Spooky Cops: From Buffy to The X-Files | Copaganda Episode 7 

Correction: at 31:15 these shots are from Grimm not from Buffy, my tag got all messed up :(

Can't wait! A video about how we portray cops to kids sounds really interesting and it's definitely not an excuse for me to stare at cute animated dogs for a while.

I can't wait to see how you take us from Paw Patrol to existential terror

Darn that's that episode I been waiting for

I just join your Patreon just for Paw Patrol

I mean, if you think about it Buffy is a perfect candidate on paper. She has generally poor grades and a history of violence. They want people who aren't smart enough to question orders and are willing and able to hurt people. She's perfect (on paper, at least).

Which is hilarious because she solves most of her problems with violence.

​@@pn2294somewhat more justified when dealing with literal demons from hell as opposed to brown people (understatement)

Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart are alright with me!

@@Thor-Orion they’re assholes.

Taking help from friends being a stand-in for working with the community (imho). Remember the season 6 finale where Xander "talking" saved the world. Powerful metaphor.

Best comment

Also Faith doesn’t just break bad, she does so while letting authorities become her father figure. That was extra creepy and excellent foreshadowing but yeah Buffy took many opportunities to paint law and law-aligned groups as the bads.

The early RPG series Ultima has a great take on this kind of plotline. In Ultima IV, your character, the Avatar, has to retrieve the sacred Codex from the depths of the underworld, so you descend into the abyss, find the Codex, kill the demons guarding it and take it back to the surface. Yay! Happy ending! Fast-forward to Ultima VI, and the land is invaded by a massive army of demonic-looking Gargoyles, hell-bent on killing the Avatar. Initially, it seems like standard fantasy fare, but when you do a little digging you find out that the Gargoyles are only invading because they're desperate. They were happily minding their own business until some asshole broke into their most sacred temple, killed all the worshippers inside and stole their holy book. Now their species is dying, and the only way to save themselves is to fulfill a prophecy by retrieving the Codex and sacrificing the person who stole it. It's a great bait and switch. The "always chaotic evil others" weren't all chaotic evil at all, and you accidentally started a devastating religious war by treating them like they were.

Always irritated me that Supernatural never delved into the cops/government dealing with the supernatural stuff. Instead of just...being super oblivious or dying to them.

good view

Problem with the zombie episode you mentioned is that it tries to end on some sort of "morally ambiguous" note by being like "well the zombies were bad....but crime went down!" Like... wtf? It really didn't if you count all the assaults the zombies were committing at random. It could have been a strong episode but they botched it big time. EDIT: Spelling

@@galactic85 yeah, that was definitely some nonsense devil's advocate shit. I think the episode's relevance is more than was intended from a very white show in the early 00's

Yeah...then Kate tried to kill herself. Hurmm

It's literally the wolf/sheep/sheepdog worldview that Dave Grossman professes. Did the writers of these cop shows attend killology sermons too??

@@guy-sl3kr fiction is great. The problem comes when people take it too literally and start thinking the same rules apply in real life. "If I kill people it's OK because I'm just like Buffy and I'm killing subhuman monsters!" The fact that people are seemingly unable to distinguish between a fictional evil like vampires and real life criminals is just disgusting.

I've just found this channel, and I've seen the videos on Brooklyn 99 and Veronica Mars. I'm glad you said it didn't ruin Buffy, because as my all-time favourite show ever, and one that's got me through some tough times (e.g. heavy relation to S6), I would have skipped this video if I thought it was just going to end up trashing it.

If you watched the revival seasons, it turns out it was just one white dude on an ego trip

so damn true

Although in light of recent Revelations by the US military to the Congress, the Extra-Terrestrial Invasion scenario is looking just as credible.

@@iwanttobelieve2 revival never happened u must of dreamed that. xfiles ended season 6 and thats where it definitely ended and nothing after that

@@stuck_around I wish

Agreed. I can't tell if the decline in quality as the seasons stretched on was really that intense, or if I was simply getting too old to take it seriously anymore, but god I loved this show when I was in high school.

​@@robbiesmith8055 I'm with you. I stopped caring about the crappy SFX very early on. It's a show that easily suspends disbelief.

@@robbiesmith8055 honestly the monster of the week slowly becoming less prominent is probably the cause. The actual overarching plot was pretty terrible.

@@logansmith2703 I actually felt that the further it went, the less I cared about the monster of the week and the more I just wanted the plot to move faster. It's just that once I got to season 5 and it was suddenly clear how dumb the plot was getting, the more duped I felt.

Yeah. It was a paradox, wasn't it? Like...the lore was so idiotic, and also so compelling. It baffles me to this day.

You can see the same thing happening now as people are quick to defend our police state because we have a polite fascist in office instead of a rude fascist

@@guy-sl3kr Sometimes it feels the two parties came together and decided to run the country like a wrestling show. Right now the GOP is the heel but it might switch in a decade or 2.

@@sjbrooksy45 "Hey this one side is literally trying to kill all of your friends while the other isn't" "AHA THEY ARE BOTH EQUALLY BAD I AM SO SMART"

@@Shadewaltz Dumping money into the police and military while ignoring healthcare, worker's rights, and wealth disparity is completely bipartisan. If you think democrats are substantially different from republicans then please look at how much we're currently spending on war as compared to literally anything else.

​@@Shadewaltz if you dug a bit deeper than twitter and infographics you'd understand how your libshit take is laughable. but sure Biden is a super super good guy who doesn't harbour any bad beliefs and will singlehandedly save every minority.

Americans in a nutshell. Everything outside their small world, which contains only the United States, is either hostile or unimportant.

to elaborate on the Wesen pronounciation: If its pronounced like in the video they're putting the stress on the wong syllable. its kinda like pronouncing taco tuh-COE. Anglos are weird about grimm tales in general tho, thank god they only ruined the most basic ones ( we have gez sponsored modern fairytales to ruin more obscure ones on our home turf)

@@bortsimpson9308 Leave GEZ alone. It's the cllosest thing we have to content creators getting financed without the biggest spender calling the shots.

I found the words weird and the pronounciation ... but I imagined that a) the word were very old archaic forms and b) they had been mangled by people living in the US (and elsewhere) a couple of generations.

This is reminding me of the episode of Supernatural that dealt with the "pagan deity Sam Hain" it hurt so much.

To be fair though Angel's cover of Mandy is the stuff of true evil

Yeah, Angel even talks to Kate (the cop) about how all bad things (demons) are bad things. Some are just a different species than you, living completely assimilated in the world. Later in the show they even devote a whole episode to that point

​@caitlyncarvalho7637 ... my take is "all spooky cop shows are urban fantasy, but not all urban fantasy is spooky cop shows". So "Bewitched" & "Sabrina The Teenage Witch" are arguably urban fantasy, but wouldn't fall under the perview of videos like this re. "spooky cop" shows as copaganda.

@caitlyncarvalho7637There are plenty of urban fantasy stories that aren't spooky cops. (Granted, spooky cops predominate in live-action television, but urban fantasy is multimedia.) - American Gods - Good Omens - The Magicians - Brand New Cherry Flavor - Baccano!/Durarara!! - Scott Pilgrim - Hilda - etc - Honorary mention to Doctor Who who is or isn't a spooky cop depending on the episode

Yeah, I think Angel is really being slept on, particularly for its influence on "Spooky Cop Shows TM" going forward. Buffy borders on being a slice of life show for a lot of its run time because its about a person given an incredible, life changing ability and primarily struggling with just how to grow up and be an adult and make life work. Angel opens a detective agency and is repeatedly the lynchpin to saving society because he's a good monster with the best intentions. Also, not related, but Lorne is best boy and must be protected and preserved at all costs.

Angel improved when he left

@@mattgilbert7347 agreed.

Greenwalt never wrote for the X Files, he was a co-executive producer.

@@maxkproductions Um, you know IMDB exists, right? Greenwalt co-wrote “Synchrony” (Season 4, Episode 19) with Howard Gordon.

@@musicalnotextr i checked on imdb, i didn’t see him credited as a writer. that/ both my bad and the site’s PC interface!!

Or how that’s good. So many show are like “some spooky cops kill the monsters but we only look them in a cell with standing room only that they’ll be in forever see we’re good spooky cops”.

Indeed, and I've seen the obsessively punitive approach become increasingly popular over time too, despite y'know the scientific evidence that there are much better ways to handle justice.

it is tv

This goes along with superhero media constantly asserting that killing the bad guys, in any situation, is wrong. And then regularly dishing out literal fates worse than death. Their whole concept of morality is based on justifying the endless reuse of villain characters. No matter how absurdly unrealistic it gets. The Joker would have been, legally, gunned down by the GCPD years ago.

Sometimes the monster escapes and gets killed anyway.

You did not hear wrong, sadly.

Buffyverse comics are terrible all around. I'd like to think they don't exist

@@jaguarking2892 Making Dawn and Xander a couple was such a stupid idea. I actually liked Dawn. She didn't DESERVE THIS!!!!

​@@eamonndeane587no one deserves xander

I mean, the whole overarching plot of Angel is them drifting further into moral greyness as they pursue rewards from the system for saving people. They're literally a paid PI service charging people - even if they often wave or reduce their fees, and Angel is pretty invested for awhile in the idea that if he's a Good Enough Boy he'll make up for all the murder and crimes against humanity and get made into a Real Boy and have his vampirism cured by divine intervention. Later on, they're directly contrasted to the Scoobies who have to work day jobs on top of the world saving and do it because it's right rather than for a reward. It then finishes up by going reallllly hard on criticizing the idea of reforming corrupt systems of power instead of destroying them, making the whole final season a lesson on how if you try to change corrupt systems for the better by participating in them, then it's you that will end up being changed for the worse.

Interesting take, but subject to change if and when the show delivers more info (also at time of comment haven’t seen episode 4 so no spoilers there please).

Comment aged pretty well post-S2

He'd need an hour lol

I definitely couldn't give Supernatural the time it probably deserved, considering how much ground it covers, and I do think that it's closer to Buffy than to Grimm, but I do think it represents a step in that direction

@@SkipIntroYT eh, I’d argue that given the major thrust of the show is choosing free will over following authority (heaven, archangels, God himself), that it’s not even a step in that direction. It’s very anti authoritarian, and it’s also nowhere near black and white, with there being grey demons who do the right thing at least sometimes (like Crowley and Meg), Rowena turns out to be an ally, Garth the werewolf is a friend, as was Benny the vampire. But God, who is portrayed as the ultimate good in religious myths in our world, is an arsehole and a shitty writer, and the big bad. I’m actually rather surprised that I didn’t hear much uproar from the fundy Christians about Supernatural. Not only for playing around with Christian myths, and making God the bad guy, but making God canonically bisexual! I for sure would have thought they’d have an aneurism over that.

I'd watch that full video tho

Dean's black and white worldview is often the source of tension between Sam and Dean. Which I think the show also demonstrates well. And when Dean does some of his darkest shit it's because of that black and white worldview.

oh god what did they do?

@@StickWithTrigger The colours look different, everyone's face looks like a wax mask, night seems like day...basically, they did a fast, cheap remaster just to make a quick buck. There's a video on the channel Passion of the Nerd called 'The great tragedy of the Buffy HD remaster' which explains everything in detail: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oZWNGq70Oyo.html

I sold my OG DVD set I'm old now but if I had the energy of a yoof I'd weep

The three police themed Sentai would have been nice to cover.

yes! actually one of my fav shows as cheesy as it can be i really loved that jack completely changed the system so although his task was similar to the organizations he ran things completely different even trying to get that one alien home yk i feel like they really did martha dirty having her work for that other place

​@ergonorm9960 Martha, as a character, never gets the respect her character deserves from both the fanbase and the writers.

​​​@@ianisimoyeah, after seeing UNIT imprison Tosh without trial in solitary confinement indefinitely in Torchwood, it's really jarring to see them often represented as the good guys in Doctor Who. I enjoyed The Giggle but I couldn't help thinking... Kate Lethbridge Stewart could probably be put on trial for crimes against humanity or something, and here she is hugging the Doctor. But then the Doctor was also friends with Churchill and apparently Stalin(?!), I guess when you're travelling through space and time morality is always going to be relative.

‘Supernatural isn’t misogynist’ LOOK AT THE BODY COUNT 🤦

They do go into it kinda. They actually kinda blame it all on God and Christianity. He was the one who put them there. When they meet god, they actually hate them and ask how he could let all of this shit happen, and not doing a thing. God is shown to be wildly incompetent, a coward who is afraid of his own mistakes, and is really pretty selfish, and self-righteous. He really only liked Sam and Dean and helped them because he saw them as characters in a story he liked. God was gonna let all of humanity die and suffer because he got in a fight with his sister, and didn't want to stop her from ending the world. Dean even ends up in purgatory and meets someone who helps him and realizes it was really him that was the monster, as all the stuff he hunted was out hunt him like a mark, just like he had done in the past. Most angels in the show in general are pompous douchebags who see anyone especially monsters as subhuman. The show has like an entire season dedicated to it.

Optimus Prime/ the entire transformers series

Brave Police J-Decker is RIPE for critical analysis

@@lulucool45 yep

I'm hoping he does power rangers.

Also Ghost in the Shell. Tachikomas are pretty explicitly giant robots but the Major is also about as strong as one. Bonus points for Shirow also making straight up copaganda with a giant ‘robot’ (Appleseed)

I discovered Psycho-Pass earlier this year and it’s such an amazing series. The complex system of government portrayed is just chilling in all the best ways.

"stories from the cyberpunk world that cast an empathetic lens on those working within the system(s) of control" From where is this part of your comment from?

I second the motion. 😉 Both make for fascinating discussion.

I think soner or later we are in for copaganda anime episode.

Be great if he also could talk about one piece and the marines being a complete reference to both the police and the military. I really doubt he watches/reads one piece though. It would be interesting if he could talk about cops in other media (video games, manga/anime, etc).

I'm in southern Oregon and it's so unseasonably hot by June standards that I've been having panic attacks because I Know Why That Is. I miss our freak weather being blizzards in mid-April.

stay safe, dudes! i have a lot of experience with heat cause i’m from southern california recommend getting towels wet and then freezing them and also lie on a tile floor to cool down and make sure to learn the signs of heatstroke vs heat exhaustion. i know it’s not really the point of your comment but please stay safe!

I touched on this a little in my video about Mindhunter (which is kind of a prelude to the Copaganda series). It's a bit more focused on style/form, but the end is mostly about why we're so fascinated in understanding true crime/serial killers: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-h727mq79mOk.html

@@SkipIntroYT I mean, I think there's a pretty easy Ockham/Hanlon combo razor set here: Cops are one of the very few, and most prominent, occupation that is enabled with legal investigative powers. It's most likely just an easy choice for a writer when they want a character that's allowed to investigate in a contemporary society. It's a problem I run into with tabletop RPGs frequently.

@@BH-wh2vo They are also pretty much the only occupation, apart from the military, that is allowed to engage in morally permissible* violence! For middle-class white America, the target audience of most TV, most of those folks simply do not engage in or encounter violence in their everyday lives. So if you want your good guy to be able to wave a gun at bad guys, even if you throw a layer of fantasy or sci-fi over top, by default you are going to end up with some flavor of Cop. *actual moral permissibility of the violence may vary depending on your stances on ACAB, as should be obvious to anyone watching this series

That gets even worse in the comics, in which Buffy ends up being a cop - and Faith as well. Personally, I blame Joss Asshead Whedon.

@@GermanLeftist "Personally I blame Joss Whedon" Honestly that's always a solid choice

To be fair, that season also ends with a very anti-establishment message in which buffy deconstructs the traditional power structures behind the show's mythos. Instead of maintaining her position as general, the solution she finds is ultimately to literally redistribute her power to the community. While I agree that season 7 was absolutely inspired by 9/11, I think the show is actually quite critical of American militirarism (though this criticism is admittedly not very well constructed, because season 7 kind of sucks). That being said, fuck the comics. We don't acknowledge the comics.

@@nsb144 You're totally right. S7 is very confused in its own messaging a lot of the time and it contradicts itself a lot. I think there is an intended anti-establishment message there, given how it ends, but then there's also moments where Buffy is very harsh and re-enacts the actions of the establishment (e.g. one episode where she sets a vampire on some unpowered Potentials, which is what happened to her in S3 and was shown to be traumatic for her) and it's justified as "they're at war", and the show doesn't explicitly challenge that.

@@emilyadair8380 Yeah, I think season 7, is probably the worst season of the show for a lot of reasons, but the theming is particularly problematic, especially considering how good the show had previously been about theme. I will say that Buffy's harshness and her repeating the Council's patterns is eventually called out and criticized (in a really stupid, infuriating, ooc way, but still) and I think what the writers were going for is that Buffy initially thinks that the only way to win is to adopt the council's militarism, before realizing that that's actually bullshit and destroying the system that created this whole mess in the first place. Once again, I'm by no means a season 7 defender, and I certainly don't think it imparts these ideas very well, but I do think that's the intended point of that mess of a season.

ACABEFM (All Cops Are Bastards Except Fox Mulder)

They don't really care even if There own citizens die.

@@kaleeshsynth9994 They'll start to in the next ten years when it's them and their neighbors who start dying.

@@itcouldbelupus2842 exactly! Unfortunately, it will be too late by then! Idk exactly when it happened but at some point between 1870s (or 1 generation after the civil war) and 1950/60s (1 generation after WWII) people started to trust the government/powerful people of the country more than their neighbors! There was a time when the people in a community (aka: neighbors) counted on each other and all did their part to make sure everybody had enough of what they needed to survive so if the community came under attack or was stricken by some kind of catastrophe, EVERYONE was capable of defending, rebuilding, etc. Now look at the relationship between most neighbors... A lot of people don't even know their neighbors names (let alone their story), people calling the police/town officials on their neighbors for loud music or like a flower bed that encroaches onto an unused piece of their property by 2 inches, or they see their neighbors suffering somehow and offer no help, even if it wouldn't cost them a dime! When this is the situation within most communities, when that metaphorical flood comes, neighbors become enemies, fighting for a spot on the life boat... rather than coming together, helping each other, thus not relying on government life boats... Sorry for the rant... I'm pretty high rn 😂

@@phatnana2379 All good, I usually am high on RU-vid as well. People definitely used to know and rely on their neighbors more but trust in the govt was always quite high until around the 70s when corporations started pushing anti politics propoganda, saying all forms of govt are bad and inept, eroding trust and muddying the water so much most people don't even know the purpose of government. Capitalism is the reason for our reliance on systems rather than each other, we are better consumers when we are all isolated individuals, people who have a sense of community don't need to buy as many things to make themselves feel good. A system that prioritizes profits over people is always going to have negative societal effects. Remember that Government holds the possibility of being democratic, corporations are tyrannys. We need to rebuild our local communities and build trust in each other and then reform or form new governments that actually represent us, not corporate interests.

Unlike Marxists, who will declare the boats a bourgeois counter revolutionary crime and demand we build a giant tower for BIPOC only (only for it to collapse because architecture is a white supremacist patriarchal construct)

I'm a patron. He considered talking falcon and winter soldier because of how pro cop it was but ultimately decided against it so that he could finish this video. Maybe after loki wraps we may get MCU part 2. We'll see.

I think we should get Space Cops in general

@@G-LukeJA leave Rich Evans out of this.

I feel like that show is EXTREMELY anti-cop. It starts out showing the TVA as this benevolent group protecting the world from chaos and then ends with revealing that the TVA are actually kidnapping and brainwashing people into their cause. For having such a short first season that show was crazy.

Agreed

Hmm, have you seen the first movie recently? Because it pretty much does the exact opposite of what you describe. First scene of the movie is a truck full of illegal border crossers getting stopped by cops. (ICE didn't exist then). Then the MiB comes in, pick out the one potentially dangerous person in the group, then put the others back into the truck and send them on their merry way with a "Welcome to America". When the cops protest because he let illegal immigrants in, K coldly puts him back in his place. Then the MiB start talking with Mikey - keyword talking. They don't threaten him in any way, they just talk. They don't even pull out their gun until Mikey starts attacking. In the rest of the movie, you'll notice that the MiB never get violent or menacing with any alien except the Bug. In fact, the one time J draws his gun and fires unprompted at the Bug, K chews him out royally for it. And K does mention a couple times that their job is as much to keep the humans safe from the aliens than it is to keep the aliens safe from the humans. And then there is the magnificent scene where J and a bunch of othe cops and military types are being tested. An alarm rings and light goes off and a bunch of alien-shaped targets come out. All of the other guys start shooting like crazy, but J waits, gun lowered, evaluate things, and then fires one shot...on the white girl. When asked to explain his reasoning, he basically tells the same story 2-3 times: he thought about shooting an alien that looked scary, but then looked closer and saw they were doing something mundane. He's basically saying that he was racially profiling, but then stopped himself. That's right, MiB is a movie were the hero shows himself as heroic by refusing to do racial profiling. So yeah, MIB is actually a pretty progressive movie, and focuses a lot on how the MIBs are there to protect everyone, aliens and humans alike, rather than hunt down a specific enemy. Now the rest of the franchise kinda downplay this aspect, but not by much.

@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 I remember the alien doing the mundane thing was blowing their nose, another was exercising. The girl however was walking the streets 'alone' and holding a physics book.

@@alexandredesbiens-brassard9109 There is a scene in the third movie I recall where a young K disapproves of his superior's nonchalant and flippant attitude towards killing aliens; in fact his respect for aliens is what convinces a young K to not wipe J's memories, because an alien that the main bad guy killed was K's friend and so he did it out of respect for the memory of his dead friend, and a desire to avenge him.

Oh damn, you're totally right.

That's a pentacle, you ignorant ass, a symbol of protection from the Devil since the Middle Ages.

@@Laurelin70 calling someone an ignorant ass for taking place and shape of the tattoo to compare it to a police badge is… just outstanding. Like if such comparisons were completely unreasonable Germans wouldn’t have started to call a vagina "sheath" in the 17th century. No one ever would have "seen" that in Robert Jordan‘s Wheel of Time THE place of female empowerment does in fact look like one. The similarities are there and even if something has a meaning already doesn’t mean it can’t be recontextualized. The Othala Rune bears the meaning of heritage. Nazis recontextualized it (sometimes changing it a little bit) so it got a touch of "Rassenlehre und Ariertum" today’s pagans use Othala mostly in it’s original context and original form but sometimes they’re Neonazis too. And the TV series Sleepy Hollow (which also could‘ve come up in this video) only took it’s form and called it the "Thure Rune" (German dub atleast) which is used to ban gods into magic prisons. See things can have multiple meanings and can imply different things. So the tattoos are definitely to keep them save from demons but they also work as a metaphor for a police badge because "saving people [and] hunting things [is their] family business"

The star shaped badge has occult origins, so it's not unusual on that level.

The star is a pentacle. It is occultic in nature, not the police...

Always remember that robots are made by people and will be programed with the biases they currently have.

Could still go for it. Be the change you want to see.

Ooh there's climate change in this one?!

I watched Grimm for the the first 2 season and by the time the third came around something clicked inside me and I realized just how bad (boring) it really was.

@@yunggreen215 yeah that pretty much what happened with me. I suddenly realized how little I cared.

noooooo

I think we can all agree that the buffy comics are not canon

But the biggest obstacle was always the police or the government who just wanted to brush it under the rug and go home

Well to be fair the scp foundation is a spooky prison which does not make it much better

the scp thing is a cringe larp written by a bunch of wankers trying to turn subpar creepypasta into a coherent story by shoving their furaffinity sonic OC-tier characters into everything

@@richardvlasek2445 it may be now, but it used to be better.

The father-son stuff is the only thing I ever liked about Fringe.

Just because it has Copaganda elements doesn't mean it's a bad show per se. On the scale from Blue Bloods (copaganda is omnipresent and makes it bad) to The Wire (copaganda is relatively minor and doesn't affect it) its okay to be somewhere in the middle.

Agreed Also yet another good show that was jerked around by near-cancellation the messed up the flow of the series. Just stop putting your name on things, JJ

Ohh, THAT watercolor painter?

Nahhh chill out bruh, you just seeing things that aren’t there lol

In the end Fox Mulder was pretty calm when talking to one in the season 2 finale, also when Scully had to ask for help when Mulder was having an episode, predicting the future sequence and screaming none stop in season 6.

You can read anti establishment media in lots of different ways - and Alex Jones and modern leftists are both critical of the neoliberal order for reasons that overlap. In the 90s those critiques were far less clearly delineated than they are today, so it's unsurprising that a show from that decade is confused about them - but the fact that it is not simply a tacit, docile endorsement of the government of the Clinton years is notable, and distinct from most cop shows.

It does seem as though pre-2000s conspiracy theories, which the writers referenced and drew from, tended to be more apolitical and paranoid than reactionarily ideological as they are today (though many of the ones talked about in the show share a backbone of antisemitism). This may be the reason for some of the more regrettable plot points (i.e., smallpox injection *very* bad, give scar for aliens). I see the central theme of X Files as anti-Military Industrial Complex (not anti-1%), which made for a variety of paranoia targets but not in a distinctly left-right framework. They also wrote weekly episodes on cryptids, cultural practices (some weird exoticism there), etc. that led to bad episode arcs. In short, it was still the 90s, broadcast by Fox, written mostly by dudes, and not an ideologically left-ish show.

I wasn't around during the 90s so I'm not sure if the Haitian refugee camps refers to a crisis in the US (also not American), but that episode seemed to me like a criticism of a situation. Mulder & Scully obviously didn't agree with the people who worked at the refugee camp. If I remember well, they go to Mr X for help, saying "why dont people know about this/isn't Congress doing anything?" and Mr X is basically like "haven't you noticed, Mr Mulder, Lady Liberty is on vacation"