From the openining notes of Mark Snow's creepy theme song until when , an hour later, the final loose string was left unsnipped, Chris Carter had us. The nine-year television phenomenon that was the X Files is arguably the most popular unconventional drama ever to hit American airwaves. It made David Duchovony and Gillian Anderson household names, series creator Chris Carter a rich man, and made many of us "want to believe."
The complete nine-season boxed set of this cult favorite was recently released in Asia as one complete package, an event that parrallels even the release of David Hasslehoff's Greatest Hits in Germany. Instead of messing around with buying nine seperate boxed sets from Best Buy, totaling about 720 smackeroos, you can buy the entire collection in "book" form from eBay for about $170 including shipping and handling. You lose some of the "coolness," such as the individual boxes, inserts, and any other interesting holograms and graphics that came with the individual boxes, but for those just interested in the actual episodes themselves, and for anyone that doesn't care about the Asian characters on the very bottom of each disc, this is a tremendous deal.
It all begins with Agent Fox Mulder, an up-and-coming star in the FBI, who forgoes advancement in the bureau to work on a questionable project known as the X-Files. For some reason unknown to the viewer yet, Mulder's superiors do not want Mulder digging around in these dusty boxes. However, his work is not stopped, he is simply moved to a dingy basement room. This is where he meets his future partner, Agent Dana Scully, who has been sent by the Bureau higher-ups to, as Mulder believes, "debunk" his work. The two end up forming an unlikely bond and become the most formidable TV duo since Ren and Stimpy.
Scully plays the role of the straight man to Mulder's eccentric beliefs and whims, as she struggles to stick to science and reasoning to explain the unexplainable cases Mulder pulls them into. The cases usually fall into one of two catergories: plot cases or "random monster" cases.
The monster cases have Mulder and Scully chasing everything from the Jersey Devil to la Chupacabra across the United States and sometimes beyond. These stories are completely contained in the epidisodes and can be watched alone.
The plot cases on the other hand, delve into the underlying themes of government conspiricies and cover-ups, pulling on info and incidents from previous episodes. It is in these that we meet characters like Deep Throat, Mr. X, and the Well-Manicured Man, not to mention the biggest baddie of them all, the Smoking Man. These continue the story started in the pilot episode and carry viewers on until the very end. Both varieties are equally enthralling and even when sometimes cheesy, are still completely gratifying.
The quality of the DVDs never suffers. There are no complaints as to the video, other than a strange orange hue that has shown up twice for about 30 seconds each time over the course of eight episodes. While noticeable, it does not impede viewing in any way. The sound is crisp, clear, and sharp. The show is presented entirely in 2.1, but this is the same on the American editions as well.
And the extras sections are wonderful as well, with DVD-Roms for Windows users, interviews with cast and crew, and various documentaries focusing on different seasons and characters. All in all, this is an awesome value for the series that mainstreamed Sasquatch and proved, once and for all, that pantsuits can be damn sexy.
Rating: A