14 Greatest Format-Breaking SF & Fantasy TV Episodes Ever 3

3 Millennium
“Somehow Satan Got Behind Me" (1998)

The legendary Darin Morgan – who wrote some of the funniest X-Files episodes (“Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose”, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”) – concocted this wonderfully bat’s-arse script, his last for the X-universe. Four demons meet up for a chinwag in a coffee shop, and while they swap stories they realise they have all run into Frank Black at various points. It‘s full of cracking dialogue and black humour, and satire; you can’t help thinking that the TV censor who features in one of the tales (“If you are going to show a pile of dung, it must be dried dung, not moist”) is based on personal experience. And how can you not love an episode in which a demon moans: “I ask you: what evil genius invented the alarm clock? No other creature but man could concoct a device that interrupts, on a daily basis, their only state of natural happiness. No doubt, the evil genius's evil twin contributed the snooze button.”

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