region 2 DVD. pub: 20th Century Fox F1-0GB 19778MDVD. 7 DVDs 1100 minutes 25 episodes with extras. Price: £ 9.90 (UK) if you know where to look) stars: David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

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One thing that struck me when watching the second season of 'The X-Files' again was that although it's now thirteen years old, it still hasn't lost any of its power. Either we're still all hungry for conspiracies or its exposing a deep paranoia in ourselves. With so much SF and horror based shows on the box now, there is also the likelihood that a new generation coming up might actually have missed these stories, no doubt because they were sent to bed become it came on the box.

It's interesting watching the talks with the directors from this season's extras that it was only here that they realised they had something special. Rather wryly, this is also the first time for several of them to put faces to the names. This is also the season that brought the two-part 'Colony'/'End Game' that introduces Samantha Mulder as multiple human/alien hybrid clones and the start of the mythology getting deeper that perpetuates through the next eight seasons. Saying that, the series also invigorates itself with continuity.



With the end of Season One, FBI agents Mulder and Scully find the X-Files section closed and themselves reassigned. Scully to teacher in pathology and Mulder doing the most mundane cases. He gets in trouble for getting involved in cases he shouldn't as well being put on cases he thought otherwise shouldn't concern him. After Scully is kidnapped by Duane Barry and becomes an alien abductee, Mulder's boss, Assistant Director Walter Skinner (actor Mitch Pileggi), re-opens the X-Files seeing this as the only way to upset the people behind the scenes. More so, as an agent, Alex Krychek (actor Nicholas Lea) had been put into assist Mulder and done serious damage to solving the case.

Scully's eventual return is an interesting examination of life-after-death symbolically with her being cast adrift in a small boat before regaining consciousness. With them both back working together, the series gets into the real swing with some superb episodes like 'Dod Kalm' on board an abandoned freighter to 'Humbug' at a rest home for people who used to live as circus freaks exhibits. It would take longer to describe all these stories but 'The X-Files' is one of those shows where everything pulled together and made it work and shows how ground-breaking it was at the time. It certainly showed and paved the way for many series that was to follow showing that a world-wide audience had a taste for horror on television once again.

The extras are rather sparse until the seventh disk which then tends to make up for it with assorted mini-interviews and such. If you're up on the series none of these should be much of a surprise although I hadn't realised that the community in 'Our Town' were all named after cannibals. If you're transferring your video collection over to DVD, then don't forget this boxset.

GF Willmetts