Case 05, File 03: Unusual Suspects

AKA: The Frohike, Langly & Beyers Happy Funtime Hour

For such relatively minor parts of the series (they only show up 3 or 4 times a season), The Lone Gunmen cast a huge shadow. If you ask any fan who some of their favorite characters are, you're almost certain to hear the Lone Gunmen in there, and they were the characters tapped to hold up a spin-off during those heady days when they thought the series could support a spin-off (it couldn't). And yet, we know so little about them, outside of their relationship with Mulder. At least, till now.

Case 05, File 02: Redux Part 2

AKA: The Assassination Of The Cigarette Smoking Man By The Coward Quiet Willy

Keeping a series fresh and exciting is a high stakes game. You need to keep coming up with new and interesting ideas to keep the audience invested, keep coming up with new places for the story to go, new characters for our heroes to interact with, new challenges for them to overcome. If you fuck it up, you can end up collapsing into ridiculousness, no matter how good your series is. And while some of the pressure is taken off when you're largely a Monster of the Week series, like The X-Files, it doesn't mean that they don't occasionally chase plot twists down rabbit holes.

Case 05, File 01: Redux Part 1

AKA: There Is Water At The Bottom Of The Pentagon

Season 5 is the last truly great season of The X-Files. That's not to say that the later seasons don't have great episodes, just that is the end of the Golden Age. And while Season 3 was the experimental and 4 was the dark one, Season 5 was defined by being BIG. Big budgets, big names (both in front of, and behind the camera). Season 5 was, to my mind, the season where they started to see if Fox would balk at the size of check they were being asked to write, and they basically never did.