I really liked Weitz as a guest (despite being that one geek who never felt anything particularly strong either positive or negative about any iteration of Star Wars- I always loved Spaceballs though)- and I like Weitz's work (to some extent) and find some of it to be a bit critically underrated. However, I do feel that, like Dan Harmon (who was also a fine guest) Weitz is overly critical of the masterful episode he guested on, and this would be fine except that in both cases, the implicit basis for the criticism (the fact the person making the criticism can be assumed to Know Their Shit, being an experienced and apparently successful writer or director themselves) does not really hold up under scrutiny, since, as solid as he can be at times as a filmmaker, Weitz does not really take any comparable, outrageous (and rewarding) artistic risks in his work as Glen Morgan and James Wong take in this episode, just as Harmon, brilliant as his writing can be, never did anything that broke as many boundaries for what was possible on TV at the time, as Darin Morgan did with Jose Chung. That is to say, I like Glen Morgan and James Wong themselves very much, indeed I consider them intermittently to exhibit traits of artistic genius, but if they were guesting on a movie podcast about Alfred Hitchcock and finding all kinds of little nitpicky flaws in Psycho as if to say "well I would have done that better/differently", I would take issue with that as well, because, compared to Hitchcock, they (as is almost everyone) are followers, not leaders. Likewise, compared to Glen Morgan and James Wong's innovative and extremely risky, yet artistically confident and successful, work on this particular X-Files episode (if not necessarily their career overall), Weitz has done exactly nothing that compares. This is not a case of "if you can't do better, don't criticize," the problem is Weitz (like Harmon) was not assessing the work in a fair way but rather, WAS constantly implying "I could have done that better." It is not appropriate for mediocre artists to take that stance when dealing with works that had much greater ambitions than their own work usually does. It's easy to find flaws in anything, and it's fine to do that, whoever we are (even if we have never made any movies or TV ourselves, and never will) but if we DO make movies and TV, and the ones we make have a lot of flaws too, it isn't really appropriate to act like we can pass some special form of knowledgeable judgment (stemming from our industry experience) on work that, even if it also may be flawed, actually blows away our own work in every way.

I don't take issue with it in the sense I wish Weitz or Harmon hadn't been honest- I just think we should remember that Weitz is, well, Weitz and Harmon is, well, Harmon. Nobody is going to watch Weitz films- or Harmon's work- in even 10 years, probably sooner than that. Their work will not be rediscovered and assessed, except by scholars of the very particular areas they tread (i.e. scholars of the early 2000s American sitcom will know Community) because it quite simply isn't that great. The X-Files will endure quite a bit longer in global memory, partly because of its wider audiences at its peak, but also partly because it is more rewarding and sophisticated as a work of art, and tells more truths about its times (and indeed in many cases, our times today) than Weitz (or arguably even Harmon) does. I'm sorry to break it to Chris Weitz, but in a few decades, if earth still exists, his upcoming Star Wars film may be the only thing he has done than anyone has even heard of, much less seen. These are cool dudes (well, politically, I am not so sure about Harmon) but not the be all and end all on cinema, and regardless of my partisanship as an XF fan, I would always respect risk taking artworks like Musings- even if they sometimes fail (although this doesn't)- more than safe artworks like those Weitz and even Harmon mostly makes. Weitz did try to do some riskier works (American Dreamz and even The Golden Compass, and In Good Company to an extent) but even these were nowhere near as risky as Musings, and most of the risky works by Weitz were artistic (as well as commercial) failures, at least, they were not as artistically successful as Musings- and Weitz had greater means at his disposal too, in terms of budget (which seems to be an obsession of both these guys, criticizing The X-Files early episodes from its cult period simply because it seems to have a lower budget than their own very expensive and mainstream work) and also artistic freedom, not being subject to as much content censorship or the limitation of 44 minutes. As Weitz correctly noted, the MLK section actually WENT THERE (telling 17 million Americans about FBI complicity in bringing down MLK- whether or not they ultimately pulled the trigger) and (as Weitz did not mention) THIS WAS UNPRECEDENTED and EVEN NOW 19 years later (!!) there has still been no big screen JFK-style treatment of the MLK assassination and possible US government complicity (although Selma- a very recent film as we all know, appearing 18 years after the XF episode- did deal with the FBI letter). It strikes me as odd for the dude who did American Pie (no offense- it's not a bad movie) to be damning the PIONEERING risk taking The X-Files did here, on one of the most pivotal events of the 20th century, with such faint praise, acting like this is only a minor deal, and ignoring also the fact that, on a cinematic level, first-time-director Wong's work, on this extremely risky and complex project, is far more distinguished than most of last years best-director Oscar nominees. Wong was also the first Asian American to be nominated for any of the major directing awards (Emmy, Oscar) and it was for this episode- an episode that directly targets the American military industrial complex and white supremacy, albeit in a brilliantly "problematic" way that it would be legitimate (although in my view- wrong) to take issue with if one was going to seriously analyze the work (it is undeniably "triggering" and not "politically correct"- as are most inspired artistic attempts to examine infinite historical injustices, which are simply impossible to treat respectfully without admitting- as this episode does- that the absurd scale of the injustice exceeds the artist's ability to respond).