The second thing to hit you is the realisation that the original pairing of Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny as Mulder and Scully will go down in history as one of the best double acts in the arena of telefantasy. Even when the show had lost the charismatic sex addict David Duchovny, it continued to spit out some truly experimental and outstanding television.

When you begin the epic task of ploughing through all 218 episodes, the first thing to hit you is the realisation of how many of these are stone cold classics. This box set is nice and concise - all standard nine seasons are present and correct, plus the six episode ‘event’ season 10 and the seemingly final Season 11, which Gillian Anderson stated bluntly would be her last outing in any event. This box set does lack the two movies and spin-off series The Lone Gunmen and Millenium, but maybe a set comprising all of this would be possibly too expensive for the average fan of this 90’s mainstay. There is a truth out there (see what I did) that the later seasons suffered from the lack of input from key writers such as Glen Morgan and James Wong, but the entire run remains surprisingly consistent and quite resilient to the passage of time. The brainchild of Chris Carter came out of nowhere and hit big with its careful blending of horror, conspiracy theories, urban legends, and sometimes all-out sci-fi.

During its initial incredible nine season run, STARBURST seemed to feature the show on every alternate cover. Want to get a genuine feeling for how big a phenomenon The X-Files was in the nineties? Simply Google back issues of this very magazine.

X files complete series