Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Tomorrow is Halloween, so this week’s header is focused on a show whose monster-of-the-week episodes are always great to rewatch during the Halloween season: The X-Files, which, in the comments section, Sir Simon Milligan said he rewatches every autumn. The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the late Mark Snow’s “The Tip” from the Doggett-era X-Files episode “Release.” “The Tip” features the theme Snow composed for Doggett, an ex-Marine and former NYPD detective who joined the FBI.

Robert Patrick, who played Doggett, has been terrific as two completely different Auggie Smiths on Peacemaker. The Auggie in the 11th Street Kids’ universe was a thoroughly evil white supremacist, while the much wealthier Auggie in Earth-X, the Nazi-led dimension where the 11th Street Kids never formed, was a decent—and more complicated—person: He wasn’t racist, but I wish he used his wealth and his resources to protect marginalized groups from the Nazis he despised.

Patrick’s work on Peacemaker has caused me to look back at certain moments from his run during The X-Files’s much-maligned eighth and ninth seasons and recall that he was great on that show as well. The X-Files writers and actors made the wise decision to, as Patrick put it when he was interviewed in 2018’s Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files, “make sure that we were not in any way implying that we were replacing Mr. Duchovny. [Doggett] was a new character created to prolong the life of the series.”

My favorite thing about Doggett’s eighth-season arc as both a stranger Scully initially disliked (but grew to trust) and a skeptic who doesn’t know what to make of the supernatural mumbo jumbo Scully encounters on a regular basis is that The X-Files took a guy who was basically an NYPD Blue character and tossed him into a paranormal procedural where the skels wind up with their faces sliced open by axe murderers who can invade people’s dreams.

Patrick’s everyman presence had a completely different energy from what David Duchovny brought to Mulder the Oxford-educated believer, and I thought it totally worked when I first watched the eighth season on Fox. It temporarily rejuvenated Chris Carter’s aging show. (I say temporarily because the first two episodes of the ninth season were a dull mess, so I skipped most of the rest of the ninth season. I had enough of the mythology episodes. They amounted to nothing. The only thing I liked about the ninth season was the revamped opening title sequence.)

I paid zero attention in 2000 to the X-Files fans’ online comments on the addition of Patrick to the cast. When I read a couple of weeks ago A.A. Dowd’s “In defense of Doggett, the unsung hero The X-Files should have reenlisted” piece for the A.V. Club from 2018, and I found out that “Doggett was never a fan favorite—reaction to the character seemed to range, at least at the time, from begrudging tolerance to fiery-hot resentment. His biggest sin, of course, was simply not being Mulder: Die-hards saw a poor substitution, an attempt to replace the heart and soul of the series,” I thought, “Man, sometimes fans are the worst.”

Doggett was a great addition precisely because he wasn’t Mulder. He was, again, an NYPD Blue guy suddenly trapped in a Kolchak: The Night Stalker world. And Patrick embodied Doggett’s struggles to come to grips with that world excellently, especially in the gory “Via Negativa,” Patrick’s personal favorite episode.

Today’s prompt is: What’s your favorite X-Files monster of the week? I tended to like the ones that were small in size or didn’t require a lot of visual effects, like the glow-in-the-dark bugs in “Darkness Falls” (“Those effects are pretty chintzy and haven’t aged especially well,” complained Emily St. James in her review of “Darkness Falls” for Monsters of the Week), the cockroaches in “War of the Coprophages,” the ELF waves that cause people’s heads to explode if they stop moving in “Drive” (the episode that kicked off “Drive” writer Vince Gilligan’s working relationship with Bryan Cranston), and the off-screen entity that senses Angelenos’ worst fears and makes them real in “X-Cops.”