@flockofnazguls Was just thinking about this last night while watching a Ryan Murphy show... Say what you will about his style, but his shows have some serious fucking velocity! He'll introduce a storyline or theme that most shows would spend months on, and have it resolved by the end of the episode (if not by the next commercial break 😂).
If he'd have done LOST, we'd have known what the smoke monster was within 10 minutes of first seeing it, and killed it off 10 minutes after that.
@flockofnazguls@etherdiver I just want to know that a show has the plot ending and all the big mystery questions worked fully out ahead of time. If I'm confident that's the case I like puzzle shows but I'm tired of being lied to
@mrcompletely@flockofnazguls yeah, definitely. I can be patient but I hate having my time wasted. Unfortunately, if no one ever watches the slow burn shows until they're complete, they won't get made.
@etherdiver@flockofnazguls I'm trying to recall what show it was where they addressed this up front, they just basically promised not to pull a Lost or BSG (what I guess is canonically an X Files fail since they pioneered the field)
@etherdiver@flockofnazguls yeah exactly, and the X Files even kinda nailed the first big mythology arc, but then just kept tacking stuff on layer after layer until it lost all coherence and descended into gibberish. A big chunk of the series remains highly rewatchable. Lost not at all. We tried a few years back and just couldn't, knowing how it goes.
@mrcompletely@flockofnazguls they should have ended it on the arc where Mulder discovered it's all a government cover up not to hide aliens, but to use imaginary aliens to hide their actual crimes (which maybe was a bit TOO real for the producers😅).
Would have perfectly set up a reboot a decade or two later where Mulder plays the role of Deep Throat/X to a new patsy searching valiantly for the truth among the government's lies...
@mrcompletely@flockofnazguls I was mad as hell when they almost instantly went back on that storyline and the started piling up nonsense... It was even ambiguous enough to leave the possibility that, hey, the aliens ARE real, and there's a cover up to hide the cover up...
But that would have required ending the series and there was still too much money on the table, I guess.
@rowjimmy@etherdiver@flockofnazguls the ending of that show is LITERALLY in lists of "do not submit your story if it contains these cliché story elements" from SF magazines in the early sixties if not late fifties. Besides the tedious religious elements, that's an absolute hard nope. You can't do that stupid ass "twist".
@etherdiver@rowjimmy@flockofnazguls you can 100% just hard stop it at one of a couple points and miss nothing of value. It does have some of the best ship to ship combat in SF
At some point I started almost enjoying the freedom of DNFing books and shows that aren't working for me. "life's too short, beyotch!" [flings paperback into the fire]
I've also become savagely picky with very idiosyncratic criteria so those kinda go together
I rewatched some of the early S1 conspiracy episodes, particularly the one with the aquarium bodies, which might be the same episode where Scully gets sick and a doctor finds that her virus has a 5th and 6th pair of DNA chromosomes.
My favourite bit ever is the typical rural road where traffic is stopped by little green aliens, until a second UFO lands with aggressive red aliens and the first alien looks up and says, in English: "What the fuck?!?"
@DenOfEarth@mrcompletely@flockofnazguls I think that bit you mentioned is in the episode is from the episode, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" if I recall correctly, and it's one of the all time great X-Files episodes.
Yeah, a bit later the first alien is in a cage alongside various other unearthly beasts, rocking back and forth while smoking a cigarette and saying "this isn't happening... this isn't happening..." 🤣
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