The X-Files - The Complete Fourth Season
by Cliff Bole, James Wong, Jim Charleston, Kim Manners, Michael Lange
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Actor: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Mitch Pileggi, Robert Patrick, Tom BraidwoodDirector: Cliff Bole, James Wong, Jim Charleston, Kim Manners, Michael Lange
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Collector's Edition, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 999 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-11-13
Studio: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of The X-Files - The Complete Fourth Season
DVD Review: Another utterly superb season for a truly great series
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Description of The X-Files - The Complete Fourth Season
Now you can own the entire fourth season of THE X-FILES?. ALL 24 classic episodes are availale for the first time in this exclusive 7-disc collector's edition. From "Herrenvolk," "Home," "Tunguska," and "Terma" to "Memento Mori," "Max," "Small Potatoes," and "Gethsemane," these Season Four episodes are a must for every X-Files fan.Bestsellers in DVD
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