User reviews

After the previous season and a half of character departures, character introductions, retooled mythology, and unyielding darkness and despair, "Lord of the Flies" feels like a deliberate attempt to recapture the lightheartedness and simplicity of a certain subset of pre-Doggett episodes. It would have felt right at home in season 6; the storyline of a misunderstood teenager whose unusual powers alternately empower and complicate his unrequited love for an unsuspecting girl would nestle snugly alongside an episode like "The Rain King."

The cast is pretty good for this one, even if Erick Avari is underutilized as the coroner. Michael Wiseman is a standout as the smarmy, pompous Dr. Rocky; his cocky flirtation with an unreceptive Scully finally gives brilliant comic straight (wo)man Gillian Anderson something to do other than shout about her baby and pine over the lost Mulder. (What that woman could do simply by raising an eyebrow...) Look for future TV stars Jane Lynch and Aaron Paul as a well-meaning single mother and a high school bully with a frat-boy mentality, respectively.

Late television director Kim Manners handles the teleplay's uneven tone deftly, imparting the same understated quality to the humor that brought many a Darin Morgan and Vince Gilligan script to life with such grace. As a prolific veteran of the show, Manners crafts an episode that feels familiar, and very much welcome amidst the inexorable momentum of the unceasingly tense Super Soldiers storyline. On its own, "Lord of the Flies" is by no means a great episode, but in the context of the 9th season it is a pleasant diversion.

High School boys deal with killer flies.

I generally go for the more goofy X-File shows, like this one, that spend less time in the deadly serious FBI office and more time out and about with sort some sort of weird creature/person/thing. Lord Of The Flies begins like no other X-File episode ever made, in fact for a second I thought I put the wrong DVD in my machine, then we see the ugly sight (perhaps too ugly for child viewers) of a dead boy. We soon find out that flies are the enemy this week.

This hour, or this 42 minutes, can't really be called a classic, and I do miss Mulder, but it held my attention and there was something wonderfully retro about it...I think it reminded me of some 1950s creature feature I can't place in my memory right now. Maybe a touch of Irwin Allen's The Swarm (1978)?

Lord Of The Flies is well worth a look.

Doggett and Reyes investigate a shocking discovery after A high school lad dies when a Dirty Sanchez style prank goes wrong.

I can imagine the script for this being devised, the writing team sat in an Office, discussing how to get a Dirty Sanchez themed storyline in, and the Office is full of flies, the conversation, how to link the two.

Not a favourite, but has some points of interest, and not just the appearance of Aaron Paul. It's the first comedy oddball episode of Series 9, and overall it's not bad, it's better than some of the previous ones, overall the words I'd use, is weird, it's just plain old weird.

I thought Michael Wiseman was very amusing as Rocky Bronzino, a name that's perhaps better suited to a heavyweight boxer, not a horny entomologist.

In the previous episode we had an outcast with an overbearing mother, and we have exactly the same here, ten minutes after watching I can still hear Mrs Lokensgard nagging.

6/10.

This was a very 'campy' and goofy episode! It felt like the direction & writing was a whole different team.

I enjoyed it, but it just didn't pull off the 'charm' aspect of cult or camp material.

Very 'different' episode, that misses the mark on the conclusion as well.

The X-Files is one of my favorite shows. I've watched it from the beginning and have seen every episode. A top-notch episode is comparable to a four-star movie (Triangle, Dod Kalm, X-Cops), but unfortunately, the worst episodes make me want to stuff the DVD hole with m80s and toss it like a frisbee (First Person Shooter, Space, Herrenvolk). Lord of the Flies, one of the series' final episodes, is perhaps the most unwatchable episode there is. Thing is, I really wanted to give this episode a shot. Season Nine didn't turn out to be anything great, but I think it turned out better than most people say it did. And this episode happened to focus partially on one of my favorite songwriters, Syd Barrett. Unfortunately, the writing is atrocious and cheesy. It seems as though it's intended to be a tongue-in-cheek episode, which also happens to be my favorite X-Files variety, but the artistic merit is lost when we're supposed to find ourselves sympathizing with characters that act sporadically and often break up the mood when they try to be taken seriously. Overall, this is up there with First Person Shooter for the worst X-File ever made.