There are some TV shows that are perfectly suited to Alternate Galaxies. And then there’s The X-Files, a show that Rob has loved since it first hit Australian television in 1994, watched from beginning to end multiple times, and spent his university years discussing with strangers on the early Internet. The problem? It’s over 200 episodes long, and Dave had somehow managed to go through the entire 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s and most of the 2020s without watching it.

So, we needed a plan.

That plan has been to throw Dave into the deep end - but only six episodes deep to start with. Rob has picked six stories from the first four seasons that don't require you to know the show's mythology, while trying to give Dave a proper taste of the enormous tonal range of The X-Files. There are monsters, Satanists, serial killers, psychic phenomena and alien abductions, but also some extremely funny episodes where the show gleefully takes the piss out of itself. Dave then immediately broke the rules by watching a seventh episode, because apparently six episodes of homework wasn't enough.

Our selections take us from the early monster-of-the-week classic Squeeze, through the Satanic weirdness of Die Hand Die Verletzt, the melancholy brilliance of Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, the genuinely harrowing Oubliette, the gloriously bonkers Jose Chung's From Outer Space and finally the dark serial-killer story Paper Hearts.

We'll keep Dave's rougue choice a secret for now.

Did you watch the X-Files back in the day? Have you watched it since? What do you think of Rob's episode choices? Which ones would you have given Dave?

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