Discussion Post: Converting The Masses

[amalnahurriyeh]

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?

Comments

[heartequals]

Having just this academic year converted my roommate to the show (we just watched the first movie tonight! there was a lot of screaming!) I can recommend that an attack on all fronts works well! That is to say, I gave her a brief, excited verbal summary, and over a period of weeks made her watch the pilot, Arcadia, Triangle, the one about the weather man, Eve, the lightning bug one etc etc mostly under the guise "heyyyy want a homework break?" I was mostly just picking out episodes that I wanted to watch and that I knew could stand alone for someone who had never seen the show and whose only introduction was a drunken roommate rambling for an hour about Mulder and Scully and their epic true love (I spoiled her for all nine season, I was so happy to have a captive audience) and how Kim Manners is a legend and how X-Files is the best show ever made etc. I went on a lot about the UST and how perfectly executed it was and how, compared to that, Bones was a shit show. (I had a deep anger at the time over the season opener for this year.)

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.

[amalnahurriyeh]

tl;dr msr is the path to enlightenment.

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.

[yvi]

Probably with the best of the first season: The Pilot, Ice, Eve, Fire, Beyond the Sea, Young at Heart, Darkness Falls, Roland.

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.

[amalnahurriyeh]

This is it: the Edited To Remove The Awful S1. Because it was a pretty compelling first season, and baby!Mulder and baby!Scully are a lot of fun. And then shit gets serious in season 2, and it's a whole new ballgame.

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.

[yvi]

I never saw Space until I rewatched the whole series with my boyfriend - I didn't when I was doing it on my own because I had been warned about it. And, um, it really wasn't all that good. Though not the most horrible episode of a TV show I have ever seen.

[naraht]

Interestingly, back in 2006 I was the friend. I suppose I had been living under a rock during the 90s, or at least really occupied with Star Trek. I saw Fight the Future and then watched "Triangle" on TV. The movie was murky and "Triangle" was impenetrable and so I gave up further efforts to get into the fandom.

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.

[amalnahurriyeh]

I was going to say something about not knowing you were so new to the fandom, and then I did some basic arithmetic about how 2006 was four years ago, and then I had to go breathe into a paper bag for a while and count my grey hairs again.

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.

[naraht]

Yes, I agree. There are entry-level episodes (some of which are fan favorites, possibly, though I can't think of any) and then there are the deep meta ones like Jose Chung that only really appeal once you know the genre.

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...

[yvi]

*nods* I think decent stand-alone episodes like "Drive" might be better suited for such purposes.