The X-Files - The Complete Third Season on DVD

After picking up steam in its second season, The X-Files made a massive leap in popularity during its third season (fall of 1995 to spring of '96), with its average audience jumping from around 10 million people to an impressive 17 million. Marked by an increasingly cinematic scope, this set of episodes delves further into the lives of FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), as they continue to unearth paranormal phenomena.

As with past seasons, many of the episodes are stand-alone stories, but here horror elements are often replaced by suspenseful, though not necessarily scary, plots that involve characters with special abilities. One of the third season's finest episodes, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," stars the late, beloved character actor Peter Boyle in the role of a reluctant psychic, a poignant performance that won him an Emmy. And in the previous show, "D.P.O.," another easily recognizable face, Giovanni Ribisi, portrays a troubled rural youth who can channel lightning, with a pre-fame Jack Black on hand as Ribisi's slacker buddy. (Star-spotters should also keep an eye out for a baby-faced Ryan Reynolds, who appears briefly in the underwhelming occult-themed "Syzygy," and a young Lucy Liu, who plays the ill daughter of a troubled father in "Hell Money.")

Of particular note is the blatantly "wacky" episode, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," which finds the X-Files spoofing itself, with no less than Charles Nelson Reilly, Alex Trebek, and Jesse "The Body Who Would Govern Minnesota" Ventura around for good measure. Strange cameos aside, the show features a cigarette-smoking alien and a Ray Harryhausen-like creature named Lord Kinbote, not to mention Mulder screaming like a teenage girl and Scully depicted as a Dirty Harry-esque tough.

For those who like the straight-faced, tension-filled "mythology" episodes, there are plenty scattered throughout the season, including the opening and closing episodes ("The Blessing Way" and "Talitha Cumi," respectively) and the action-packed two-parter "Nisei" and "731," which find Scully, and particularly, Mulder moving deeper into the alien-conspiracy mystery. Another major occurrence in the X-Files universe is depicted in "Piper Maru," an ominous episode that introduces the creepy "black oil" to the ongoing colonization storyline.

Although the characters of Mulder and Scully's supervisor, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), and the devilish Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) are given relatively little screen time during the third season, Skinner turns up as the focus of the strange murder-mystery episode "Avatar," while everyone's favorite chain-smoker gets his turn in the spotlight during the fourth season, which impressively manages to continue the X-Files' high-ratings run, and pushes the show in a number of intriguing directions.