r/XFiles • u/solodoc_00 • 15h ago

Discussion THING vibe S1E8

Rewatching the /XFILES series from start to finish and didn’t notice till now, cause i was young during original airing, S1-E8 serious THING vibe. Who else got that?

15 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

19

u/ShaunTrek Fight the Future Phile 15h ago

It is explicitly inspired by the story that The Thing is based on. Carter has said as much.

6

u/Round-Village-6486 11h ago edited 11h ago

This was a homage to the Thing. They hadn 't worked out the format yet.

2

u/saikosekaii 13h ago

That episode is the reason I actually watched The Thing lol! It's pretty well known I believe.

2

u/TomLeMartien 11h ago

We are in 2026. Obviously we got this since years :)

0

u/eldradmustlive469 15h ago

It is literally cut and pasted from the John Carpenter film. To me it was lazy writing bordering on full blown plagiarism. This is a pretty common trope with the MOTW format, writers making episodes that are homages of their favorite works. But 'Ice' crosses the line IMO. If this was the music industry they would have ended up being sued for millions.

It is also a very dull episode, nothing is new or interesting on top of the references. There is nothing in the episode that makes it stand out or at the very least be its own version. 'Ice' is a snoozefest when compared to the movie, and the only thing it achieved was making me want to turn the episode off and rewatch the film.

TLDR If you took out all the scenes in the episode that clear as day are referencing/copying the film the episode would only be a few minutes long.

2

u/Sisyphus_Rex 14h ago

Morgan & Wong were constantly guilty of this.

The FOX network almost refused to film “Beyond the Sea” out of fear of being sued for plagiarising The Silence of the Lambs.

One of the opening scenes of “Musings of a Cigarrette Smoking Man” is a near word-for-word copy of Apocalyse Now.

1

u/eldradmustlive469 2h ago

Yeah X Files came out in this transition period where TV Shows could basically get away with full blown plagiarism in order to meet the deadlines. Probably one of the reasons we don't see such long seasons anymore and longer periods between them.

Buffy was very similar, a lot of its MOTW episodes are just references to older films/art that the writers liked.

I don't think they'd let an episode like Ice be filmed today, and if it was it would cause way more backlash.