The X-files was one of the best written and directed shows on television, this unfortunately is the last year that the show held onto it‘s audience and originality. We start the season off with the two part season opener “The Sixth Extinction” and “The Sixth Extinction II” with Scully in Africa looking for a cure for Mulder’s mental state. In the middle we have the strangely sublime “X-cops” that finds Mulder and Scully on patrol with the Cops TV crew. We also find the typical mix of X-files weird and wonderfulness i… episodes like “Hunger” and “Je Souhaite” and outright weirdness in “Millennium”. To close things off for the year we see the show take a fairly dramatic left turn with the disappearance of Mulder and Scully’s discovery that she is pregnant, let’s also not forget that this is the season of the infamous kiss between Mulder and Scully (in the Millennium episode).
Video
Being a show that prided itself on its excellent production values the video quality of this disc really shine through. Being a somewhat dark and gloomy show we still see all the sublime detail in Mulder’s office and get a bright and detailed image when called for in the great outdoors. The only flaw I see is a consistent edge enhancement throughout the discs. The image on this set is a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer.
Audio
Sporting a very good quality Dolby Digital 2.0 audio track the very ominous sounding opening music shines through with all of its creepiness. The audio is good quality for the most part; there are a couple instances where dialogue intelligibility becomes a bit of an issue but, other then that the quality is good. For only having a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack makes very good use of the rears to immerse the viewer, bass is also decent but, not over powering. We also have both French and Spanish audio tracks.
Special Features
Previous releases of this series have been somewhat lacking in special features, this release is a little better. I still would have really liked to see full-on director’s cuts for at least some of the episodes instead of just the odd deleted scene. Anyways…we have at least one deleted scenes for each episode. For the deleted scenes they did something very cool, the extra footage was sandwiched between original footage with the original footage being in black and white and the deleted scene was shown in color and you can watch this with or without a commentary. I really liked the way this was done as it helped you get a better understanding of where the footage was supposed to fit and what it added to the original story line. One final word on the deleted scenes, you can watch them all at once on disc 6 or have them inserted into each episode, almost like some of the Infinifilm stuff.
There is a commentary by Chris Carter for each episode which is actually kind of interesting (for those of you that do not know Carter’s job prior to fame and fortune with the X-files was as a writer for Surfing magazine). His insight into the show are like the show a little out there at times but does prove to be at least be entertaining unlike a lot of the commentaries out there.
Next there is an interesting DVD-ROM game that test your X-files trivia knowledge and allows you to play some kind of interesting games. Nothing life altering but, better then your average DVD games.
Rounding things out we have all of the promo spots from season 7, special effects commentary with Paul Rabwin and a preview of the X-files console game (looks like a bomb unfortunately).
Final Thoguhts
For any fans of the show this is a must own as this was the last year that the X-files retained its dignity and originality. For the rest of the world this is a great rental to remind us just how good TV can be sometimes. This was a creepy and unnerving show at its best and there are some great episodes here (“Hunger” will stick with you for a while). The truth is out there.
Special Features List
- Audio Commentaries on all episodes
- Deleted Scenes
- DVD-ROM games
- Promo Spots
- Special effects commentary with Paul Rabwin
