Reception
"Jump the Shark" first aired on the Fox network in the United States on April 21, 2002. The episode later aired in the United Kingdom on BBC One one February 23, 2003. The episode earned a Nielsen household rating of 5.1, meaning that it was seen by 5.1% of the nation's estimated households and was viewed by 5.38 million households. "Jump the Shark" was the 58th most watched episode of television that aired during the week ending April 21.
The episode received mixed to negative reviews from television critics. Aaron Kinney from Salon magazine said that the episode title showed that the creators at least still had a sense of humor, but that the episode demonstrated some of the flaws that caused the series to jump the shark in the first place: "cheesy melodrama, deathly slow pacing, and a lack of coherence". John Keegan from Critical Myth was also negative about the episode and awarded it a 4 out of 10. He called it "one of the worst episodes of the season", and hoped that it was no indication of what the series finale was going to be like. Furthermore, Keegan criticized the fact that David Duchovny did not make a cameo appearance "either full frame or in the distance", given his history with the Lone Gunmen. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode one star out of five, and noted that "there's nothing celebratory" about the entry. The two were highly critical of the episode's conclusion, calling it "such a bland way of dying that for a moment, you feel you must have missed the point". Shearman and Pearson, furthermore, argued that "The Lone Gunmen deserved better. No, worse than that – we deserved better."
Read more about this topic: Jump The Shark (The X-Files)
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