For centuries, people have looked up at the night sky in awe, believing
the planets, stars and moons were not merely distant light shining in the firmament,
but rather the eternal source of order in the universe, that if we
could hear the music of the spheres, we could act in accordance with that
order, rather than struggle uselessly against it. Nowadays, the lights of the
city outshine those in the heavens, and that would have been the voice of
reporter Carl Kolchak if we had ever seen the eleventh episode of The Night Stalker
called Ascendant, written by Melissa Blake and Joy Beth Blake, who went on
to do things like Heroes. So hooray, so awesome. Folks. You
remember that show? Oh wait, you tried to forget it. Never mind,
first season was pretty good till that last episode. And it would have
been directed by Dan Sackheim. I am Mike White, and I am joined
as always by Chris Dashe, much to the chagrin of some of you,
I am still here. So, my plastic gray whale friend, let's talk
about Ascending. We're going to talk about a couple episodes of the Night Stalker,
which we never saw, though we saw one of them in a different
shape and form. Let's clarify night Stalker two thousand they talk in two thousand
and five, Yes, very important. We're talking about what ascendant and then
the M word which did get adapted eventually rewrote. Yes, severely. I
don't know how you want to classify. I mean, like it was retooled
into an X Files episode, severely retooled. But let's talk about our magical
disability person when it comes to ascendant. If there's a magical negro trope,
and I'm not saying this to offend anyone, but magical negro is kind of
offensive. Is this the magical retard trope? Yeah, there's got to be
a better word for it, but yeah, magical negroes not much better.
Like that's mildly offensive. And the issue with the sending is is it's pretty
goddamn affect. Yeah, it has not aged well and I'm not sure it
was very on point in two thousand and five, and it was written we're
a few years north. I mean, we're quite a few years north of
Rainman, which really did a lot of damage to the autistic community. We're
a little bit farther when it comes to stuff like what was at Mercury Rising
with Bruce Willis. I mean, there was a whole slate of autism films.
There was a House of Cards and one other that came out right around
the same time. But I mean the original title for Mercury Rising was supposed
to be Simple Simon. That's how far we came was that we knew that
Simple Simon was not a good name for a movie with a kid who is
an autistic person. Well, let's not forget. Also, we're three years
before what is effectively the biggest piss taking out of version of a mentally handicapped
character in the film, which is Ben Stiller at Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder,
where they take the entire piss out of the playing a mentally handicapped person
for an oscar. That whole movie just takes the wind out of the sales
of anyone ever doing that. Again, simple Jack thought he was smart,
or rather didn't think it was retarded, so he can't afford to play retarded
being a smart actor playing a guy who ain't smart but thinks he is.
That's tricky. Hats off of going here, especially No, not Tocademy is
about that ship, about what everybody knows. You never got full retired Dustin
Hoffman, Raymond Luke, retarded, act retarded, not retarded, can't two
picks che your cards artistic shop not retarded. Yeah, time hands for his
gun slow, Yes, retard him. Maybe he braced his own his leg,
but he chimed the pants off next. And they want to pin pong
competition that he't retart it. He was goddamned war hero. You know what,
he retired a war heroes. You don't buy that. As Sean pant
who hasn't one, I am saying, when full retonn whim to hit him,
never go full retond. I know people have varying degrees of reaction to
Tropic Thunder. I think it's about as subversive as Blazing Saddles was for a
lot of reasons. But the whole mentally handicapped character trope kind of died out
after Tropic Thunder because they pretty much condemned Hollywood for what is ostensibly people playing
mentally handicapped characters. And and they did a good I mean again, like
I said, I know a lot of people don't like that movie, but
they did a good job of essentially pointing the finger at Hollywood and saying you
are essentially playing it up so much that it's unrealistic, and that in and
of itself is offensive. And in this episode, it's really offensive because he's
not acting like an a functioning autistic person. This is not temple grand and
this is like just someone who is autistic, and we're just reading it.
I don't even know how it would have been performed well, and that's the
other thing. Well, the thing, the thing I don't know is I
like the person in my mind that I saw playing the character of George in
the script was Glenn Fleschler, who plays the villain in Truth the first season,
a true detective, and he has that kind of quality to him.
But again in that show, he's playing a mentally disturbed character, not a
mentally handicapped character. And so it's just a weird episode to focus on like
a magically handicapped character. And it's like, Okay, it doesn't track.
It's problematic. And I know that's like a word that oh, every yeah,
every snowflake uses this problematic, but it kind of is. And like,
I don't offend easily, I really don't like, nothing really offends me,
and I'm not offended by the script, but it's just his tone deaf.
It's very tone deaf. And this is a literal magical person. This
is not at the end and they're going to say something that will really,
you know, change the main character's mind or something. This really has stuff
to do with magic and the cosmos and stuff. So let's break it down
a little bit. We've got George who is working as a bag boy at
a local grocery store and when there is what is it, Steven is the
guy. There are two guys to kind of overweight, balding slub guys who
are shopping at the same time, and George, when he is bagging up
this guy's groceries, tells him that he's going to die, and sure enough,
the guy dies. He gets killed in the parking lot. But hey,
it was the wrong guy who got killed. It was actually a hit
that went wrong. The guy that was supposed to be killed is the husband
of a woman who has essentially beaten down and paid a hit man ten thousand
dollars to kill her husband. He just killed the wrong fat, overweight,
balding man. So it's one of those like weird X Files episodes. They
have some of those episodes in the X Files where it's like, a supernatural
thing happens, but it's also a fake out because the supernatural thing ends up
not really having any bearing on anything. It just happens to be occurring at
the same time as nefarious things going on, and that's a kind of a
cop out and I don't like it. And then through what somehow the brother
of George gets in the sights of the murderer, the hitman basically, and
then George, I mean, I'm really shortening this down. George manages to
save the day but also gets killed, and he joins his parents, who
he thinks are in heaven and somehow has changed fate, and of course that
really gives Carl quite a little chubby. The big takeaway that I had from
this script is it feels just like every other episode of Nightstalker two thousand and
five that we've watched. Stuart Townsend's version of Colchack comes off just as kind
of aloof and bizarre in this script as he is in the show. So
it's written pretty well if we're keeping with the tone of what we've seen.
But at the same time, it's keeping in tone with what we've seen,
and what we've seen wasn't particularly great. It wasn't as bad as you know,
the torch and pitchfork folks on the Colchack Facebook, what have you believe?
Burn it down, kill it. It's the monster, the Antichrist.
It's not that bad, folks. This script is very much keeping in tone
with everything we've seen from Nights Soccer two thousand and five, So in that
aspect it's a success, but at the same time it's also a massive failure
because what we've seen up until this point is not great. We got pretty
much, i'd say this is Colchack. We get a little bit of Perry,
not very much at all, and then just a hint, just a
hint of Jane McManus in this And again I don't think we've got any sort
of Vincenzo going on in this one. I didn't see Vincenzo at all.
But again, that was another thing we talked about when we were watching the
show, is that Vincenzo is not a character. He's there because Vincenzo was
a character in the original show, and if we don't have him, Colchack
fans will be upset. You guys are missing the point putting the horse before
the wagon big time. But again, it was a quick read. It's
sixty three pages. I would suggest anyone who is a mildly enjoyed the two
thousand and five show to give it a read. You can find it online
with the cursory search. It's not terrible. It's an interesting episode, but
again it's just it's mildly problematic. None of the characters are really interesting,
and the conclusion to the episode is pretty dumb, like just generically stupid.
They don't even have a Carl Colcheck voiceover at the end or else. I
would try to do that TBW to be written. That's right, because there's
there's that last weird page about that has pocket dialogue on it. You know.
The whole thing about George is like I'm going, you know, his
parents are waiting for him. Is kind of the whole thing. So it's
like he's kind of he's kind of fulfilling his purpose. He's stopping he's stopping
the death of his brother, but also he's going to Heaven to see his
parents. It's it's very mushy, it's very sappy, it's very very saccharin
and not great. I wouldn't have been happy had this actually gotten turned into
an episode. And yeah, you're right, I think this was included as
well as the M word. I think both of these were included on the
DVDs of nights Stalk or two two thousand and five, and then just forensically,
there are a lot of revisions in here, but what we're looking at
is just a black and white copy. Though the front page talks about you
know, you've got your yellow pages, your pink pages, your blue pages,
and they're all being written like an early part of November two thousand and
five, and right around that time is when everything starts to collapse for the
night Stalker because the last two episodes that actually aired well, the last episode
that aired was November tenth, and then after that they all started getting dumped
onto iTunes. One November seventeenth, and then the last three in February.
In March of two thousand and six, just dumped. Mike unceremoniously dumped to
it two. Thank you, Thank you for the correction, which takes us
to the next script, the M word, the M word, which so
we've been complaining, I've been complaining this whole time about the lack of charisma
of Stuart Townsend, and I will be frank, I've never seen a movie
performance of his or a TV performance that has given me any hope about this
guy. I mostly know him from his horrific performance in a horrific movie,
which was The League of Extraordinary Gentleman where he was Dorian Gray. Didn't give
me much hope, and then he was in that how was that horrible Aaliyah
movie Queen of the Damned? But yeah, anyway, I've never been a
fan of Stuart Townsend. And here we have Darren Morgan writing the M word
was supposed to be directed by Tony Warmby. So this one, the first
draft is written or dated November eleven, two thousand and five. And like
I said, that's when everything was collapsing on the Night Stalker. Do you
want to try to describe what's going on here? Before I try to explain
what's going on? Like you mentioned, I think I'm going to go out
on a limb here and say that this was an X Files episode from mc
gett go because it's written like one. The charisma that Colchack has in this
episode doesn't feel like Colchack at all. It feels like Fox Molder. He's
jokey and like weirdly humorous, and it's like, what fucking show did you
come from? Because this is not two thousand and five Nights Soccer. I
mean, was that what was supposed to happen here? Was it supposed to
be We're going to do eleven episodes of this guy being a charisma vacuum and
then suddenly we're going to have a joke episode in the middle of this.
I mean, when was the first like funny episode of The X Files,
Like the first purely comedic episode of The X Files. Look, the ones
that I can think about are like X Cops, But that didn't happen until
much later in the show, like season seven type late, like when they
were like, you know what, we can just kind of do whatever we
want at this point, like let's start to kind of experiment with the formula
of the show. This episode was written by Darren Morgan, who worked on
The X Files and who wrote or of the coprophages Jose Chungs from Outer Space,
Clyde Bruckman's final repose, Let's just go out on the record and say,
Darren Morgan wrote the episodes of The X Files. They won Emmy's four.
This feels like and I know, you know, I'm sorry to put
you on the spot, but like, I don't know if jose Chungs was
the first purely comedic X Files, but that is the one that always comes
to mind when it's like, hey, this is a very funny episode,
and that's what this feels like. This feels like jose Chung circa whatever.
Twenty two thousand and five. I misspoke. Season three has wore the Coprophages,
which is a humorous episode. Season three also as Clyde Bruckman's which is
funny. So yeah, season three, not season seven. You put me
on the spot, I misanswered, I'm correcting myself, not letting anyone else
get the chance to do it. Rich assured that I was on the Internet
within minutes registering my disgust throughout the wood. Season three is where Clyde Bruckman
and jose Chung was in that season. I think we're the co Prophages two,
was it? Okay? So yeah, all three and all three written
by the same person, And like I said, they're widely considered to be
some of the best episodes of the show, just like by the fan base.
Like the fan base can agree, jose Chung's from Outer Space is one
of the best, if not the best episode of the show. Clyde Bruckman
is one of the best, if not the best episode of the show.
You will find people making arguments for both of those episodes, and neither camp
is wrong because they're fucking amazing episodes, like genuinely fantastic standalone pieces of television.
And here we are with the same writer and writing this. Maybe they
were just going to pull like a weird bait and switch. Maybe everybody and
then the next day at the water cooler would be saying, wow, did
you see that episode of night Stalker last night? You mean that show Stillon,
Well, yeah, it is still on, and last night they did
something completely different than they haven't any other episode, and it was actually funny,
or an attempt at being funny. That was the thing about this I
don't understand. So, like you mentioned, we did read the script for
The M Word, which they then adapted into Molder and Scully Meet the Wear
Monster, which I liked the title the M Word a lot. I actually
think it's really clever. It's a little on the nose, but at the
same time I like it. And the issue I have with the script reading
through it is because I've seen the episode, I was just reading it as
Molder and Scully. I wasn't reading it as Perry and Colchack, because again,
like you mentioned, it doesn't feel like Perry and Colcheck. It feels
like Molder and Scully. And Darren Morgan, I honestly believe he just couldn't
get out of the idea of if you've got a male and female lead in
a TV show, you couldn't just write them as Molder and Scully because it's
so close in just content of what the show is talking about that it's almost
inevitable that you're just not going to write him that way anyways. And you've
got McManus, Who've got Jane mcmanison here who just doesn't feel like he belongs.
And then this is the closest I've seen Vincenzo actually beat Vincenzo, which
is absolutely bizarre. He's like, you know, chiding Colchack and kind of
goading him on and saying like Colchack under his breath, and Smith is a
fantastic actor. Go watch Mine Hunters mind Hunter season one. He's fantastic in
that show, so I know, and you know if you've seen Mine Hunter
that he actually can bring a level of gravitas to a authority figure. And
again they're wasting him in the night Stalker two thousand and five, but in
the script he's Vincenzo from the original show, updated to two thousand and five.
I like the bit where he has crossed out every single line of colcheck
story and Red Penn it's great. And he also chied him for using the
word monster because only insane people use the word monster or children a fairy tale
is the only time you should be seeing monster in print. His words in
the script. Well, and remember this is kind of a reaction too against
the actual producers of the ABC show, because Frank Spottonitz told us way back
when when we did the very first episode of Nightstocer two thousand and five,
which was they did and want Monster of the Week even though they wanted Monster
of the week and we were not allowed to use the M word. So
that's where a lot of this stuff comes from, is this is basically making
fun of those exacts, and it works like you could It worked and again
the problem though with all of this is when we get to it being adapted
for the X Files, it falls flat. And I don't know why it's
like such a bummer, because I know you're not a huge fan of the
script, but I like the script and I think it works, even if
again, it's almost not coal chack in Perry. I mean, it's not
coal chack in Perry period. It's not that I'm necessarily a fan of the
script or not a fan of the script. It's that I can't see Stuart
Townsend doing No, that's a failure of the scrip. I can see Gabrielle
Union doing this, I can see Cotter Smith doing this. I can see
everybody handling this role. Yeah oh yeah, But I cannot see Stewart Townsend
doing this stuff. I mean, he is making fun of his own character.
Like there's a scene where he is doing the Cole Chack veo that we
have made fun of since day one, and it's him and Jane, and
Jane is just like, are you going to keep doing that? And his
coal check reading into his pocket sized tape recorder, which we've never seen him
use a pocket sized tape recorder, and this whole thing, even though it's
such a big part of the original show, it is a secondary character of
the show. And I was so surprised that the wear Monster is wearing in
the coal chack, the original searsucker suit outfit, and even tries the hand
coal chack the jacket at the end, do you want this jacket? But
no, he doesn't, you know, he turns it down, So it
would have been an even more pointed like, Hey, this is what the
original was, this is what you are, and you kind of suck kind
of thing. Like you said. The failure is not that it's a bad
script. The failure is that it's written for I mean, can you imagine
a Terminator film right where the character of the original Terminator not Terminator T two,
the Terminator where it's a horror movie ostensibly it's a fucking sci fi horror
movie. Is that Terminator is written jokey and like quipping with one liners that
like, and I know he has one liners in the first movie, but
I'm talking about like too humorous to be taken seriously, because there is a
feeling of dread in that first Terminator film, with the Terminator being you know,
a six foot eight Austrian man who could break you in half over his
fucking leg and you know I'll be back at Ocana. I mean a lot
of that is one linery, but I'm talking like straight up comedic bits.
It doesn't track. And that's the way this feels. It's just oddly against
character. It's like if you deep faked Jim Carrey from ace Ventura over Arnold
from Terminator and kept the movie. Everything else was exactly the same, but
you've got ace Ventura doing those those lines and those bits. Yeah, it
doesn't make any sense. It's so weird. But again, the weirder aspect
of this is when it gets adapted for The X Files, which did have
that kind of humorous, witty interplay between Moulder and Scully, which is the
reason any X Files fan watched the show even into the tenth and eleventh season,
which are again they have their own problems. You came back for the
relationship between Molder and Scully and it somehow doesn't work. It's so weird.
So let's talk about Moulder and Scully meet the war Monster, and I will
say right off the bat, I was very happy to see Thailand of being
show up, prizing his role as Stoner from the two previous episodes Quagmire and
more of the copra Phages, which I loved when he showed up in stuff
and I love him. I love everything that he's done that I've ever seen
him in. I mean, Tucker and Dale is fantastic. There's a show
that I've been touting to you for a long time called Dead Last that I
really enjoyed. Really like this guy Reaper. He was fantastic and he's a
classic man. He shows up in this and I was just like, Okay,
this is a nice continuity that this guy is still hanging out in the
woods trying to get high. Dude, that's a good crop. Then it
kind of sets the tone as far as this is going to be a jokey
episode of The X Files, which was weird because at that time we were
reviving the show. We get to finally wrap up some stuff here. You
know, we've got this one last season now that they're doing for us,
not knowing that they're going to do a second got this one last season.
We're going to wrap up stuff. So then suddenly when they do Mulder and
Scully meet the wear Monster, It's like, what the fuck you doing guys,
this feels like filler. But here's the thing, because it's only what
ten episodes, it is filler. And the problem is if it hadn't been
just a limited time engagement or whatever nonsense it was being billed as at the
time. And look, I want to say, I don't remember exactly,
Like I'm pretty sure that this like broke records for viewership at Fox, Like
it was insanely successful for them X Files coming back, and I think everyone's
expectation when it came back with six episodes, not even ten, was that
it was going to be this kind of final reveal of the mythos and the
myth arc and finishing it out right, and then they don't do that at
all. They actually completely fucking destroy all the goodwill that they had built up,
which wasn't very much, to be fair at the end of the season
nine, because season nine is just the mythology. The mythology after the Syndicate
dies at the hands of the alien Boundery Hunters is where I honestly stopped caring
about the mythology for the show, because then they start going to super Soldiers
and nol Roar, And even though I love Adam Baldwin and Lucy Lawless is
great in her time on the show, and I'm sorry if I'm going on
an X Files tangent. We have to talk about the exiles a little bit,
and where this shows up in this kind of grand scheme of the show.
It shows up in a point where they should not have ever put this
episode. It should have been just mythology and talking about their son and the
cigarette smoking man and everything else, and all these things they should have been
focusing on, and instead they put this episode in, which is an interesting
episode, but it's very misplaced in when it aired in the revival of the
show, and it would have been okay if it was a better episode.
Rice Starvey's good, but he's just kind of doing his flight of the Concords
thing. Yeah, I mean there are moments in here. Hallelu I likes
Angela, so seeing her and here was pretty good. The whole idea of
this hotel that they're at, where the guy, the hotel owner can go
behind the walls and spy on people, and when they're doing this back and
forth time thing, when he spies on Fox Molder and he's there in that
little red like junk holder. I was like, Okay, that's funny.
That actually made me laugh, but not very much else. I mean,
there are a couple things, like going back to the comedian episode of the
Twilight Zone revival. We've got our friend who Mail nan Gianni, and he
is in this episode. You know why he's in this episode, right?
No? I don't know why. Okay, so let's pull the casing back
on the sausage. We're podcasters. We're talking about cole check the night Stalker.
The original show. If we we're only talking about that showed the two
thousand and five reboot had never happened, and our podcast was so popular that
it drummed up interest in Kolchak so much that they rebooted the show. We
would be in the show the same way Kumail nan Jianni's in The X Files
his X Files podcast. I listened to that podcast because I'm such a fan
of the X Files. I didn't even know who he was at the time.
He wasn't Kumail nan Jianni of cast in a fucking Marvel movie like he
is now. He was just kumaldan Jianni, stand up comedian and massive fan
of The X Files, and his podcast was so wildly popular, coupled with
the fact that X Files was, at the time on Netflix one of the
most streamed shows that they had. Fox was like, maybe we could get
Molder and Scully back together for one more ride. And because he was so
well known because of his podcast, and then obviously he transitioned into becoming a
much more well known stand up comedian and screenwriter, he was given a role
in this episode and he's awful. He's awful. The only thing I like
about him, and the only other laugh that I got from this really was
at the end when it is revealed that he's the killer and he's done all
these horrible things, which I don't know if that necessarily makes sense with how
this episode is structured, but when they're taking him away and he's like it
all started when I was a child, just uncontrollable urge to torture small animals.
As I got older, I'm compulsion. All right, leave it for
the trial, all right, mother, you see one serial killer seeing them
all, But I have a whole speech prepared that was about it. And
I like that, Gillian Anderson, that Dana Scully is going and doing these
potentially dangerous things on her own and that she is fine both times. She
never becomes a woman in distress. What this episode really reminded me of a
lot other than some of the other or Darren Morgan episodes is Bad Blood,
which was in the fifth season and it had Luke Wilson in it. It's
like an almost Raschamun style episode where you've got Mulder recounting his version of the
events to Skinner, Scully recounting her events version of the events to Skinner,
and it's like very different. So on one of them, Luke Wilson's like
this dashing smalltown sheriff and in Mulder's version, he's like a fucking ocal yokel
hick with like, you know, ridiculous stereotypical hillbilly teeth. That's kind of
what this episode veers into at the end, where it's Rice Darby recounting what
happened, like, oh and then I banged Scully, which I mean that
whole bit is pretty damn funny because Mulder just is like that did deafen?
And I love this idea that Rice Darby is becoming human and he's the monster.
Like so it's it's really clever. It really is like I think we
can agree on how clever it is, and like, the last ten minutes
of the episode are amazing. The final monologue between Molder and the wear Monster
are honestly sublime. They're pitch perfect, They're really well written. They honestly,
if you're a huge fan of the show, that might even bring a
tear to your eye because of you know, Molder at this point is very
disillusioned, and it's kind of like a reaffirmation of his belief in the unexplained.
The first time we see him, he's throwing pencils at the I Want
to Believe poster, which we then find out is Scullies, which was interesting,
right, and then his whole one sided argument that he has with Scully
where he keeps countering and like, I know what you're gonna say, You're
gonna say that, and it just the way that that bounces back and forth.
That's all stuff that was not in that Coal Check script, and I
think that is much better. I think the way the episode was realized was
much better than they would have done it as a Coal Check episode because I
just don't buy Stuart Townsend well and that relationships already baked in and Ducovney.
Ducomny's fucking awesome. Gilly Anderson, She's fucking awesome. So I can see
Ducovney. I've seen Ducovany be funny. Ducovny just on Howard Stern is hilarious.
I mean, just a plain old interview with David Ducovney. He's a
very funny guy, very quick witted. Just watch Californication. His comedic timing
is impeccable. I liked Rise Davies in this, the interplay and then how
they've got Molder in front of the Kim Manners gravestone, which was a nice
thing since Kim Manners directed a couple of these Darren Morgan episodes, So yeah,
that was it was nice. It was a very nice kind of like
homage to those older episodes. But in that time watching this as part of
that package of X Files episodes, I was like, what the hell is
this doing here? This just doesn't fit well. And then the weird thing
is is you know, obviously, like we mentioned, the X Files would
come back for eleventh limited engagement and Darren Morgan would write another episode, the
Lost Art of Forehead Sweat, which he also directed, and he directed this
one. But it's again, it's very much that like poking fun at the
X Files, like that was always the thing that Darren Morgan did that I
loved about his episodes is he deconstructs the show in a way that only he
could be successful at doing, and he subverts your expectations in a way that
feels earned and it's smart, and it's not like he subverts your expectations by
subverting them even more than you thought they could be subverted. And that's why
Darren Morgan's episodes were such a joy to watch because when you knew you were
when you sat down and saw that Darren Morgan's name was the writing credit for
the episode, you knew it was going to be something special. You knew
that it was going to be an episode that was truly going to be great
or different or heartfelt in a way that a lot of the other episodes aren't.
And like I said, that final back and forth with Molder at the
end of this episode is really heartfelt and it does kind of hit me down
in my heart of like an X Files fan, like what it means to
be a fan of the show, or what it means to be a fan
of supernatural things and you know, kind of believing in in metaphysics and the
supernatural and the paranormal, and so it kind of hits me there in a
way that I didn't expect it to. But at the same time, it
doesn't have any place here. It just doesn't. And that's the unfortunate part.
It gets your written the field, so it does. It kind of
does in a way that I wasn't expecting the X Files too. But then
you also have the scene with the transgender woman and that's really not great.
It's actually kind of weird because it's like twenty sixteen and it's fucking tone deaf.
Well that it was written originally in two thousand and five, I mean,
because that doesn't really change. That's pretty close to what that I know,
And that's the bad part. Well, and then she had a worse
name. What was her name, like baby doll or baby and then yeah,
that that line of the war monsters like she can change from man to
a woman, and it's like, oh, it was bad. And then
he goes like moldres is, no, you have to have your generals.
He's going, I'll keep that, Like did you guys film this thinking this
was like gonna be funny because it's kind of cringey. But other than that,
I mean it's a fairly fun episode. But again, like you said,
if the ultimate exercise here was to write a episode of Coal Check two
thousand and five, boy, failure upon failure and then failure some more,
I can't see it having ever happened. I mean, maybe, you know,
maybe we've been completely surprised. We've been like, oh wow, yeah
that's hilarious, and maybe I'll stick with this night stock or reboot, and
wow, maybe it'll be fantastic. No, well, it would have been
funny, it would have been interesting, but the problem is is it wouldn't
have made any sense with everything we've seen up into that point. He would
have just been like, who the fuck show is this? Like, what
show is this? All of a sudden, this is not Cold Check.
This is some other show that's more expertly written. This is the X Files.
That's true what it said. You know what, I'm like, this
is just the X Files. Well I just watch that, just change the
channel. Because it was still on at the time. X Files had been
off for four years at that point, oh ended in May two thousand and
two, so we left it up to y'all the listeners about what you wanted
us to do for the next show after cole Check. And obviously Kat's out
of the bag because y'all picked it. We're doing Barney Miller. But a
lot of y'all mentioned The X Files, And since this is pretty much going
to be my last opportunity to talk about The X Files on the Cold Check
tapes, I do want to say that as a fan of The X Files,
I am one of those conflicted fans who loves the show deeply. It
is probably still my favorite show ever to air on television. The interplay between
Dicovny and Anderson is sublime. It's perfect. They are, in my mind,
a perfectly cast group of characters. You got Walter Skinner, Mitch Pelegie,
William B. Davis's a cigarette smoking man. I mean, you know,
Crycheck. I mean everything about the show is great. I love it
to death. It came out at a perfect time, but it is one
of those shows that, like coal Check, it should never have come back.
Even if I didn't like the way it ended, which I didn't and
a lot of fans didn't, it came back and didn't justify its return.
What I'm getting at here is the thing that everybody talks about Coal Check two
thousand and five is that it's not good. But the issue isn't that it's
not good. It didn't justify it coming back. It didn't give us a
reason to carry that it came back. And that's the problem with all of
these reboots or returns of shows. I mean, that's like so popular now
is you have to give the people a reason to want to watch more of
the show outside of just getting to see the characters again. And with Coal
Check, they didn't do enough to justify it. And like the X Files
those two seasons, they didn't do enough to justify it, and honestly,
they did more harm than good to the mythology. So off my soapbox,
word underneath the table. That's the last time I'm talking about the X Files
on this podcast. Oh, I'm sure you'll find a way to work at
end over the next couple of weeks. Can't. There's no way there.
I'm done. What happens if you bring it up over the next couple episodes
where we're wrapping up the original it'll be a passing mention, but it won't
be that. It will be that was me. I mean, because that
whole thing with the wear Monster like it really is indicative of coal Chack two
thousand and five and the X Files return as well, because they're inexorably length
now, because that was originally going to be a coal Jack episode. That's
why Bryce Davies is wearing that Colchack outfit. That's why he is dressed like
that. Even though the original wear Monster would have been dressed like that.
That just doesn't make sense, sure, I mean again, it was kind
of taking the piss out of it, you know. Yeah, well the
original script was. But then like, it doesn't make a whole lot of
sense in the X Files episode other than like if you were sly enough to
catch on that this was originally a Colchack episode, yeah, because otherwise he
would have been like, well, why is he dressed like that? And
that's why I was saying it, unless it's like, oh, well,
Colchack influenced the X Files, which obviously it did. But yeah, before
I knew that this was originally an episode of night Stalker two thousand and five,
I had no idea why he was dressed like that. And that's and
that is again a weird thing about the way that the script got made and
then re edited into a X Files episode. It's like some weird idiosyncrasies stuck
around that don't work anymore, like him being dressed up like Colchack, and
it's like, so, I mean again, for us, it's iconic,
and for a certain generation it's iconic. But another generation people, why the
fuck is he dressed like this? He's dressed like us, a reporter from
the seventies. Why Yeah. Next month we will be back with our Wow,
it's not our final episode of the show, and we still have a
couple more after that, but our final discussion of an actual episode of cole
Chack the Century, and after that we will do a couple more episodes where
we talk about things like Colcheck and other mediums. You know, he appeared
in a form in a tomb of Dracula. There's a whole series of books,
comics, all kinds of stuff. And if those fine folks over at
Moonstone Publishing want to finally fucking get back to us, maybe we'll have an
interview with them, and maybe we'll try to help you pimp some of their
books. Colcheck, the character of original col Check Darren McGavin's Cold Check has
been lovingly kept alive by a fair number of people, and to you,
I say thank you for keeping the character alive because two thousand and five show
didn't do a very good job of doing No. No, nobody's doing fan
fiction about the Stewart Townsend version. Again, with the overwhelming response that we've
gotten from the culture back fan pages, they don't even want us to talk
about it. So sorry, sorry, but we did well. We did,
we got We got to do our due diligence, as they would say,
and give it all a fair shake. And that's why we sprinkled these
throughout because I think we kind of would have gone crazy had we just concentrated
on the two thousand and five. Can you imagine doing a podcast on just
the two thousand and five. It's almost like it would be just a one
season show. That'd be kind of nuts. So, Chris, what are
you up to? These stays? So I actually run a podcast Cold the
one season show with my good friend Jess byired Her and I talk about shows
that only lasted one season. If we hadn't done Cold Check, the Night
Stalker or the original show on this we probably would have done it there,
so I do that with her. And then I also have my own podcast,
cold the Culture Cast, where I talk about movies once to twice a
week, depending on if a new movie has come out of value. We
just did an episode on It chapter two, which I heard is Mike's new
favorite film of all time, best horror movie have you ever written? And
I also do a podcast with you and our good friend father Malone called Dreams
for Sale, and I do a podcast with him called Chronicles from the Crypt
about shockingly tales from the Crypt. So that is what I do when I'm
not here. What about you, Mike? What do you do when you're
not here? I like to go to the range and do target practice.
You like movies about gladiators? Oh, Billy? Do I ever? And
Yeah? Then I do a podcast called The Projection Booth, which you can
find out Projection Booth podcast dot com, where every episode we're looking at a
different movie, which most of the time you haven't heard of. Sorry,
so big thanks to John Walker for providing our theme music. Big thanks everybody
for listening. Stick with us over these next few episodes, and then return
to this feed for listening to our whole discussion of Barney Miller, and thank
you, by the way, for everybody who actually knows who Chris and My
Car on our Facebook group? Why what a weird? What a weird conversation
of that one? Whoa who are Chris and Mike? Oh God? I
feel that I can say whatever I want to about that guy because I don't
think he's listening to the podcast. You know. I think that's a safe
bet considering how you know, he asked who Chris and My Car? Sometimes
I wonder who we are Chris. Sometimes I wonder, deep in our hearts,
who are we really? Sometimes I look up in the night sky and
I see the stars, and I wonder, are those just blinking gases of
light? Where is there more in this universe? Um um um give m
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