Hello, everyone.

I recently watched The Long Walk movie and really loved it, way more than I could have expected, actually, so I then decided to also read the book.

I am now about 1/3 into it and so far 2 things struck me as odd. First is the walking speed of 4 miles per hour instead of 3 like in the movie. Though enough has already been said about that: King simply made a mistake and actually asked the filmmakers to change the speed to 3 m/h.

The other thing I noticed was that the canteens given to the Walkers actually contained distilled water, which I think is an odd choice. Distilled water doesn't contain any minerals which are extremely important during such an exhausting ordeal as the Long Walk. And I doubt the concentrated rations they were given would really counterbalance that.

But here's the thing: as opposed to the 4 m/h thing, I'm not so sure this was a mistake on King's part. I think this might have actually been a deliberate in-universe choice by the military to tire the contestants quicker and to make them start dying sooner. It could also explain some of the cramps and muscle issues pretty early on into the Walk that some of the boys had. They were simply depleted of minerals.

Thoughts?

Tornado! is a made for TV disaster movie directed by Noel Nosseck and written by John Logan. It first aired on Fox on May 6, 1996, four days before the theatrical release of Twister with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, a high-budget Hollywood movie with a similar premise.

The movie follows a group of storm chasers trying to predict the behavior of dangerous tornados in Texas in order to provide better and faster tornado warnings. It stars Bruce Campbell, Ernie Hudson, and Shannon Sturges. Although this is the second movie with Campbell and Hudson (after Congo), Tornado! is the first film where the actors are actually on screen together.

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman is a superhero TV show developed by Deborah Joy LeVine that ran on ABC from 1993 to 1997. The show follows the superhero adventures of Superman (Dean Cain) as well as the life of his alter ego Clark Kent and his relationship with Lois Lane (Teri Hatcher). The supporting cast consists of Lane Smith as Perry White, Justin Whalin as Jimmy Olsen (from season 2 onward), K Callan as Martha Kent, and Eddie Jones as Jonathan Kent. The show ran for 4 seasons and consists of 88 episodes.

Bruce Campbell appears on the show in 1995, specifically in two episodes in season 2 (Individual Responsibility and Whine, Whine, Whine) and one episode in season 3 (We Have a Lot to Talk About) as Bill Church Jr., a villain that inherited the Intergang crime organization after the death of his father.

Michelle Hurd (Raffi in Star Trek Picard and Linda B in Ash vs Evil Dead) talks about working with Bruce on the Dropping Names podcast with Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner.

>"I've decided though, pretty specifically, to live with it, not die from it," he told host Adam Carolla. "The cancer rabbit hole is enormous. You can go into focus groups of 10,000 guys who have exactly what you have. I won't touch it with a 10 foot pole."

>Campbell added that he feels "perfect" right now as he continues to refuse to let his battle stop him from living life. "The cancer, it creep me out because of the ancillary stuff that it does. It's not just, you don't die for cancer. You die from what cancer does to you," he continued.

I really admire his approach towards all of this. I think that as long as he wont allow the cancer to beat him mentally, he could live even more than just five years.

The Demolitionist is a low-budget action superhero film from 1995 directed by Robert Kurtzman and written by Brian DiMuccio and Dino Vindeni (from story by Kurtzman). It stars Nicole Eggert, Richard Grieco, Heather Langenkamp, Peter Jason, and Tom Savini. The story revolves around a murdered police officer Alyssa Lloyd (Eggert) who is brought back to life by a scientist as the Demolitionist, an ultimate weapon against rampant crime.

The movie is Kurtzman's directorial debut. He was also one of the special effects artists on Evil Dead II, worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with Heather Langenkamp, and will later work on From Dusk Till Dawn with Tom Savini (Kurtzman actually being the author of the film's original story).

Bruce Campbell has an uncredited cameo in the movie as a member of a crime gang and a winner of a raffle which allows him to shoot the corrupt police chief Higgins played by Peter Jason.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is a comedy-adventure western TV series created by Jeffrey Boam and Carlton Cuse that aired on Fox from 1993 to 1994. It stars Bruce Campbell as the titular Brisco County, Jr., making him a lead actor of a TV series for the first time in his career.

The show takes place in the late 1800s and, as the title suggests, follows the adventures of Brisco County, Jr., a Harvard-educated lawyer-turned-bounty hunter ho has been tasked to track down the gang of John Bly (Billy Drago), a ruthless outlaw who was also responsible for the killing of Brisco's father. On his travels, Brisco is accompanied by his trusty horse Comet, as well as a liaison between him and his employers, Socrates Poole (Christian Clemenson), and he often crosses paths with a fellow bounty hunter, a rival-turned-ally Lord Bowler (Julius Carry). Dixie Cousins portrays Kelly Rutherford, a saloon singer and con artist who serves as Brisco's love interest throughout the show, and John Astin plays Professor Albert Wickwire, an eccentric scientist and inventor.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. also has elements of fantasy, with the main plot centering around a series of mysterious magical orbs, as well as sci-fi, with Brisco and Wickwire always being on the lookout for the "next big thing", often presenting new inventions giving the show a bit of a steampunk flavor.

Fox decided to put The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. on the 8 PM Friday slot which caused for its viewership to slowly decline throughout its original run. And since it was a relatively expensive show, being a period piece from the Wild West, it was eventually cancelled after the first season. However, as it usually goes for Bruce Campbell's projects, it gained a strong cult following over the years through re-runs and an eventual release on DVD in 2006.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. consists of 27 episodes, with Bruce Campbell starring in all of them.

A couple of months ago a fellow redditor on this sub recommended to me a nearly 6-hour YouTube video from a creator named Rick Worley titled The X-Files Mythology All Makes Perfect Sense, Actually. Personally, I always loved The X-Files mythology, even if it didn’t make complete sense to me all the time, so I was curious to discover what this video has to say.

So I watched it and found it quite interesting and informative. The video is very well-made, very thoughtful, and it brings up some very interesting ideas. At the same time I knew I couldn’t just take it at its word so I decided that this is actually a good opportunity to rewatch all of The X-Files mythology, consisting of all the OG mythological episodes, the Fight the Future movie from 1998, and the Revival mythological episodes (even though I swore to myself 10 years ago I will never watch the Revival ever again), as well as a couple of episodes that aren’t usually considered mythological, specifically Sleepless (S02E04) and The Unnatural (S06E19).

Overview of the video

The video itself delves into a lot of stuff, from historical references and recurring numbers and patterns to religious and scientific symbolism. But its key premise is the perceived discrepancy between the OG seasons and the Revival: while the OG seasons were all about a looming invasion of Alien Colonists, the Revival suggests that there in fact never were any Alien Colonists and that the Conspiracy heading towards world domination was actually led by a group of wealthy and powerful men using salvaged alien technology. The video then argues that not only is this not a retcon, but that the OG seasons actually hinted at this from the start.

The video basically presents two major assumptions that help prove its case:

1. The Syndicate, as we understood it in the OG seasons, was never at the top of the Conspiracy. The leaders of the Conspiracy were actually a sort of “Cabal” of wealthy and powerful men who wanted to use alien technology to make themselves immortal and then release a plague to kill off the rest of humanity. So the Cabal actually sold a lie to the Syndicate about the Alien Colonists so that they would manufacture means of spreading the plague (in the Revival referred to as the Spartan Virus) and to create a race of human-alien hybrids whose biology would then allow the Cabal to reach their immortality (while the clueless members of the Syndicate – apart from CSM – would die with the rest of humanity).
2. All the Aliens we see on the show or in the movie are either not part of the Conspiracy (the Black Oil, the Greys killed by the military), implanted memories created by the military through hypnosis (the Greys seen by Duane Barry and other abductees), or alien-human hybrids in different stages of evolution of the Project (some Greys plus the “Alien” Bounty Hunters and the “Alien” Rebels).

I found all of this very fascinating and was excited to watch all of the mythology within this new framework. But when I started to go through all the mythology episodes from the start, I must say that right around the season 4-5 mark, I began to realize that there are just too many holes in this reading of the mythology for it to truly work. There is a bunch of specific examples for this that I could name, but this post is already pretty long so I’ll just leave that for the comments, if anybody’s interested to ask.

What I will say here is that my biggest problem with this reading of the mythology aren’t really the logical discrepancies, but rather how narratively unsatisfying it makes the whole show. Because all the episodes showing people talking about the Alien Colonists and the vaccine against the Black Oil are now hollow and meaningless, because all of this is now just a part of the hoax created by the Cabal, which deflates almost all tension of massive portions of the entire show.

And what suffers the most from this is actually Fight the Future. Originally, it was a huge twist that the Black Oil can turn humans into hosts for Grey Aliens, the implication being that we will all get killed and replaced by them. But if the Black Oil was never supposed to be released on a global scale, then none of this really matters. Sure, it’s still pretty bad that the Black Oil can do this to people, but if it’s not going to be used this way on the entire population, then it really isn’t such a big deal.

So when I originally started this little project, I thought there’s gonna be only one of two outcomes: either the video is correct and the mythology does make sense, or the video is incorrect and the mythology doesn’t make sense. So when I realized that some of the core ideas in the video really don’t hold up to scrutiny, I have come to terms with the fact that the mythology truly is broken. Nevertheless, I decided to continue with my rewatch to piece together at least as much as I could.

But then I got to the Revival seasons and something unexpected happened. Or rather unexpected to me, while anybody reading this who actually remembers what happened in the Revival probably wouldn't be surprised and actually knows where I’m going with this:

The video is wrong, but the mythology still (mostly) makes sense

Now, when I say the video is wrong, I’m not trying to sound snarky or condescending. I still believe the video is very well-made and correct in a lot of ways. Not only that, but Rick Worley actually managed to piece together a lot of stuff that I myself never realized throughout the 20+ years I’ve been watching the show. And a lot of the information in the video actually helped me understand the mythology better, even though in different ways than it intended. The problem here is that even though the video is correct in a lot of ways, it all centers around an assumption that the Revival says the Conspiracy with Alien Colonists wasn’t real. Which I don’t think the Revival actually says.

Sure, there are people in the Revival convinced that the Conspiracy is of men using alien technology and that Aliens themselves aren't part of it. But when we get to the episode My Struggle III (S11E01), we meet two former conspirators of CSM: Erika Price and Mr. Y. And they both basically spill out to Mulder that yes, they were part of the Alien Conspiracy, but the Aliens aren’t coming due to dwindling resources of a warming planet, pretty much saying that the Aliens abandoned the Project due to Climate Change.

Now on one hand, I feel this explanation is kind of stupid. Throughout the OG series it was established multiple times that the Aliens actually thrive in high temperatures, so why would they be worried about Global Warming? And if the issue here really was the resources that will get destroyed due to Climate Change (yay for us), the Aliens have already established so many Human replacements (=Supersoldiers) in the US government (and potentially other World governments) throughout the early 2000s to be able to actually do something about Climate Change through legislation and corporate oversight.

On the other hand, you could say that Erika Price was only speculating about the reasons why the Project was abandoned, so maybe there is a different reason (which I will get to later).

The contradictory nature of the Revival

Whether the Climate Change explanation is stupid or not, it is AN explanation of where the Alien Colonists went. So why isn’t it represented in the video? It’s not like Rick Worley missed it, because he actually uses clips from this scene. But when you actually watch that part of the episode, it kind of makes sense that it also could have a second meaning.

The information in the scene isn’t portrayed as some sort of a big revelation. The dialogue is kind of rushed, disinterested and even a little bit cocky or sarcastic. So it could also be read as: “oh yeah, we were part of the ‘Alien Colonization’ that you believed for so many years, but the Aliens are not coming because that would be stupid to believe and also who would even want to colonize a dying planet”.

And the fact this scene could be read in more than one way was in my opinion Chris Carter’s intention. Because if I had to guess, I’d say that he wrote the mythology of the Revival the way he did so that when a person who’s never watched The X-Files before or only vaguely remembered it (which is already 99% of the viewers), they would be able to watch My Struggle (S10E01) and go: “oh, it doesn’t matter that I don’t remember the mythology because the Revival says that it was all fake, so now I can find out what’s REALLY been happening”. But then if they actually go back and watch the OG seasons, they would realize that it wasn’t all fake, that the Alien Colonization plans were real, but also that the Revival seasons still kinda work, because now you can read the scene with Erika Price and Mr. Y in a different light (though here’s where the Rick Worley video would clearly disagree with me).

So what is the mythology?

After watching all of The X-Files mythology and compared it to the video, I felt that I now have a pretty good grasp on what was going on. Which is why I decided to create a document (an x-file, if you will) titled The Facts, Speculations, and Theories about The X-Files Mythology, where I lay out the broad strokes of the mythology from beginning to end.

In this document, I’m trying to present a “relatively brief” and clear overview of what was happening on the show for anyone who, like me, was always a bit confused about the overall picture and would like to fill in the gaps. That being said, I’d also like to mention that even though I believe the mythology does make sense, it’s not 100%. There still are questions that were (and probably forever will be) left unanswered, not to mention that the point of the mythology never was to spill everything out, but to actually keep a couple of things a mystery or open to interpretation. Which is why I also added some of my own theories that I think could make the mythology a little bit more coherent (for example about what happened to the Colonists after season 9).

Either way, I hope this document will be helpful to at least some people. Because when it comes to The X-files fans (especially on this subreddit), I have noticed that a lot of us choose to ignore the show’s mythology, thinking that it’s all incomprehensible gibberish. And I would really like to disprove this notion and to show that the mythology is actually pretty cool. In other words…

I want you to believe.

The Hudsucker Proxy is a 1994 comedy film directed, produced, and co-written by the Coen brothers and co-written by Sam Raimi (who also served as a second unit director). It stars Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, and Bruce Campbell, and tells the story of a naïve business graduate (Robbins) who gets hired as president of a manufacturing company as part of a stock swindle.

In the film, Bruce plays the role of a news reporter Smitty. In his book If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, he talks about how he first declined the role that he would have to audition for, but eventually was offered it audition-free, due to his previous relationship with the Coen brothers on The Evil Dead (where Joel worked as an assistant editor) and Crimewave. In the book he also describes how star-struck he was to work beside Paul Newman and how in awe he was by the professionalism of Jennifer Jason Leigh, who always perfectly knew her seemingly endless barrage of lines and never once tripped up.

Personally, I am perfectly fine with this. He's done more than enough for us Evil Dead fans over the decades and even if he decided to go forward with the animated series, I just don't think it would have worked. Evil Dead is so deeply rooted in practical effects and actors' physicality that I just can't see that satisfyingly being translated into animation.

Also he's a 68 year old man with cancer. So let him tour with his movie, let him smoke weed a and let him ride his tricycle. He's more than deserved it. None of us can possibly demand anything more from him at this point.