The reviews for the new X-Files: I Want To Believe flick are pretty grim. Manohla Dargis in the Times calls it "baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark," and Dana Stevens at Slate says it should be subtitled I Want To Care. But her colleague Juliet Lapidos makes a good point about why this is so disappointing — the film was conceived as a standalone episode, mercifully divorced from the muddled meta-narrative about how a government Syndicate was in cahoots with aliens looking to colonize the planet. (Joe Klein bangs that drum every time he writes "neocon.") X-Files standalones were really the gems of the series and most of them, as Lapidos shrewdly observes, were written by Darin Morgan, who also acted in others. If Charlie Kaufman had a brother, he'd be Darin Morgan (as it happens, he's the brother of one of the show's regular writers, Glen Morgan). After the jump, the best episodes cooked up by — or just featuring — this genius homunculus. Then we want your selections in the comments.

"Humbug"

No "Humbug," no HBO's Carnivàle. OK, maybe that's going too far, but this was the first episode written by Morgan, who brought winking self-parody and a Northern Exposure-like character quirkiness to the series. It's set in Gibsontown, Florida, a retirement community for circus folk, to which Mulder and Scully are drawn after the mysterious but patternistic death of "Alligator Man" (guess what he looks like). There's a local sheriff who used to be known as "Dog Boy" until alopecia robbed him of his freakiness; a conjoined twin who can detach from his unloved brother; and a human jigsaw puzzle, The Conundrum, who dines on live animals. Yet the chief suspect is the Fiji Mermaid, a supposedly apocryphal monkey-fish hybrid. Below, a clip of Blockhead, one of the more self-assured performers who hammers nails into his face.

"Small Potatoes"

Darin Morgan didn't write this one, but he guest starred in it as Eddie Van Blundht, a schlubby nobody (ergo the title) save for the fact that he was born with a tail and has been impregnating a whole townful of women in West Virginia via his enviable ability to shape-shift into sexually charismatic fantasy figures, like Luke Skywalker. Also Mulder, whom Van Blundht embodies in order to seduce Scully in a terrific scene. See clip.

"The Host"

Morgan's first guest starring role was as a human-sized flukeworm ("Flukeman") who lives in the sewer and eats people. Not much beyond gross-out factor superficially, but the episode did prey upon this New Yorker's fear of C.H.U.D.s, Ninja Turtles, and drainpipe gators. Oh, and there's a slightly hamhanded man-reaks-havoc-on-nature footnote about how "we made this." Flukeman arrived on a ship used to dispose of radioactive waste materials from Chernobyl.

"Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"

Morgan won an Emmy for the script, and Peter Boyle won one for his portrayal of Clyde Bruckman, a psychic insurance salesman who glimpses how people are going to die (how brilliant is that?) The premise of the episode is Mulder and Scully's investigation of a spate of murders in which the victims are all fortunetellers. It features a Uri Geller-like baffoon called the Stupendous Yappi, whom Mulder doubts has any ESP mojo. Also memorable for Bruckman's prediction that Mulder dies of "autoerotic asphyxiation" and Scully doesn't die at all (and they call him "spooky"). There's great dialogue in this episode, especially this exchange the hangdog Bruckman has with a would-be policy-buyer, which we provide in lieu of a missing YouTube:

Bruckman: "You don't get it do ya kid...two years from now, while driving down Route 91 coming home to your wife and baby daughter, you're going to be hit head-on by a drunk driving a blue '87 Mustang. You'll end up looking worse than sixty feet of bad road your body slides across after flying out your windshield."

Customer: "Mister, you really need to work on your closing technique!"

That should be the new Geico commercial.