Reception
"Terma" premiered on the Fox network on December 1, 1996, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on November 4, 1997. The episode earned a Nielsen household rating of 10.6 with a 15 share, meaning that roughly 10.6 percent of all television-equipped households, and 15 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. A total of 17.34 million viewers watched this episode during its original airing.
Writing for The A.V. Club, Zack Handlen rated the episode a B-, finding that it contained too much "vamping for time", without enough focus on any of the individual plot threads. Handlen felt that the plot thread based on the murder of the Well-Manicured Man's doctor friend should have been the episode's focus, and derided the "pomposity" of the dialogue elsewhere in the episode. Based on an advance viewing of the episode's script, Entertainment Weekly rated "Terma" an A-, praising the "arms race" plotline. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated "Terma" one star out of five, comparing it unfavourably with the previous episode. Shearman and Pearson described the episode as "awful", noting that there "is virtually no structure to it at all". The episode's dialogue was described as being "dreadful, boring and facile", with its long, clumsy lines and "ever more complex and ever less interesting" speeches.
Read more about this topic: Terma (The X-Files)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)