Case 06, File 18: Milagro

AKA: Wait, The Same Plot As The Will Ferrell Movie?

Tone, in The X-Files is a delicate thing, and honestly I'm hard pressed to explain why it works as often as it does. The show, overall, takes itself pretty seriously but it's also working with some kind of inherently silly concepts. And yet the show can be glib, make fun of itself, even be an outright comedy, without necessarily making the darkness feel cheap or easily breached. This is a tightrope walk, tonally, so we can't necessarily blame the series too much if they fall off on occasion.

Case 06, File 17: Trevor

AKA: The Gritty Shadowcat Reboot?

Calling one episode of The X-Files a ripoff of another is unfair, to say the least. The series sits at over 200 episodes, most of them Monster of the Week episodes. The series can't possible avoid repeating itself, even obliquely, on occasion, especially if you boil plots down to broad outlines. If you boil everything down to its bones, everything looks like bones. Which is why I won't say this episode is a ripoff of any others, but it does bear some strong resemblance to a lot of Revenge From Beyond the Grave episodes.

Case 06, File 16: Alpha

AKA: MRAs Ruined The Title Of This Episode

In case episodes like 3 and Shapes didn't prove it to you, The X-Files does want to do episodes about classic monsters but, as episodes like 3 and Shapes prove, they don't just want to do classic versions of those monsters. The X-Files is a weird, creative show with a lot of weird, off the wall ideas, and it doesn't ever really like to be constrained by existing boxes. So even when your idea can be theoretically summed up by the word "Dude changes into wolf" you can bet it's gonna take that idea in an odd direction.