(![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amalnahurriyeh posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
philedom May. 1st, 2010 11:39 pm)
amalnahurriyeh posting in philedom May. 1st, 2010 11:39 pm)This is the first part of a two-part question, but I'll do them on separate days.
You want to convince a friend to get excited about The X-Files. (Assume the person is someone who wouldn't be automatically averse to the idea, but hasn't previously encountered the show, presumably via living under a rock for the 1990s.) What episodes would you use as the introduction? And, just as importantly, how would you frame them--that is, what would you tell them about why these episodes are awesome, and represent only selections from a more awesome whole?
You want to convince a friend to get excited about The X-Files. (Assume the person is someone who wouldn't be automatically averse to the idea, but hasn't previously encountered the show, presumably via living under a rock for the 1990s.) What episodes would you use as the introduction? And, just as importantly, how would you frame them--that is, what would you tell them about why these episodes are awesome, and represent only selections from a more awesome whole?
From:
no subject
Anyway, by Eve, or something, she was hooked. We watched the entire first season before winter break; she went home and bought s2 and s3. AMAZING. She's a die-hard shipper now and she wants to marry Gillian Anderson for reals.
But in seriousness, I think it helped that I didn't just make her watch s1 straight through because it's kind of excruciating (. . .SPACE) and showed her stuff from all over so she could get a taste of what it would be once it established itself. She saw the sexual tension and the humor as well as the terrifying and morbid. That is what I would recommend; show them all parts of the show, the drama and the humor, the friendship and the love, before they watch it straight through. I think I deliberately didn't show her any alien episodes though. That might have been too much.
tl;dr msr is the path to enlightenment.
From:
no subject
I need, like, an icon that says this!
I actually think being spoiled for somethings makes it better, a little; when I was rewatching and getting back into it, I found a 'shipper episode guide and had read far enough ahead to get the picture. I didn't have any of the real shape of what would happen, but I knew the general arc, and that was actually kind of cool.
Yeah, a straight s1 rewatch...would be a not good thing. Every so often my bff and I rewatch the Pilot (usually while my wife rolls her eyes and decamps to another room), and the dialogue goes like this:
Him: Huh. No one had learned to act yet, had they?
Me: Not really. Gillian learns faster.
Him: Can we watch the one where her father dies yet?
Me: No, we need to finish this one. But we can fast forward.
My Wife (From Down The Hall): I want to watch the vampire one.
Me: You always want to watch the vampire one. Maybe later.
From:
no subject
By that time, they should be hooked :) If not, I should show later stuff: Grotesque, Never Again, Drive, maybe Dreamland,...
Oh Gosh, now I want to rewatch the series.
From:
no subject
Although I remember thinking Space was the shit when it first aired. Prooooobably because I was, um, 12. But seriously, Scary Mars Face has stayed with me to this day.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Flash forward to 2006, when my very good friend had a lot of the tapes. She showed me a few of them. The only one I can remember now was "The Rain King," whose tone I found baffling. I didn't mind watching them, really, but I didn't get hooked until an afternoon that we spent with another friend who had the DVD set. She showed me part one of "Dreamland" and I loved it so much that I had to borrow the DVDs in order to see the second half and, indeed, the rest of the season.
I do think that season six is a particularly good entry point because, after the movie, it doesn't necessarily assume an encyclopedic knowledge of the preceding canon. On the other hand, neither I nor anyone else could have necessarily predicted that Dreamland would be the one for me. So I suppose I'm a bit of an agnostic on the question. Sometimes I think the only thing to do is throw some episodes out there and see what sticks.
From:
no subject
Rain King, while an episode I rather love, would be entirely baffling if you didn't know the characters or the general tone. Funny how I think this is true of a lot of fan favorites--Triangle is actually fascinating once you know who these people are; ditto something like Rain King. I sometimes wonder if my Bad Blood missionary work goes astray, because it's too meta. Ditto for any attempt to convert people with, say, Jose Chung.
From:
no subject
The other thing is that there are different kinds of fans. I don't think I'd ever succeed in converting someone who was predisposed to like the mytharc, because I'd never think to show someone those episodes...
From:
no subject