The Lone Gunmen: All About Yves Rewatch

August 27, 2020 8:07 PM - Season 1, Episode 13

In the series finale, the Gunmen team up with Morris Fletcher, the sleazy Man in Black from X-Files: Dreamland, to find the person who stole the list of false flag operations. The cliffhanger ending is resolved in X-Files: Jump the Shark.

Fandom, IMDB trivia

posted by porpoise (3 comments total)

These poor guys. The series wasn't terrible, or even bad, but I felt like the creators made a lot of not-great decisions in an effort to make the show more mainstream. I remember wishing the tone had been more like it was in the pilot, where the characters were nerds with a comic edge but they also felt grounded. There was an element of real pathos to these guys on The X-Files, we could laugh at their childish squabbling but there was something noble and sad about their lonely, nerdy crusade. All of that was pretty much gone from this show, which was mostly comedic without a lot of depth or heart. Jimmy was OK but he was only OK, and Yves felt like a rather contrived cool/sexy babe type. If this show had played more like the pilot, or more like TLG episodes from The X-Files, I think it would have been better... But I'm not sure if it would have found an audience then, either. TLG were fan faves for a reason, but I don't know if there was any way to turn this into the kind of hit show Fox was looking for. No matter what you did to it, it would still be a show about three emotionally immature, not-conventionally-attractive nerds lurking in a shadowy hideout and arguing about conspiracies and Star Trek. I guess I can't totally blame Fox for looking at that and saying, "Uh, could we maybe throw in some big, cute guy who can get in fistfights and stuff? And maybe a badass Lara Croft type?" We're lucky they didn't get some cute robot sidekick who'd fart a lot.

I did think it sucked how The X-Files brought these characters back just to kill them off. That felt like the show's creators venting some bitterness at both Fox and the audience. "You didn't like our spin-off? Well, fine, now these guys are all dead! Happy now?" Then poor Langley returned as some kind of cyber-ghost in The X-Files reboot show and we kind of left him there in his weird digital purgatory, making his sad fate even sadder. I think their last appearance (probably ever) was in Mulder's bizarre mushroom hallucination. They truly deserved better. I hope The X-Files comes back in some form and these guys can return somehow. I'd hoped that digital Langley could be reunited with cyber versions of Frohike and Byers, so they could all exist together online. That felt like where the story was heading, but we never got to see it.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:34 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

In the end, I can't believe that the producers were so deluded as to consider that they might get renewed and needed 'Jump the Shark' like 'Millenium' needed the season 7 episode 'Millenium.'

+1 Ursula Hitler. Using the tone and style they adopted fell really flat. Almost any other approach would have been better. This ultimately ended up being grating, and it played that way when it first aired.

robot sidekick who'd fart a lot

But we got TLG's super annoying caricature friends. So much toxic masculinity and casual racism. It's not funny, it's horrifying. Also, punching down.

The Laura Croft Type was played pretty damned earnestly by Zuleikha Robinson, and I'm glad she went on to a solid career.

Stephen Snedden never had a chance with the Big Cute Guy given the material he had to work with.

The music for the entire series was decent. The car chase through a blocked off and deserted Gastown felt like the last fond goodbye to Vancouver for the franchise.

Did end up kind of enjoying the stunt of bringing Morris Fletcher back, and the cheesiness of the abduction.

I'm divided by the homophobia-related humour in the Mulder cameo, but the characters are not judgemental and it's solely in the viewer's court. It's mostly Mulder being Mulder to amuse himself and Jimmy is a total innocent.

There is an awkwardness to that scene that rings true. In the BBS days, arranging first in-person meets having no idea what the other people look like. Hell, even Mefi meetups in the early days I remember the mild awkwardness and the modest stigma around meeting 'strangers' from the internet." Nowadays, it's the standard way of deciding which internet 'stranger(s)' to physically meet and how to go about doing so.
posted by porpoise at 8:14 PM on August 28, 2020

This rewatch flew by faster than I could keep up but I cannot let the discussion end without saying how kickass the show’s theme song is. It’s been on my playlist since I downloaded it as a low quality WAV back in 2001 in college and put it in my little 64 MB pocket MP3 player that I won from a Coca-Cola contest.
posted by Servo5678 at 3:11 AM on August 29, 2020 [2 favorites]