THE X-FILES The Collector’s Set

Mulder and Scully go high-def

released OUT NOW! 1993-2002 | 18 | Blu-ray Creator Chris Carter Cast Gillian anderson, david duchovny, Mitch Pileggi, William B davis, annabeth Gish, robert Patrick

The thought that there could be people reading this review who weren’t even born when The X-Files’ first episode aired on 10 September 1993 inspires horror. Because the idea of anybody not having seen the series, and not understanding just how goddamn important it was in terms of sci-fi history – hell, television history – is too hideous to contemplate.

The X-Files was like nothing that had been seen on prime time US TV before. Sure, there’d been a few shows to inspire it – Kolchak, The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks – but there was something about the way creator Chris Carter took a police-procedural format and injected fantasy into it that made everything look different. The X-Files wasn’t a cop show; it wasn’t a supernatural show. It was an amalgam of both genres. Today, we see this kind of series on the box all the time, but back then it was extraordinary.

Then there were the characters: Gillian Anderson’s sceptical Scully, ready to pooh-pooh any UFO sighting or werewolf kill, and David Duchovny’s laconic, driven Mulder, king of the one-liners, who lost his sister to aliens as a kid. The show lost a lot of oomph when both actors scaled down their roles in later seasons, replaced by Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish, but the quality of the scripts never waned despite the loss of their charms.

Then there were the monsters: hundreds of the buggers, all weirder than the last, sucking brains or infecting innocents with hideous diseases, grossing out audiences who had yet to see a corpse on CSI. The X-Files was a blast. It was funny, gory, thoughtful, complicated, silly, scary and even sexy, and changed television forever. If you haven’t seen it you really should.

If you have, whether or not you want to buy this box set may depend on how much of a purist you are. In some instances it’s