(Season 1, Episodes 21-24)

Another fun guest appearance in these last four installments of Season One. And a welcome return. Doug Hutchison was truly one of the creepiest monsters of the week as Eugene Tooms (I’m still checking my vents every night before I go to bed), so it was great seeing his creepy performance again.

I was even more surprised, though, to see Zeljko Ivanek as a mentally challenged twin in “Roland.” He gave a stellar performance, so convincing that if I hadn’t already seen him elsewhere I might have thought they got a truly autistic man to play the role. It’s nice to know that he was just as good at giving the creepiest stares back then as he is now.

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(Season 1, Episodes 1-4)

The X-Files is one of those shows that managed to transcend its genre to become a bona fide hit. It was one of Fox’s biggest sensations early on and became a supernatural phenomenon the likes of which hadn’t been matched, except perhaps for Buffy several years later. And somehow I missed it. And similar to my problem with jumping onto Buffy the Vampire Slayer after it had already started, this one premiered my first year in college and I generally had other things going on on Friday nights, so I missed it’s debut.

Then when I started hearing all these great things about it, I balked because I’d already missed too much of the “mytharc.” About one third of The X-Files episodes tied into this arc. It was the major driving thrust of Mulder’s obsession and the focus of the show. The rest of the episodes would be considered filler, though they also had some elements that were important from time to time. Still, the mytharc concept was so important that they released The X-Files Mythology, a 4-volume set of DVDs with just the “mytharc” episodes. But I’m not going to cop out on this one and go that route. It’s all or nothing, baby!

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