I am a huge fan of The X-Files. When I was in college (before TiVo), my family knew not to call my apartment between 9 pm and 10 pm on Sunday nights because the phone would just ring and ring and ring (college students can't afford voicemail!). The chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson was a perfect blend of sexual tension, frustration, blind faith, and skepticism. Plus, Mulder has an obsession with porn. I always preferred the episodes which were individual X-Files, rather than the episodes that progressed the whole aliens-on-earth plot. The episodes that wrapped up at the end of the hour were terrifying and hilarious at the same time. Each week, I could hardly wait to see what scary creature Chris Carter had dreamed up for me to have nightmares about that night. The show went downhill right after the movie in 1998 and never recovered. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, The X-Files only lasted five seasons and concluded with a movie. You hear that, Seasons 6-9? You are dead to me!


After 1998, you could tell David Duchovny's heart wasn't in it because of his spat with Carter. When Duchovny left the show in season 7, Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish were added as cast members. I suffered through the second-to-last season with Scully and Doggett, but once Gillian Anderson left the show for good, so did I.

It was very hard to whittle down my five favorite episodes of The X-Files. My criteria: episodes that I must watch when they appear in reruns:

5. Home This episode, which aired during the fourth season, is by far the most disturbing episode of The X-Files...ever. This time, it wasn't monsters or mythical creatures. It was in-bred, pig-men that scared the holy crap out of me. It started with a dead baby with severe birth defects found buried in the ground and ended with the discovery of Peacock family, in-breeders who mate with their own mother. The mother was kept on a small cart, locked under a bed and she had no legs (I just gagged).

4. The Host This episode, during season two, made me afraid of my toilet for a good, long time. Sure, the human/worm thing couldn't fit in a toilet, but that didn't really matter to me. You see, Mulder thought he was being punished when he was sent to New Jersey to investigate a dead body in the sewer. But, it turned out there was a mutant in the water and it was killing people. Somehow, a human mixed with a worm. The episode was so scary because we only got little glimpses at the monster until near the end when it washed into a sewer treatment plant. Of course, the mutant thing with the giant, sucker mouth and sharp teeth escaped the plant. Mulder tried to stop it by lowering a gate, but he only succeeded in cutting it in half and we all know that won't kill a worm...

3. Squeeze, Tooms Eugene Tooms was the scariest monster I ever saw on The X-Files. He was a normal-looking guy who could stretch his body to squeeze through pipes and under windows. I include both episodes in this post because Tooms' entire story is really a two-parter. Both parts aired in the first season. In Squeeze, we meet creepy guy Tooms and learn that he is hundreds of years old and every several years he wakes up from hibernation because he has to eat people's livers! The second episode, Tooms, is probably the better of the two because of one simply hilarious line. When Mulder gets bile on his fingers, he says, "How can I get this off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?" I've seen the actor who played Tooms (Doug Hutchison) in Law & Order, Boomtown, and CSI, and he freaked me out then, too. By the way, he's a regular now on Guiding Light. (shudder)

2. Humbug This is one of my all-time favorites just for the pure spectacle. The show features the Jim Rose Circus, which is popular at colleges, and all the sideshow characters in the program really do things like stab themselves with nails, bathe in boiling cauldrens, and eat bugs. The agents are trying to discover what is killing sideshow freaks (it turns out to be a mini sideshow freak that lives in someone's tumor), but the story really isn't all that important. It's the characters. The Enigma, which ate raw fish directly from the river, is a real guy who is really covered in blue, puzzle-shaped tattoos. I love that The X-Files creators recognized that the stars of the Jim Rose Circus were freaky enough to be included in an episode... no special effects needed!

1. Jose Chung's From Outer Space Hands-down, all-time favorite episode. Why? Hi-larious. Most of the episode is from the point of view of Scully, who was telling her version of an alien abduction investigation to author Jose Chung. All the characters have wildly different versions of the story and shows just how wild alien abduction hype can get. It's complete with an alien autopsy video and "men in black" played by Alex Trebek and Jesse Ventura. My favorite character is the conspiracy theorist who says, "I want to be abducted by aliens...I just want to be taken away to some place where I don't have to worry about finding a job." And, because the story is from Scully's point of view, the sheriff, who swears a lot, says things like, "I just got a call from some crazy bleep-head who says he saw the alien abduction. You feel like talking to this blank-hole?" What can I say? I love the funny.