u/ThingTime9876

NOTE: this isn’t a complaint post, just something I noticed and found interesting

I’m finally doing a complete X-Files rewatch, from the beginning, and I’m up to season 6 now, and it feels way more different then I recall it feeling at the time. I guess that’s something you might notice when you watch an episode daily, instead of weekly with long gaps in between seasons.

TBH when S6 aired I had kinda bounced off of The X-Files. I was frustrated with the Myth Arc and the movie disappointed me. I only watched a dozen episodes of S6 and S7 as they aired, before returning to the shadow after Mulder left, to see how that went. So now that I’m catching up on episodes I hadn’t seen, I’m noticing a few things:

- I just finished episode 8 - The Rain King - and 5 of those 8 episodes are overtly comedic

- Episodes like Drive, Triangle, Ghosts That Stole Christmas are also overtly ‘gimmicky’ - based around a high concept premise, rather than a typical investigation plot

- Terms Of Endearment is the only episode so far that feels like an ‘old school’ X-File - but even then, Mulder’s and Scully are kept apart for a long stretch!

- Almost every episode so far has has explicit shipping bait - mostly random characters commenting on how M & S should kiss each other. The romance was once doled out in crumbs; now it’s a major tease

I know that moving filming from Vancouver to L.A was partly responsible for the changes, but I feel like the writers have kinda lost track of what a ‘typical’ X-files episode should be.

Again, not a complaint, as some of these S6 episodes are among the best of the show. But still, it’s interesting.

Surely some academic critic has interpreted The Truman Show through a Gnostic lens? This film came out at the height of popular films that attracted esoteric religious discourse – in between Dark City (1997) and The Matrix (1999). I feel like The Truman Show lends itself to a Gnostic metaphor even more so than those films.
 
The Gnostic tradition is complicated and obscure, with many branches going back 2000 years, but one idea they have in common is that there was an original cosmic being from which emanated other lesser beings, one of who created the material world that we live in, and keeps our souls trapped here while pretending to be our creator god – the Demiurge. And according to Gnostics, the human soul strives to be free of this false world.
 
Does that not perfectly describe the relationship between Cristof and Truman? And like the Demiurge, who in some interpretations comes to believe he actually is the creator god (aka the God of the Old Testament), Christof has come to believe his own hype.