Reception
"Irresistible" premiered on the Fox network on January 13, 1995. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 9.2, with a 15 share, meaning that roughly 9.2 percent of all television-equipped households, and 15 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 8.8 million households.
Chris Carter said "Irresistible" was effective for "being really scary", and that not only it was one of his favorites but inspired him to create the television series Millennium later. Entertainment Weekly rated "Irresistible" a B+, saying it was based on "an unsettling concept to begin with" that was reinforced by "Chinlund's skin-crawling one-man show". Todd VanDerWerff of The A.V. Club rated the episode A, praising the acting, particularly of Chinlund as Pfaster, and describing it as "legitimately scary, a sign of a show that was pushing itself in new and interesting directions". The only criticsm was for the scenes where Scully hallucinates Pfaster shapeshifting as "pretty silly, almost feeling like an attempt to make sure something vaguely paranormal is in the episode so the fans don't get bored with what is ultimately a very good episode".
Writing for Den of Geek, Nina Sordi ranked "Irresistible" the sixth best X-Files episode, saying that "excluding CSM and his cronies, Pfaster has got to be the most disturbing villain that our favorite agents have encountered", and Juliette Harrisson listed "Irresistible" among the best standalone episodes, describing it as "a genuinely creepy 45-minute horror movie". Connie Ogle of Popmatters listed Pfaster among the best monster-of-the-week characters of the series, and IGN's Christine Seghers ranked Chinlund the seventh best guest star in the history of the show, considering that "what makes him all the more frightening is how downright passive and polite he is up until the moment he's going to kill; the perfect camouflage for a modern-day monster." TV Guide listed Pfaster among the scariest X-Files monsters describing him as "evil incarnate".
Read more about this topic: Irresistible (The X-Files)
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