Don wrote about _The X-Files_: >My wife and I started on it last year but gave up on it as it seemed to >be pulling out urban legends and tabloid headlines for plot ideas, without >developing any implications farther than their shock value. I couldn't agree less. The program seems consistently to suggest all sorts of "implications" regarding its "fantastic" narrative elements. The role governments, experts, and powerful institutions (like bourgeois education) play in the determination of what counts as "credibility," for example (notice that the program refuses a condescending stance toward socially marginalized popular knowledges about things like alien abduction phenomena). A specific episode that springs readily to mind is a recent one featuring an intestinal parasite (a "flatworm" of some sort) that, as a result of the Chernobyl meltdown, mutated into a humanoid form, and was roaming the New York sewers. What a great concept, no? And great partly because it contains such an interesting implicit critique of the nuclear power industry, and such an interesting articulation of nuclear anxieties (the mutant was simultaneously fascinating and repulsive). Also, even when there seems to be only "shock value" at stake, isn't there always necessarily something more going on?? That is, aren't there necessarily additional "implications" at stake when one finds something "shocking" (e.g., there must be powerful social boundaries being transgressed or negotiated, powerful social meanings at stake, etc.--and how could that be considered insignificant?) Cheers, Kevin, X-Files devotee