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.

[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.

[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.