X Files

Two of TV's most popular science-fiction shows, "Babylon 5" and "The X-Files," are invading video stores. Episodes of TNT's hit television series "Babylon 5" are available now, while "The X-Files" movie, which includes never-before-seen footage, hits stores next month. Warner Home Video offers four new-to-video releases from "Babylon 5. " Titles now available are: "The Gathering", "In the Beginning", "Born to the Purple/Infection" and "Midnight on the Firing Line/Soul Hunter.

There'll be another kidnapping on The X-Files in the fall. This time, it's the whole series. "I consider that the show has been abducted to Sunday night," Files boss Chris Carter told TV critics Wednesday. Carter was opposed to Fox's moving its hottest series from 9 p.m. Fridays to 9 p.m. Sundays, he says, but he understood the network's strategy. Fox wants to use the popular Files to prop its sagging ratings on Sunday, the most-watched TV night of the week. There is, as they love to say in TV-Land, an up side to the displacement.

Networks have stopped broadcasting threat levels, Larry King has started doing UFO shows again, and there's an "X-Files" movie in theaters. Journalism rule of thumb: two's coincidence, three's a trend story, so strap yourself in for my cockamamie theory about the inverse relationship between real and imagined threats. Here goes: Humans have a natural appetite for paranoia. If there is no obvious, urgent danger, we exercise this appetite by indulging in contrived conspiracies. Thus, the apparent peace and prosperity of the 1990s produced "The X-Files" and its mythology built around government cover-ups of the paranormal.

Here's the basic plot of the latest installment of The X-Files: The last handful of surviving witnesses to a mysterious UFO crash in 1948 are starting to either die or have long-suppressed memories mysteriously re- emerge. The clues that agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have to work with include, among other things, a strange citrus odor emanating from one of the bodies during an autopsy. Can't wait to see it this Friday on Fox TV? You don't have to wait - and you can't see it on television.

While some fans of the Fox television show The X-Files were in X-stacy yesterday, others were less than X-cited. An exhibition for junkies of the science fiction thriller - a Friday-night cult hit entering its third season - made a stop at the Valley Forge Convention Center, offering memorabilia, displays and entertainment that did not meet the expectations of all the hundreds of devotees in attendance. Most fans, many adorned in X-Files shirts and hats, laughed out loud during the playing of bloopers from the show and cheered two villains in the supporting cast - Doug Hutchison and Dean Haglund - who made brief speeches and signed autographs.

Bugs are no problem. David Duchovny knows them well, all the maggots and flies and bees and roaches. They are like brothers now, comrades, collaborators, professionals. And he has learned from them. They have a primitive wisdom of their own, as Duchovny and costar Gillian Anderson understood last year during the making of The X-Files movie, when a swarm of bees was released at them - take after excruciating take. On the set, a beekeeper warned filmmakers that the insects needed to be finished by 4 p.m. or they would become uncontrollably angry.

Scary TV show, The X-Files. Perhaps even scarier: The idea of paying to see an X-Files movie when you've seen more episodes of Teletubbies. Fear not. You've missed less than you might think. After all, Fox's The X-Files is about two FBI agents who hardly ever figure anything out. They don't even know the names of important, powerful, shifty guys who show up over and over. And while fans do know more, they're never sure what's true, because of all the lies, hoaxes, theories, blind alleys, wild-goose chases, and missing pieces.

There are aliens in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, but they are not from outer space. Instead, they come from Russia: a band of demented medicos, descended on West Virginia to participate in some freaky Frankenstein shenanigans - and that's too bad. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) still has that old UFO poster on his wall, though it's a wall in his house in the middle of nowhere. He's a recluse with a beard and bitter memories, in mopey exile, retired from his job as an expert on paranormal phenomena at the FBI. So the plot of Chris Carter's second film spun off of the hit cult TV show is decidedly terrestrial, and grim and unpleasant, too. A convoluted, unconvincing mishmash of hot-button social issues - stem cell research, Catholic church sexual-abuse scandals, pedophilia, gay marriage, organ harvesting - The X-Files: I Want to Believe reunites Mulder with Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson)

Look for some changes this fall on Fox's second season of "Millennium. " The brooding, twilit, perpetually moist thriller about ex-FBI agent Frank Black, a somber profiler of serial killers and the supernatural, is about to change, the producers told critics Friday. Black (craggily played by Lance Henriksen) works for a mysterious organization called the Millennium Group, and is "a guy who needs to lighten up," producer Glen Morgan told critics here. It won't happen immediately.

You've seen the TV series - now buy the music CD. The marriage between television and music stretches back to the early '50s, when "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and the theme to "Dragnet" were major radio hits. But in the '90s, instead of just offering up occasional hit songs or soundtrack collections, some TV producers are taking the opportunity to play DJ for a day and are loading official soundtrack albums with eclectic and exciting musical material. A superb example of this type of media cross-pollination appears this week, when the official soundtrack CD to the Fox series "Party of Five" is released by Reprise Records.

There are aliens in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, but they are not from outer space. Instead, they come from Russia: a band of demented medicos, descended on West Virginia to participate in some freaky Frankenstein shenanigans - and that's too bad. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) still has that old UFO poster on his wall, though it's a wall in his house in the middle of nowhere. He's a recluse with a beard and bitter memories, in mopey exile, retired from his job as an expert on paranormal phenomena at the FBI. So the plot of Chris Carter's second film spun off of the hit cult TV show is decidedly terrestrial, and grim and unpleasant, too. A convoluted, unconvincing mishmash of hot-button social issues - stem cell research, Catholic church sexual-abuse scandals, pedophilia, gay marriage, organ harvesting - The X-Files: I Want to Believe reunites Mulder with Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson)

Networks have stopped broadcasting threat levels, Larry King has started doing UFO shows again, and there's an "X-Files" movie in theaters. Journalism rule of thumb: two's coincidence, three's a trend story, so strap yourself in for my cockamamie theory about the inverse relationship between real and imagined threats. Here goes: Humans have a natural appetite for paranoia. If there is no obvious, urgent danger, we exercise this appetite by indulging in contrived conspiracies. Thus, the apparent peace and prosperity of the 1990s produced "The X-Files" and its mythology built around government cover-ups of the paranormal.

There are aliens in The X-Files: I Want to Believe , but they are not from outer space. Instead, they come from Russia: a band of demented medicos, descended on West Virginia to participate in some freaky Frankenstein shenanigans - and that's too bad. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) still has that old UFO poster on his wall, though it's a wall in his house in the middle of nowhere. He's a recluse with a beard and bitter memories, in mopey exile, retired from his job as an expert on paranormal phenomena at the FBI. So the plot of Chris Carter's second film spun off of the hit cult TV show is decidedly terrestrial, and grim and unpleasant, too. A convoluted, unconvincing mishmash of hot-button social issues - stem cell research, Catholic church sexual-abuse scandals, pedophilia, gay marriage, organ harvesting - The X-Files: I Want to Believe reunites Mulder with Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson)

Ricky Oyola is Philly old school. Now 30, he has been skateboarding since 1985. He remembers skating at LOVE Park before the JFK Plaza site became a legendary skate hangout featured in every national skateboarding magazine. And before skaters like himself became Public Enemy No. 1 to city officials. Tomorrow, Oyola plans to do a little skating outside of City Hall. He won't have to worry about being chased by police. In fact, he just might find Mayor Street there applauding his efforts.

Terence Davies' thoughtful and elegantly rendered adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth recognizes that the novel boasts one of the most bitterly ironic titles in American fiction. Wharton chose it from the incontestable opinion in Ecclesiastes that "the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," and Davies is more successful in drawing out the book's central irony than he is in capturing the molten rage that flows through it. At the cold heart of The House of Mirth is a woman doomed by a simple fact of life in the haute monde of New York in 1905: Ideas of principle, honor and scruple should be publicly and vocally espoused, but they should be privately ignored when self-interest is an issue.

QUOTE "Come on. I got drunk when I was five. " - Fiona Apple, on whether she got drunk on her 21st birthday. Fans of "The X-Files" can breathe a collective sigh of relief now that Gillian Anderson no longer is talking about walking away from the series like long-time partner David Duchovny. Anderson has discovered that not only the truth, but a bigger paycheck, is out there. After signing on for next season and at least one more year as FBI agent Dana Scully, she got a hefty raise.

The long note must have been quite traumatic for Buffy, even as it ended so many traumas: "I probably shouldn't do this," read the "Dear Buffy" letter in a recent script. "I don't want to make this any harder on you than it already is. It's not fair to you, but then none of the past 3 years has been fair to you. I just couldn't leave without saying some kind of good-bye. "I don't know where I'll go," continued the note from her beloved Angel. "All I know is as much as I want to . . . I can't leave California.

For some faithful soap fans, today is the end of the world, as 35-year veteran Another World goes off the air with a wedding, a gorilla, and the strains of "Get Up Offa That Thang. " After 8,891 episodes, NBC's oldest daytime drama is finished, a victim of low ratings and the network's decision to make room for something new. That would be Passions, the supernatural-tinged soap that is to debut July 5. Produced and owned by NBC, unlike AW, which was produced by, and shared its revenues with, Procter & Gamble, the new soap on the block has some new moneymaking tricks up its sleeve.

Two of TV's most popular science-fiction shows, "Babylon 5" and "The X-Files," are invading video stores. Episodes of TNT's hit television series "Babylon 5" are available now, while "The X-Files" movie, which includes never-before-seen footage, hits stores next month. Warner Home Video offers four new-to-video releases from "Babylon 5. " Titles now available are: "The Gathering", "In the Beginning", "Born to the Purple/Infection" and "Midnight on the Firing Line/Soul Hunter.

Scary TV show, The X-Files. Perhaps even scarier: The idea of paying to see an X-Files movie when you've seen more episodes of Teletubbies. Fear not. You've missed less than you might think. After all, Fox's The X-Files is about two FBI agents who hardly ever figure anything out. They don't even know the names of important, powerful, shifty guys who show up over and over. And while fans do know more, they're never sure what's true, because of all the lies, hoaxes, theories, blind alleys, wild-goose chases, and missing pieces.