially Season 4. The Truth is Out There - you just need to go out and buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Believe The Lie
Review: By it's fourth season the X-files had grown from a cult hit to a phenomenon, and the fourth season captures some of the greatest X-files of all time. Taking a truly darker direction, which becomes evident in the season opener Herrenvolk, part two of the dynamic Talitha Cumi. Although it doesn't live up to it's predeccesor, it introduces several plotlines that would be further explored. Early on in the season, the darker tone of the season is less evident, as we get traditional standalones that are just like the previous seasons. It isn't until the wonderful Paper Hearts that we begin to see the change, and the change is clarified in Memento Mori, where yes we discover Scully has cancer. This, put together with some other elements earlier in the season [I'm not going to spoil anything] season four is not like previous seasons. There are no self parody episodes, save for Musings of a Cigarette Smoking man, and nearly every episodes puts Mulder and Scully in a life/death situation. Of course, the seasons dark tone peaks in the finale Gethsemene. Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean. Now, on to some episodes I've selected that I think are highlights of the season. Caution: although in the following no really big twists are given away, if you don't want anything spoiled, then don't read ahead.
Herrenvolk: Mulder and Jeremiah escape the alien bounty hunter, Jeremiah leads Mulder to a mysterious farm in Canada where Mulder finds clones of his sister. Meanwhile, the syndicate is beginning to suspect an information leak.
Home: In this truly disturbing episode, Mulder and Scully discover a baby, deformed by inbreeding. X-Files at it's most bizarre.
Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man: the Lone Gunmen explain to Mulder and Scully the information surrounding CSM's past.
Tunguska: Mulder locates Krycek, and they soon leave for Russia to try and unearth the secrets of the black oil, but Krycek betrays him, and Mulder gets captured. Par
Paper Hearts: One of the best episodes. Mulder discovers the body of a young girl, which leads him back to a murderer he helped catch. Mulder begins to believe that this man knows the fate of his sister, and he begins losing his mind.
Memento Mori: Scully discovers she has cancer, which sends Mulder on a quest for the truth of Scully's cancer.
Tempes Fugit: When a plane carrying Max Fenig as a passenger mysteriously crashes, Mulder and Scully discover Max was transporting something, and they try to discover what Max was transporting.
Elegy: a woman dies, and the only person who can give insight as to what happened is a mentally retarded man.
Zero Sum: A woman is found dead with several bee stings on her. This puts Skinner back working for CSM.
Gethsemene: Scully exposes Mulder to the rest of the FBI as going off the deepend, and that he is obsessed with aliens. Just before this happened, Mulder believes to have found proof of extraterrestral life, but a startling truth revealed to Scully sends Mulder in a sharp decline, and has him questioning his own believes.
Season four provides more than enough shocking moments, and this coupled with some great standalones and dark tone make it one of if not the best season. Yes, I do think it's superior to season three. BELIEVE THE LIE
Rating:
Summary: Still going strong!
Review: To sum it up quickly, Season 4 makes the whole series a lot stronger. This season is just as intense as Season 3, as dark as Season 2, as serious as Season 1 and on top of that, it takes the mythology of the series, Mulder's quest for the truth, a step further. Things can't get any better than this. I highly recommend this item!
Rating:
Summary: Dark, violent and true to the X-Files tradition
Review: Dark, violent and probably the most serious of all 9 seasons of the X-Files. One of the episodes that sticks out for me is "Paper Hearts." For the first time we see what happened when Samantha, Mulder's sister, was abducted in a different light. I won't give away any spoilers here. The episodes in this season were just as intense as those in Season 3. They're probably just as dark as those is Season 2. If anything Season 4 is a wonderful contribution to the series, another reminder of why X-Files will be remembered as a classic TV series years down the line. Buy Season 4. You won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Another utterly superb season for a truly great series
Review: Season Four of THE X-FILES broke into two unequal parts. The first two thirds tended to drop many of the ongoing development of the series story arc to focus instead on individual stand-alone episodes. Now, these were largely great episodes, but THE X-FILES was always at its best when it focused more on the longer story than on individual stories. There were some major plot developments in the first two-thirds of the season, however. Most importantly, we learn that there is a deep and shocking connection between Mulder's mother and Cancer Man aka The Smoking Man, to the extent that one even wonders if he and Mulder have a connection far more intimate than either Mulder or the viewer might have suspected. In fact, one of the best and most fascinating episodes in the first part of the season is a marvelous episode in which we learn a great deal about The Smoking Man's personal history, including the fact (well, fictional fact) that he was the trigger man on both the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, the episode ends up as an explicit parody of FORREST GUMP, with The Smoking Man ending up as one of the driving forces of modern history, yet privately he yearns more than anything to become a professional writer. In one of the most poignant moments in the entire run of the show, he manages to get a single short story published in what turns out to be a soft-core porn mag, and when he reads what they have done to his story when it appears, he agonizingly he forced to destroy the letter of resignation that he had planned to submit. It is a brilliant episode in part because he adds enormous complexity to all of his future appearances on the show.
While the first two-thirds of the season was extremely solid and marvelous, it may have fell just short of the brilliance achieved by the earlier seasons. But at a precise point in the season, everything changes. For several episodes leading up to the pivotal one, Scully had been cranky and more discernibly impatient with Mulder, though the cause for dissatisfaction seems to stem more from her unhappiness about her life in general than with him. She was, to speak bluntly, in a rut. But when Mulder, who is on vacation, calls her and asks that she go to Philadelphia to investigate an incident, she cuts loose a bit. She gets drunk with a near stranger, has a semi-physical encounter with him, and gets a tattoo on her lower back. Within two episodes, however, things get far more complex when she discovers that she discovers that she has a nasal mass that is cancerous. The last third of the season is dominated by the sense that she is a dying woman, a fact the viewers are reminded of by her frequent nosebleeds. During the last third of the season the plot thickens considerably indeed. The season ends with a host of questions. Will Scully die? Did Mulder really die in the final episode? If not, why did Scully identify the corpse as Mulder's? What is the connection between the Smoking Man and Mulder? Could he be Mulder's biological father? And will more develop out of that big tease moment in the episode where a man who can change his appearance makes himself look like Mulder and comes within an inch of kissing Scully? And was she as willing to kiss him as she appeared? In fact, although Mulder and Scully are deeply attached to one another as colleagues and both are ridiculously gorgeous looking, the first four seasons are remarkable for the lack of romantic interest they express towards one another. In Season Three there are a couple of episodes where they express considerable jealousy towards others who get close to their partner (e.g., "Bambi" in the great cockroach episode), but the show never lingers over this or expands this. Clearly Mulder and Scully love each other and are deeply committed to the welfare of the other, but there is little or no romantic element in this.
Season Four also illustrates some of the problems that plagued the show, in fact the only problems that plagued the show until the very end when it lost some of its creative energy. This was the tendency both to develop parallel plot lines that somewhat contradicted other plot lines and before a prior plot line had been fully developed.. For instance, by the end of the season there was the clear implication that the X-Files were a gigantic scam on the part of nefarious forces within the industrial-military complex, that they had "created" Mulder. In fact, the first episode of Season Five would take this a step further, in a very funny episode in which the gents who would form The Lone Gunman pooled their resources for the first time and at the same time met Mulder, who at the time was not interested in the X-Files. The episode represents Mulder as being exposed to a powerful drug that would cause extreme paranoia and a tendency to conspiratorial thinking. This was all enormously funny, but it also undercut the show's own mythology. This lack of internal consistency was, in my opinion, the only thing that kept THE X-FILES from being as superb overall as BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. While BUFFY got its mythology straightened out, THE X-FILES never did. Speculating further along these lines, one wonders if this illustrates the difference between Chris Carter and Joss Whedon. Carter tends to be more tactical as a creative talent, whereas Whedon is a strategist who thinks seasons ahead. The Carter versus Whedon factor is especially crucial when one considers that several key figures on THE X-FILES, including David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, and Jeffrey Bell, would serve as producers on ANGEL (and in the case of Minear, FIREFLY) as well. Or perhaps Greenwalt, Minear, and Bell learned the mistake of not undergirding a show with a consistent mythology.
Nonetheless, THE X-FILES managed a consistency despite the inconsistent mythology behind the episodes. This largely stems from two things: the absolutely magnificent writing on individual episodes and the astonishingly good cast. Few characters in the history of TV have held a show together as well as Mulder and Scully. BUFFY, to keep that parallel going, was always held together more by the writing than by the cast (though the cast was good also). David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (by the way, a natural blonde who is impossible to imagine without her red dye job) are not merely the glue of the show, but the nuts and bolts as well. I believe Anderson especially is outrageously underrated as an actress (though if everyone saw her in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH their minds might be changed). In episode after episode I marvel at how both of them bring so much more to their roles than can possibly be contained on the page).
I don't want to be misunderstood here. I fully believe that THE X-FILES is one of the five best shows we have seen on TV. My lament is that it wasn't one of the top one or two. Getting the show's underlying mythology and undercutting it less would have gone a long ways towards achieving this.
Rating: 
Summary: How in the world did this awful show last 9 seasons?
Review: How did this awful, nonsensical garbage manage to remain on TV?
Well, professional wrestling is popular too. You just can't go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American TV viewer and the popularity of the x-files show that this is still true! An embarrassment.
Rating:
Summary: Season 4
Review: I love X-Files and this is a great season. Disc One has two standout episodes. The episode called "Home" is disturbing, violent, and disgusting. Do not watch it if you don't like those things and certainly do not let your children or even your teenagers view it. I wish I hadn't seen it. On the otherhand, the last episode on that disc, "Unruhe" is captivating and very original, even if it's not the most well written episode I've seen. Yes, it is slightly disturbing, like many X-files episodes are, but truly artistic and thought provoking.
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