Just got to Season 6, Episode 1 and...

The problem with The Beginning (the worst mytharc to date at that time- the shark-jump for the mytharc) and season six and onward has almost nothing to do with the climate or the scenery in California. It does have to do with the fact they had a crew and writers in Vancouver who knew what the hell they were doing, whereas they fired or replaced most of those guys when they moved to LA. The same exact thing could have happened in reverse, if the show had started in California and then moved to BC, but as it stands, what happened is that it moved the other way, and any kind of movie of this nature, which was already unprecedented for TV shows then, was even more difficult because they were making a theatrical movie (also completely unprecedented for a show that eas still on the air) at the same time. To make matters worse, all the good or even decent writers were fired after season five, apart from one good writer you may know, Vince Gilligan, and he was working below his creative capacity in season six and on (as compared with either his first four years on X-Files in Vancouver, or his later career making Breaking Bad), because he was a relatively slow writer and was being asked to contribute a huge number of scripts each season to make up for other writers' ineptitude, which meant he needed to collaborate with other (weaker) writers, and was increasingly rushed even on his solo episodes. Meanwhile the visuals of the show suffered because the new cinematographer Bill Roe, while very technically gifted, did not understand the show's unique, unlike-other-modern-movies-and-TV "visual storytelling" the way it had been understood by those who had been working on the show for a long time, and Roe introduced a flashy, brash, mainstream blockbuster style visual obviousness that was detrimental to the suggestive, creepy vibe that had given the show a sense of artful mystery. And the acting performances also became more obvious, because instead of casting up and coming actors and unknowns, often from Canada, who may not have been particularly career-motivated and flashy, they were casting LA-based scenesters and starlets and an increasingly they were casting already-famous faces, which introduced a sense of cynicism and wink-wink to every guest performance, whereas that was previously limited to a few comedy episodes intentionally exploring a self-reflexive mode.

The way the climate of LA affected everything was more about the commercial climate than the physical climate. When they did occasionally get around to making classic, tense and moody episodes in season six, these episodes- Drive and Field Trip above all- made use of sunny locations in an eerie and effective way. There is no reason they couldn't have done this in every episode, if the writing, performances and cinematography had been up to par. Most of the work of David Lynch, who practically invented the moody and eerie qualities of Vancouver-era X-Files, was actually shot in Los Angeles and nearby, just like season six and onward X-Files. Even Twin Peaks, which is famously Pacific Northwestern in its setting, only shot its pilot in rainy, foggy Washington state, all the rest of the show was done in LA. As episodes like Milagro and Millennium showed, it was actually possible to replicate (although not as well as in Vancouver) a foggy, forested look if they wanted. The problem with those episodes was that they weren't as well written or as well shot as the better ones in the same vein that had been done in BC, but that was about the quality of creative talent on the show and the commercial climate in LA that could be (for a creator as uncertain and lax in his showrunning as Carter) detrimental to doing art. The problem was not about the climate of the place being not moody or not scary- even the pure sunshine can be very scary. Just watch Lynch's Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and try to say you can't make moody and scary stuff in LA. In fact, Mulholland was originally being shot around LA as a Tv show during the exact same time season six X-Files was in production- yet the differences could not be more extreme. Mulholland is one of the creepiest, weirdest and moodiest things ever made. Just watch the famous five minute Winkies scene on Youtube or Vimeo- it takes place entirely in bright LA sunshine, no violence (or sex) is even shown in it (so they could've done it on X-Files for sure if they wanted) and it's probably the scariest scene in the history of movies.

/r/XFiles Thread