The X-Files: The Complete Fifth Season on DVD
The Collector’s Edition
The X-Files: The Complete Fifth Season Collector’s Edition, originally released on DVD in 2004, is the inspirational turning point of the mega-hit series and the preface to precedence in movie-making that would eventually lead to a summer blockbuster with The X-Files: Fight the Future.
The X-Files Ride the Wave of Success
Although their highest rated episode aired during the fourth season, The X-Files began to really peak in popularity during its fifth season. The season premiere, which consisted of the now typical three episode cliffhanger, was the most crucial in defining where the show would follow from this point through to the end. While Scully once again pushes her moral boundaries in order to cover for her mortally endangered partner, Mulder resumes his search for the cure to Scully’s cancer. As this storyline comes to an explosive conclusion, the two agents finally begin to overcome their personal issues with conveying their feelings for one another and settle into a more comfortable relationship based solely on trust and each other.
The remainder of the fifth season offers a generous amount of drama, humor and angst to make even the casual viewer interested in understanding the show from the beginning, which was now possible due to its start in syndication on FOX and its affiliate, F/X. Scully encounters more heartache in connection with her fateful abduction from season two when a little girl named Emily turns out to be her biological daughter (a direct result of the truth uncovered in season four by Mulder of the tests performed on her and other women). Mulder begins to lose faith in his beliefs of extraterrestrial life, favoring instead the maniacal workings of the shadow syndicate using alien life as a cover for their experimentations; however, after the disappearance of a multiple abductee, Cassandra Spender (played by Veronica Cartwright), and another heart-pounding close call on Scully’s life his faith is restored.
Written by the Stars
Aside from toting the annually voted fan-favorite episode of the series (“Bad Blood,” a humorous “he said, she said” farce told mostly in retrospect that pits Mulder against Scully in a small southwestern town filled with vampires), season five also features two episodes written by horror and sci-fi novelists turned fans. One episode, “Chinga” (which later had to be changed to “Bunghoney” due to its unsavory translation in Spanish), a story about a possessed doll found at sea in New England, was written by the master of horror himself, Stephen King. The other, “Kill Switch,” written by world class sci-fi “prophet” William Gibson, crossed Mulder and Scully with a virtual reality controlled by the song “Twilight Time”.
The season had other wonderful stand-alone episodes as well; it covered some back-story on Mulder’s loveable tech friends, The Lone Gunmen, with “Unusual Suspects,” some long awaited answers on the origins of the X-Files in “Travelers” and “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” a Cher-themed, Frankenstein homage that was nominated for seven 1998 Emmy awards, which was written and directed (in black and white) by series creator Chris Carter. It all comes to a blistering end, however, when the X-Files office is burned to the ground by the nefarious Cigarette-Smoking Man, who has devastating plans for the dedicated agents.
This Collector’s Edition set includes a new documentary, “The Truth about Season Five,” a forty-six minute F/X special entitled, “Inside The X-Files,” special effects sequences from seven episodes with optional commentary by Paul Rabwin, deleted scenes from four episodes with optional commentary by Chris Carter, eleven “Behind-the-Truth” spots from F/X, forty promotional television spots and an all new DVD-ROM game for the computer, “Earthbound”.
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