A problem I have with FAMILIAR is that it's basically told like an ordinary Whodunnit. You can guess who the bad guy/girl may be from the first moment on. And quite easily at that. There’s that phone call and the weird exchange of looks at the playground between the two moms. It’s not SUPER obvious but designed to be one of the traces laid out in the ep. I guess I also held out some hope that they wouldn’t go there and make the red haired woman the armchair/self-learned/not really good at it-“witch” but, alright. One of the things I love about The X-Files is that it mostly doesn’t work that way. It’s one of the things that I noticed about it actually when I first got into it. I’m from a country in which 98% of all fictional tv-content is an often-mixed-with-sociological-undertones unimaginative variety of crime stories. I’m not really a fan ‘cause I’m sort of fed up with it and easily bored by it. So, the fact that TXF is NOT you run-of-the-mill crime-story thing is basically one of my requirements to love the show. I love that TXF is less interested in WHO commited the crime than in HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?! That it’s more about the journey and sense of scientific discovery in order to keep someone from doing something evil than just to put someone in jail. That it digs deeper than your formulaic crime investigation and its typical sociological dynamics. Very often on TXF, you even get to catch a glimpse of the baddie while it/he/she is insinuating something evil early on. The challenge for the viewer is not to guess who the “killer”/bad guy is but to figure out WHAT is really going on here. Accompanied by Mulder and Scully’s wisdom of course. That whole generic feeling FAMILIAR exuded though, really bugged me. Because it seemed to be somewhat beneath this show. It seemed too shallow to me. Not enough witchcraft and weird shit to be faced by our leads. Granted, there are X-Files eps just like that. But it’s not what makes the show stand out. And if you decide to go down that rather shallow path you better have your characters do some amazing stuff or feature their chemistry in a special way. I’m trying to enjoy the ride here, of course. But this is the way I see it. Granted. There are many weak X-Files eps in the show’s history and these shorter seasons have an extra amount of pressure on every single episodes to bei outstanding. But anyway: only because an episode features creepy creatures, witchcraft and the woods doesn’t make it a classic X-File.
