I was a big fan when it came out, and watched as many episodes as I could. Some time during the first run, I got busy doing other things and didn't catch it on the regular.

Now that I'm retired, and seem to have watched "everything else," I thought I'd catch up what I missed.

I started from the beginning a few months ago. Some of the episodes played in the background, so I had to replay them when I could focus a little more. Some I'd seen before so I allowed myself to be distracted through. Some I think I still missed, being distracted through episodes I hadn't seen before that I might have missed some because of auto play. Still, I think I got pretty much all of them past the various face holes.

I know much analysis has been done on the series, so I'm not going to inject too much of my own.

There seemed to be a few tracks of story lines that persisted through the series. I found myself a little disappointed that more of them weren't brought into a common thread more than that the cases were from outside FBI norms, sometimes touching on "normal" paranormal, sometimes tied to the "alien" story line, and more than a few conspiracies wrapped around or through those ideas. I'm sure it was difficult to remain both tied to reality and in its own fictional universe, and also to maintain continuity from a few different sets of writers through the run of the series.

There were the episodic police episodes that had nothing to do with the rest of the series, tied together only because of some weird aspect that resulted in them being an X-file. A few things like ghosts, witches, and vampires popped in occasionally. A few unique psychic people, with different kinds of abilities.

The alien episodes were not always in the same vein, I think getting conflated or combined (or transitioned to?) the conspiracies. There seemed to be a few different story lines along abductions and abductees, alien technology, alien invasion, and a long running alien hybridization of humans. For the most part, the alien bits followed the same kinds of alien ideas throughout. The long-running thread about the life form within (or acting and looking like) oil was a huge opportunity to tie them all together, too.

The conspiracies could have been the thing to pull most of it together. There were a few different threads of conspiracies, and a couple attempts to align some or explain one as the deceit or misdirection of another. They moved to and from (and to again) a cabal inside the government, and then neatly had them (well, almost all of them) killed off by the aliens.

I suppose the ghosts and vampires and such could have been rolled in as misinterpretations, and even the 60-year cycle and unique abilities of Eugene Tooms could have fit into a longer understanding of the conspiracies. Eugene Tooms was a man, who appeared in a couple episodes, who seemingly surfaced every 60 years or so to kill a few people to eat their livers, and then hibernate between. He had the ability to stretch his body to squeeze through cracks and duct work to reach his victims and escape police.

Alex Krycek appeared in some guise in nearly all of the tropes, including simple assassin for the cabal, infected alien, alien invasion agent or opposition, and even a conspiracy participant, protector, and whistleblower. He is a great character as an adversary, collaborator, untrustworthy ally, and eventual martyr.

The espionage connections within the cabal were a nice way to scoot the various stories along. I appreciated that the information they led to was always important and accurate, if incomplete, and that even when it led to a distraction, it was cleverly integrated to the story universe.

As with the first time around, I had a hard time with the season 8 stories. Because of real world issues, they had cast shake-ups and brought in a couple new agents to replace Mulder and support Scully. I did appreciate the attempt to keep things alive, and even the dynamic that she had to belief and he was the skeptic. But I think they held that line a bit too much, and she was a bit of an irregular believer who didn't have a deep hook in the X-files but instead bordered on an involved medium with supernatural ties, while he was too by the book who was also the X-files encyclopedia having read through them once.

There was a big gap between the difficult seasons 8 and 9 and the ending seasons 10 and 11. I don't recall any of the episodes in 10 and 11 as I watched them, nor many of them during 8 and 9. In real time, where there was an actual 14 year gap, it probably would have been a little less shocking, but rolling out of the end of season 9, through the second movie (I watched them in timeline order, too), to the opening of season 10 was a bit of a switch as the cast aged instantly. It didn't take long to buy into the fast forward.

I was disappointed in the ending seasons as they had a good grip on the conspiracy and alien things, but still chose to wind in unrelated mysterious event stories. Knowing it was drawing to a close, they could have avoided the supernatural stories that didn't align with the aliens and conspiracies, or they could have rolled them in. There were a couple character stories, like the look at Skinner's Vietnam years and the monster that came out of that, that did to a bit to show that the monsters were within us instead of unexplained supernatural events. But the one with the witches and children could have been better than having mysterious spirits pulled from spells as their monster. Some of them were just wonky and simply leveraged beloved characters, like the one where Scully and Mulder are the only humans in the episode where they're attacked by AI.

Without spoilers, they did leave it open for a return. It's been 7 years, and no one is getting any younger, so if not now, then maybe with other characters. There were a few young FBI agents played by actors who have become something in other shows who could make a comeback, too. They could spin up new agents with new conspiracies and tie to the same alien story lines, maybe with some of the previous agents making appearances as FBI leaders or even new cabal members!

Maybe in light of COVID and the infection-based disaster predicted in the last seasons, it's a story better to let lie.

In all, I appreciated being able to watch them all. I do still have some favorite episodes and story lines. I appreciate the season 8 effort and actors better now than I did in real time (even though I was fading away from the show back then). For all of its flaws, it was a pretty good show.