As someone who watched every episode of the X-files at least twice, take my word for it, this is an interesting and riveting season

Season five of the X-Files was remembered for a few notable facts. The first, and most important, was that this was the last series shot in Vancouver.
Many people have stated that the show was never quite the same after this and I would have to agree.
Unlinke many reviewers though, I did not think that the subsequent seasons to this were in anyway terrible, but if you look back at any of the first five seasons, you will see the grittiness and eerieness that seemed to permeate through much of the stories.
This season ( five ) is no exception, and well and truly holds up well to the first four excellent seasons.
First the negatives.
The first very slight cracks in the mythology episodes start, as they started to become a little complicated to follow.
As a whole, all in all, the mythology episodes were again first class, with the usual characters living up to most peoples expectations. Perhaps any fans disappointment are simply the introduction of too many elements, that are hard to reconcile.

The other negatives would include a few more than usual
" stinkers " in this season, more than any other previous season that I can recall.
I feel this is in no way connected to either David Duchovny or Gillian Anderson, but simply average scripts, bought on by the pressure to film quickly after filming the movie.
So the ones I didn't like?
Well, " Detour" was a little far fetched for mine ( a monster hidden in the forest) The humour was ok though.
" Christmas Carol" and " Emily " were just a little better than average- they could have benefitted from a faster pace, as they were very slow.
" Schizogeny" and " Chinga" were just plain stinkers, pure and simple! Sorry, didn't like them one bit!
But for the good stuff:
The stand-alone episodes were once again excellent with my favourites including the following:
" Unusual suspects" featuring the Lone Gunmen prominantly, basically how they formed- a great comedy drama episode.
" Bad Blood" was again a different direction as they explored comdey from yet another angle with different points of view telling the same story.
" Minds Eye" I found this one quite captivating as a blind woman can somehow " see" her fathers killing people. Very interesting story.
" The Pine Bluff Variant"- top notch thriller episode as Mulder infiltrates a terrorist group, also features Skinner quite a bit which I always enjoy.
All in all, an enjoyable season, if not quite as good as the first four seasons.
I also loved the cliffhanger episode " The End " appropriately named as many reviewers have pointed out as the last episode shot in Vancouver. It introduces a child prodigy named Gibson Praise, a mind reader, and possible part alien, he plays a chess champion who avoids an assasination attempt.
The other notable point for this season ( also that many reviewers have pointed out! ) is that the X-Fles movie directly follows this season, and remarkably was shot before the entire season.
This for me explains why the quality was missing from several episodes, and why the season was just twenty episodes long!
As usual the box set contains excellent extras, including interviews and special effects highlights, deleted scenes etc which are a must for any serious X-File fan.

Still a more than worthwhile addition to your X-File Collection.

Thanks for reading

By the end of the fourth season of THE X-FILES, Mulder had discovered that everything he had believed in about the existence of extra-terrestrials had been a big lie. Seemingly, he had killed himself as a result of this blinding revelation...but of course, who really believed that? So of course Mulder is back in Season 5 trying to dig deeper into the deep, dark secrets of aliens and our own government, and undergoing a radical ideological change in the process. By "Patient X"/"The Red and the Black", he has turned into a skeptic, even as a faceless alien rebel force had suddenly made its way onto our planet and caused mass murders. But as "The Red and the Black" closes, Mulder even starts to question his own skepticism. Boy, the lengths X-FILES creator Chris Carter will go to frustrate his audience.

The 5th Season of THE X-FILES---which lasted a mere 20 episodes, as the crew was working hard on the upcoming X-FILES movie---still finds the show in good form, but it is with the mythological developments of this season that I think the alien mythology of the show began its decline into muddle and, eventually, painful drawn-out death. In the first three seasons, THE X-FILES' grand conspiracy story deftly mixed our deepest paranoia with our love of the freaky to make it fun and exciting. But, with the blinding revelation of Season 4's concluding "Gethsemane" and the introduction of the faceless alien rebels in Season 5, I personally started to feel less intrigued than exasperated at its hard-to-swallow twists and turns. (Guess again if you think one of the main characters is really dead by the end of "Redux II"; notwithstanding Mulder's resurrection in Season 3's "The Blessing Way," it seems like all the wrong characters come back to life in this X-FILES universe.) In his quest to continually keep his audience on its toes, Chris Carter kept piling on the twists until, by Season 6 onward, there was nowhere left for the alien mytharcs to go but down...and down it went.

Still, "Redux"/"Redux II" was a fine opening two-parter, filled with the kind of convoluted plotting and strong emotions that made the opening diptych of Season 3 classic mythological X-FILES. (The tears Mulder sheds at Scully's hospital bedside in one scene in "Redux II" will break your heart.) Unfortunately, "Christmas Carol"/"Emily", in which Scully discovers she bore a daughter during her abduction experience, seems more emotionally brutal than gripping---poor Scully has already gone through a draining bout with cancer; now she has to go through another (futile) life-saving bout on account of a daughter she never knew she had? It's a little much, if you ask me. And the aforementioned "Patient X"/"The Red and the Black" just seemed lifeless, totally lacking in the kind of spark that infused, say, "Colony"/"Endgame" (still the most viscerally thrilling of X-FILES mytharcs). Finally, the season ends with "The End," which introduces another mythological chess piece: Gibson Praise (Jeff Gulka), the young mind-reading kid who may or may not be part-alien.

If the mythological developments of Season 5 sometimes fail to stimulate, there are still some excellent standalone episodes to keep your eyes open (which, arguably, were the only reasons left to watch the show in its later seasons). As with the previous season, the highlight of these standalones is another Vince Gilligan foray into hilarious self-parody and satire, "Bad Blood." The RASHOMON-like structure of the first half, especially, is a brilliant masterstroke, cleverly revealing the way both Mulder and Scully see each other. (The truth may be out there, but as Kurosawa masterfully demonstrated in his classic film, it is ultimately unknowable...except for the part about the buck teeth.) Other notables include:

Chris Carter's clever B&W comic-book "Post-Modern Prometheus," a modern-day retelling of Mary Shelley's classic FRANKENSTEIN tale, with John O'Hurley---commonly known as SEINFELD's J. Peterman---well cast as the (subtly) mad Dr. Pollidori.

The convoluted, jargon-filled, yet thrilling "Kill Switch," co-written by famed "cyberpunk" author William Gibson and directed by Rob Bowman, who has an unerring sense of the kinetic. Gibson and co-writer Tom Maddox create a dark, ugly, chilling tale about paranoia and live artificial intelligence.

"Mind's Eye" has a terrific performance from Lili Taylor as a blind woman whom Mulder believes is innocent of murder, regardless of all the evidence stacked against her. Taylor vividly creates a spunky, sometimes abrasive character who refuses to be pitied under any circumstances; it's a memorable, touching performance.

Religion-themed X-FILES episodes are usually stimulating, and "All Souls" is no exception, an episode which finds Scully still dealing with the emotional grief of having lost her daughter Emily. Perhaps actress Gillian Anderson's finest episode.

Rob Bowman returns to the directing helm with the exciting "Pine Bluff Variant," in which Mulder gets involved in a bioterrorist plot. As an action hero, David Duchovny has nothing on Bruce Willis, but the episode nevertheless is a lot of fun, provided you don't think too much about it afterward.

And "Folie a Deux" is a fine penultimate episode involving a telemarketing company who may or may not be under the control of a man-bug who sucks the life out of his victims. If you think Mulder went to the edge of madness in Season 3's underrated "Grotesque"...he goes even further in "Folie a Deux." Just look at the title.

Sure, the quality of the standalones may not be as consistent as they were in Season 3---don't even bother with the pointless "Kitsunegari" if you loved Season 3's "Pusher"---but, even in lesser episodes, there was always the rapport between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, still managing to strike some sparks here and there to keep us intrigued in their characters' relationship.

All in all, the 5th Season of the X-FILES is not one of the show's best---it is done in by the rather lackluster mythology episodes. Still, there are some worthy episodes here that make it worthy of the X-FILES name.

I love this season. Some of the mythology episodes ("The Red and the Black", "Patient X", "The End"). Gillian Anderson is a tour-de-force. She's one of the biggest reasons why I love the X-Files. The chemistry she and David Duchovny have on the show is still very strong in this season. My favorite episode of all this season is "Bad Blood." All of the pros and cons of the two main characters, Mulder and Scully, are embellished in a very comical way. Scully is seen as less than exuberant while Mulder is seen as the opposite. It's hilarious. I just wish this season had been longer, though. I understand, though, the demanding schedules of the stars, what with the movie, "X-Files - Fight the Future" being filmed in the same year. The season was very good, though. I highly recommend it!

What is astonishing in looking back at the first five seasons of THE X-FILES is how amazingly consistent the show was. With most shows you can clearly demarcate the better from the worst seasons, but this show hit the ground running in its first season and never really eased up. Apart from adding touches of comedy in Season Three, the first five seasons are masterpieces of consistency. Over the course of time the show managed to build up a massive back-story, often leaping back a few decades to detail events in the past (including an excellent episode that not only deals with Mulder's father, but pays homage to one of the few shows that could be a precursor to THE X-FILES by guest starring THE NIGHT STALKER's leading man Darren McGavin). There are a number of outstanding stand alone episodes, and several that I personally find scarier than anything in the first four seasons. One early episode finds Mulder and Scully lost in a swamp with chameleon-like creatures that can strike almost at will (with more of the flirtation that left fans wondering if there was potential romance in the wings). Another very funny episode in black and white deals with "The Great Mutato," a take off on bad 1950s Sci-fi films. But the best comic episode of the season is easily one set in Texas with Luke Wilson and vampires, a RASHOMON type story in which we witness the same story first from Scully's and then from Mulder's point of view (the former presenting Luke Wilson as the apex of male attractiveness, while Mulder presents him as a doofus with buck teeth and possibly some idiocy in the family line). There is also an amazing episode with Lily Taylor guest starring as a blind woman who has the ability to see things remotely through the eyes of the man who biologically fathered her.

As with the former seasons, the most engrossing parts of the season dealt with ongoing plot lines. Season Four ended with Mulder apparently dead (though who really believed that?) and Scully in desperate shape because of her cancer). After a very, very funny first episode that provided comic relief after the cliffhanger ending of Season Four as well as dealing with both the creation of the Lone Gunmen and Mulder's involvement with the X-Files. And in an absolutely stunning episode sequence Scully, who was rendered barren by the procedures performed upon her during her abduction, discovers that she has a child that she is the genetic mother of. The Smoking Man is revealed to be Mulder's father, but then later not to be Mulder's father. Or perhaps Mulder's father, and the father of both his brother and his sister, or perhaps not. Just who Cancer Man fathered is a complex mystery at the end of Season Five. We get endless amounts of increased by increasingly unilluminating details about government conspiracies and plots. As I've pointed out in previous reviews, this highlights the only real weakness the show ever had: a tendency to pile one mysterious plot element onto another without resolving previous ones, and introducing apparently conflicting plot details, as the Smoking Man's role as potential father demonstrates. Unfortunately, subsequent seasons did less to resolve these tensions than to multiply them.

The season ends with a wonderful episode about a small child with psychic ability who Mulder and Scully (and Mulder's old flame, played by Mimi Rogers), the most intense heightening tease hitherto that Mulder and Scully might have feelings for one another that their professional relationship has forced them to ignore (more in a second), and the reappearance of the Smoking Man who not only steals the child but sets fire to Mulder and Scully's office, destroying the X-Files. The final image of the season consists of an utterly despondent Mulder laying on his couch with a solicitous Scully sadly watching over him. Nonetheless, fans wanting to see something happen between Mulder and Scully were encouraged by the words of the boy who tells Mulder with both Scully and Mimi Rogers's character present that one of the two women was thinking about him, and that he was thinking about one of them, and also by the look of implied emotional devastation (which she typically refuses to express) when Scully walks by a door and sees Mulder and her old flame holding hands. Though the X-Files are ashes, the viewer still feels that Season Six will not only begin with the X-Files being resurrected, but with Mulder and Scully, whom we all assume were thinking of one another, might finally be coaxed to break the cold reserve that exists between them.