Before Vince Gilligan defined modern television with the story of a high school teacher turned drug kingpin in Breaking Bad, he was helping to invent modern television on the revolutionary 90s sci-fi mystery series The X-Files. A show chronicling the adventures of Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) and Dana Skully (played by Gillian Anderson), FBI agents who specialize in the unexplained, The X-Files told individual stories that ran the gamut from dark and disturbing, insightful and profound, to practically ridiculous, while stringing together overall mythology that held the whole thing together. Along with writers like Darin Morgan and his brother Glen Morgan, many of Gilligan’s episodes are heralded by fans as some of the best ever produced for the series. While many of them would have all the intense drama and conflict we would come to know with Breaking Bad, they can also be incredibly funny. Since the premise of the show was so simple and strong, it allowed brilliant minds like Gilligan’s to operate untethered by the norms of traditional television dramas.
With the Breaking Bad spinoff series Better Call Saulcoming to an end, there have been reports of Gilligan pitching a new show. We don’t know much about it at this time, but early reports, per Deadline, suggest it will be more in the vein of The X-Files than his most recent work. In anticipation of his possible return to television of the fantastical, we’re ranking his very best episodes of The X-Files.
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7 X-Cops
20th Television
Season 7’s episode “X-Cops” mixes up the format like never before by shooting as though it were the scariest episode of Cops ever produced. Airing around the same time that The Blair Witch Project was terrifying audiences across the globe, “X-Cops” sought to give your typical X-Files episode more of a grounded and real tone by using low-quality, handheld cameras (the kinds they used on Cops) and frantic editing. The result is a genuinely creepy and fascinating story about a monster with the ability to change shape based on the greatest fear of the person looking at it, making the creature impossible to track.
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6 Drive
Similar to “X-Cops,” “Drive” throws you for a loop by appearing to be actual footage of a high-speed police car chase, before moving into the car itself, where we meet the story’s protagonist. Ten years before they would collaborate on Breaking Bad, Gilligan and Bryan Cranston worked together on this suspenseful episode about a man named Patrick Crump (Cranston), who is forced to travel across the country to escape a sound so terrible it killed his wife and is about to make his head explode. This is one of those episodes that grabs your attention with a flashy opening and great concept, but holds you there with a captivating relationship between the guest star and Duchovny.
5 Unusual Suspects
Not only did Gilligan work on The X-Files, but he was also heavily involved in its criminally underrated comedic spin-off The Lone Gunmen. Always considered to be highlights of the episodes they appeared in, the characters referring to themselves as The Lone Gunmen (John Byers, Melvin Frohike, and Ringo Langley) are finally given an origin story in the fantastic episode “Unusual Suspects,” about how they first met and started working together. It got a sequel episode the following season and served as a great testing ground for what their show would eventually become. Above all, though, it is just an endlessly entertaining episode of television.
4 Monday
Time loop episodes are standard fare in science fiction. However, since this is The X-Files, it has to be done with a bit of a twist. Instead of reliving the same annoying day on a constant loop until they learn their lesson and become better people, the characters in the episode “Monday” are forced to suffer through a deadly bank robbery where a man sets off a bomb and kills everyone inside over and over. It’s an excellent test for our main characters and keeps us on the edge of our seats as we try to figure out the key to stopping this madness.
3 Small Potatoes
A unique aspect of The X-Files that never gets enough praise is the show’s ability to handle dark material with enough levity to keep you laughing through some pretty gruesome details. This is the case with “Small Potatoes,” the story of a shape-shifter who is impregnating women against their will, resulting in multiple babies in a small town being born with tails. It doesn’t sound very funny, but the tone is surprisingly silly and there’s a bit of heart thrown in for good measure. One cool production detail is the actor playing the impregnator is X-Files writer Darin Morgan.
2 Dreamland and Dreamland II
Another sci-fi trope that has been done to death, but works if you figure out an interesting angle, is the body swap. Whether it’s one of the multiple Freaky Friday movies or any number of imitators, this is a concept that writers love to play with. The X-Files nails it by taking Fox Mulder and replacing him with one of the dreaded men in black often associated with Area 51 and covering up alien encounters. That alone would be a neat idea, but where this two-parter — “Dreamland” and “Dreamland II” — really excels is casting. By hiring the legendary comedic actor Michael McKean as the man swapping identities with Mulder, the show essentially guarantees that every scene featuring him pretending to be Mulder will be gold – which they absolutely are.
1 Bad Blood
“Bad Blood” really needs to be seen to appreciate. Explaining to you that it’s a vampire episode in which Mulder and Scully recount the events of a recent investigation from their own unique point-of-view doesn’t sum it up at all. That’s the concept, sure, but it’s all about the execution. The episode is great because of how Mulder and Scully’s interpretations are different. Seeing the same characters through two different sets of eyes makes all the difference. It is hilarious, fascinating, and well-acted across the board. If you’ve never experienced a funnier episode of The X-Files and are curious about them, “Bad Blood” is a fantastic place to start.
