This week marks the beginning of the final seasons for both What We Do in the Shadows and Star Trek: Lower Decks, two of my current favorite half-hour comedies. Hulu posted the first three episodes of WWDITS’s final season on the same day (the second episode, “Headhunting,” is my favorite of the three), and just an hour ago (I hit publish on this post at 12:30am Pacific), Paramount+ posted the first two episodes of Lower Decks’s final season.

Lower Decks is so enjoyable that it’s the first-ever Trek show I’ve collected on physical media. I have its second and fourth seasons on Blu-ray (my favorite Lower Decks episode, “wej Duj,” is from the second season), while I made for myself mp4s out of the first and third seasons when Paramount+ temporarily posted them in their entirety for free on YouTube.

Having the first and third seasons in my MacBook folders has made accessing episodes from those seasons easy (especially when the internet goes down). Any time I need to revise in TextEdit a review of a 2020 or 2022 Lower Decks episode for my book (in progress) about the animated Trek shows, I can replay the episode on QuickTime Player right beside my TextEdit window as I make my revisions. I like how I don’t have to go to Paramount+ to rewatch any episodes from the first four seasons.

Also this week, I finished writing the next nine Couch Avocados headers in advance. I’m done for the year, baby! The headers are structured so that if a beloved person who did some great stuff for TV unexpectedly croaks or something awesome happens like David Zaslav getting canned, then I can easily change the headers to add my feelings about those events.

The list of instrumentals I plan to choose as future Original TV Score Selection of the Week entries currently amounts to 55. Maybe I should do a prompt where I ask people to guess some of the instrumentals I jotted down on my private list.

Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month is an instrumental from a show that’s either perfect for watching (or marathoning) on Halloween or is just plain creepy.

The haunting X-Files main title theme was the most popular instrumental Mark Snow wrote for the show, but it’s not my favorite piece of original music from The X-Files. The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is my favorite X-Files score cue: Snow’s “Eaten by Light” from his score to The X-Files‘s “Soft Light” episode.

Seven years before Tony Shalhoub began playing an ex-cop who was afraid of germs, heights, milk, and 309 other things, he played a man who was afraid of his own shadow. “Soft Light,” a rare monster-of-the-week episode that collided with one of the shadowy figures from The X-Files‘s soon-to-be-frustrating mythology, was the episode where Shalhoub guest-starred as the week’s monster: Dr. Chester Ray Banton, a runaway scientist who’s hardly monstrous at all because he is stricken with guilt over the deaths that were caused by his shadow.

Mulder and Scully find out that a particle accelerator accident caused Dr. Banton’s shadow to vaporize people when they come into contact with it. Dr. Banton wants to find a way to fix his condition before the government captures him and experiments on him.

The 1995 episode was also the first of dozens of X-Files episodes that were written by future Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.

In 2018’s Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files—the book that inspired me to write in a similar style a book on the animated Trek shows—Zack Handlen complained that “There’s a lack of humor [to ‘Soft Light’] that makes both the repetitive plot feel even blander and the thoroughly wonky science stand out even more. Gilligan would soon become one of The X-Files [sic] most accomplished writers, but his debut is disappointingly flat.”

I like “Soft Light” a bit more than Handlen does. He finds it to be too humorless, but it actually contains some amusing banter between Mulder and Scully.

When “Soft Light” first aired while I was in high school, I only knew Shalhoub as Antonio on Wings. He delivered a solid non-comedic performance in “Soft Light.” It has a great final scene where a mute and catatonic Shalhoub sheds a Denzel Glory tear. The episode also gave us the pulsating brilliance of “Eaten by Light.”

There’s no prompt today. An alien from a UFO stole it.