Every Episode of The X-Files, Ranked From Worst to Best

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Now that the return of The X-Files is upon us, it’s the perfect time to revisit all nine seasons and 202 episodes* of the original series before we’re thrust back into the world of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (and Walter Skinner and John Doggett and, yes, Monica Reyes). In the ’90s, there was no better place to get a dose of conspiracy paranoia and nutty sci-fi, not to mention butterflies in your stomach watching David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson’s tension build. At its heart, the series was about confronting the darkness within ourselves — you know, the crippling doubt of the unknown, the fear of what’s to come. It just used aliens and monsters to explore that in a way that decades later, still resonates with viewers.

As a refresher course for the series we all fell in love with, and then slowly fell out of love with in later seasons, only to love once again once nostalgia kicked in, I’ve ranked every episode. These rankings are based on numerous factors: enjoyability, chemistry of the leads, scariness of the monsters, and effectives of the jokes, to name a just few things (obviously technical factors are at play too). There are a lot of episodes of this show, so try your best to wade through through the downright awful ones (or just skip them, where I’ve suggested).

That said, it’s best to be forewarned that while the post-Mulder episodes of the series aren’t spectacular pieces of television, I find season eight incredibly underrated (and miles better than season seven, where David Duchovny seems as bored as all of us were at that point), and I actually like not only John Doggett, but Monica Reyes, too. Please don’t stop reading. Since every episode is available on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, you, too, can revisit the series and decide for yourself. The rebooted X-Files premieres as a six-part mini-series starting January 24 on Fox.

* There were 202 episodes of The X-Files, but for the purposes of this list, I considered two-part episodes a single entry. This equals 182 entries.