X-Files episodes in my "watch later" queue

"Dogged" (1999, 42 min)
Scully's faith in science is put to the test when her microwave mysteriously stops working. Mulder follows a stray dog that reminds him of his sister.

"Samovar" (1998, 42 min)
Assistant Director Skinner refuses to be called by anything other than his full title. Mulder suspects that he has been hijacked by the spirit of the fabled Baba Yaga.

"Chip's Challenge" (1994, 42 min)
A sentient desktop computer takes over a PC Richards & Son. Scully can't win a game of Solitaire.

"Bobby's World" (1996, 42 min)
Scully's faith in science is called into question when a young boy uses psychic powers to offer narration to the lives of everybody living in a small town.

"Tammany" (2000, 42 min)
Mulder and Scully go on special assignment to Chicago, where ghost gangsters are terrorizing a local zoo. Scully's sister's ghost complicates matters.

"Electrolux" (2000, 42 min)
A traveling home appliance salesman comes to Mulder complaining of a sentient vacuum. Scully is vocal about her boredom.

"Pins and Needles" (1998, 38 min)
In this X-Files clip show, Mulder's leg falls asleep and he fondly recalls his favorite cases while he waits for it to wake up again.

"Plaster" (2001, 42 min)
Scully's faith in science is pressed to its limits when a French chemical disaster seems to support Lavoisier's discredited nomenclatorial suggestions regarding acids. Skinner decries the jurisdictional restrictions of the FBI.

Excerpts from: Dudley Dursley and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry lurched onto his haunches and scrambled to the base of the giant’s slick black boots. “I’m Harry, sir! I’m here! Harry Potter!”

The giant lowered his radiator-sized paws and grabbed young Dudley. Harry barely dodged the giant’s fingers as they wrapped like toupee’d pythons around Dudley’s bulbous frame. The giant plucked Dudley and then held him aloft, inches from the ceiling, smiling agape at him, his Olympian beard billowing madly in the draft from the broken door.         “And here’s Dudley!” He belched. Dudley smelled carrots and tobacco.

Harry was caterwauling, undeterred. “I’m Harry, sir!” He wrapped himself, kitten-like, around the scratching post that was the giant’s thick leathery pant leg. “Harry Potter!” A quick kick sent Harry tumbling into a pile of dusty crates and spare nails.

“Name’s Haghh,” the giant announced, interrupted by a tinny blast from Uncle Vernon’s pencil-dick rifle. Haghh grabbed the barrel of the rifle with his teeth, of which there were too many, and in which Uncle Vernon could see the grimy reflection of his own pathetic misguided life, and in one predictably tremendous bite, Haghh snapped the barrel in half. He then kicked Uncle Vernon as well, but the Uncle simply rolled like a boulder for a few feet, then rocked gently to a dumb stillness.

“Name’s Hagrid,” Haghh corrected.

“I’m Harry Potter!” Harry screamed, pulling a nail out of his thigh.

“Yer filthy, Harry,” Hagrid commented. Then he turned back to Dudley, who was still wriggling over the ground, jaw hanging, like a fattened fabled Mandrake. “And you! Dudders! Yer a wizard, Dudley!”

Dudley puked a little.

“Squeezing you too hard there, am I?” Hagrid offered.

“No!” Harry Potter shouted from the corner shadows, ejecting black dust into the air. “I’m the wizard! I’m Harry Paaughh,” he continued, piercing his bare foot on another stray nail. Uncle Vernon, enraged at the interruption, hoisted his now sawed-off pea shooter and trained it at Harry’s dusty quivering silhouette.

“Vernon!” Hagrid yelled. He kicked Uncle Vernon again. “The rat boy isn’t worth your bullets.”

Harry yanked the nail out of his foot and wagged it at Hagrid, brandishing it like a bloody iron wand, whispering desperate made-up spells. Dudley gazed at Harry’s fidgeting form and, as though possessed of an ancient power, said, “Defenestrum Verminus.” Harry was immediately lifted and ejected out the window of the hut by some rude mystical telekinesis.

Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia applauded politely and nodded their approval.

• * *

Harry leapt through the snow like a black rabbit, seething at every frozen touch to his accumulated wounds. He knew he had to be stealthy in his approach, but despite his general incompetence, the task was easy enough: Hagrid was a tremendous and bombastic thing, a mark that made its own cover. With Dudley wrapped cocoon-like in Hagrid’s vast amorphous beard, the giant was now stomping unhindered through the snow by the moonlit shore, his many legs shooting down as pistons and retracting with machinated precision, his hideous rows of too-many teeth, yellow and black from soot and cigars, chomping the snowy fog to shreds. “To Swine Wart with us!” Hagrid roared in multitudinous cacophony. “To Swine Wart! To Swine Wart! To Swine Wart!”

It struck Harry as remarkable that Hagrid would not fly, perhaps on a broom stick, but then some intelligence pierced his indefatigable stupidity, and he remembered that only witches are said to fly on broomsticks. “Like in Macbeth,” he quipped to himself.

Sensing that his time was running short, Harry bounded to the rear of the terrible giant and wedged himself into a gap in one of those many black boots. There he saw fit to rest until Hagrid had delivered them all to the wonderful plane of the wizards. But Harry’s rest was short-lived: he soon found himself choked by arctic seawater, plunged in and out of the ocean through which the Hagrid was now simply walking. 

• * *

“Another round?” asked Marty the bartender. The sole patron was a dingy septuagenarian thing, a once-crooner draped in brown and yellow sweaters and coats. 

“It’s so cold,” the old man moaned, sliding his empty glass back across the bar.

Marty dunked the glass into a tub of soapy water and produced another, filling it with the same thin yellow dribble that had been spitting from the tap all night. “Heater will be fixed soon,” he said.

“It’s too cold.”

“It’s a cold winter.”

“You should get a heater.”

“Heater’s getting fixed,” Marty said. He adjusted the sign that was a new fixture to the bar, then glided over to the front window, cloth draped over his shoulder, to check the duplicate signs he had posted outside. All but one of them said the same thing: NO WIZARDS ALLOWED.

The one new sign that did not say this was affixed to the back wall, nailed to the fresh brick: “DO NOT TOUCH THIS WALL.”

“Bloody wizards,” Marty muttered.

Back at the bar, the old thing was clumsily spilling beer on his pants. Marty stared at him and quietly lamented the loss of his old regulars.

Suddenly, a winking shot across the horizon, and a distant guttural roar rolled slowly over the waves. Marty buckled at the knees, whipped back around to the window, put his palm to the icy glass. “No,” he whispered.

The roar was real, though, and the figure producing it approached with impossible haste through the violent surf.

“Wassat,” the old man said. “Did you say something?”

“Get out,” Marty said. “Leave. Get out now.” He dashed over to the bar and leapt over it, slapping his washcloth against the cheap wood.

“What’s you talking about? Slime warts?”

Marty’s head popped up from behind the bar. “Get out!” He yelled, and as he stood, he lifted a cricket bat over his shoulder.

  The old man tottered hastily over to the front door, spilling his beer all the way there, and then tumbled out into the cold. It was too late, however. A terrible iron Hagrid arm crashed into the man’s chest, crushing it utterly, sweeping the man like flimsy detritus into the alcoholic gutter. The Hagrid’s eyes shone like lighthouse beacons. “To Swine Warts!” it announced. “To Swine Warts!”

This door was again victim to Hagrid’s divine purpose. It burst from its hinges and shattered into a hundred dull splinters like flying arrows against the bartender’s militant charge. “It’s a load-bearing wall!” Marty screamed. He leapt with the passion and fury of a mother lion and struck with the expertise of a master cricketer, but Hagrid hardly noticed. Instead, Marty’s terrified form was thrown into the relentless maw, all teeth chomping in turn, and the poor man was finally consumed, each bone crushed in measured sequence, the whole broken body sliding like taffy down Hagrid’s oily throat.

“To Swine Wart,” Hagrid insisted, and when he reached the back wall, he slammed his forehead into it. The bricks pulverized instantly, and when the red dust settled, they proceeded gently to a hidden train station.

“That man died because I am a powerful wizard,” Dudley thought, and he was absolutely correct.

• * *

Dudley Dursley loitered on the thin pale station planks, tugging at his earlobe with his plump little fingers. Long ropey curls of Hagrid’s beard still stuck to his clothes and skin. Just moments before, he had listened to Hagrid while the giant magically shrank his frame: “Dudley!” -- and already his voice was squeaking and narrowing, sliding from oboe to flute -- “You have to run straight and pass unimpeded through the pillar to station 3 and 3/4 and 15/4 and 15/24,” which translated roughly to 6 and 6/4, plus 15/24, Dudley thought, straining his meager resources. Thereto simplified: 6 and 51/24, or 8 and 3/24, or 8 and 1/8. Was that right? A bamboo grove of pillars surrounded him. This pillar read: 64/8 and an eighth. A nearby pillar read 7/45, and another read 129/16 and half an eighth. Wait.

Where had Hagrid gone? Disappeared too thin, evaporated into squelching smoke and rosemary. Why couldn’t Dudley, greatest of all the wizards, do that too?

Meanwhile, the slick invertebrate Harry “urchin” Potter scrunched up behind pillar “e and i,” praying not to be noticed. Things had gotten dicey there for a moment; he hadn’t anticipated that Hagrid would reacquire his human form, or that he would shrink rapidly into nothingness, threatening the non-shrinking Harry with suffocation (or worse) between leather and leg. Gasping, agog, the sooty Potter prayed to what he hoped were wizard Gods that the Dudley would not discover him. “On Esther, on Dopple, on Winchcrack and Mottle,” he whispered hurriedly.

And Dudley was too distracted with his fruitless calculations. 

“Everyone down! Criminals beware!” The sounds of militant booties and swinging little pistols tickled from behind the pulverized brick wall. Nutters, thought Dudley. It’s the Feds! I’d better cheese it!

It wasn’t the Feds though. Britain has no such force. Still, the threat of beetle-black bullets clanking around Dudley’s bloated head was too much harassment to handle; he inhaled sharply, locomoted his little legs, and bull-rushed the pillar marked “Station 6 and 6/6.”

And in a rubbery flash, he was wasn’t.

Harry smacked his wet head and whipped his wiry round glasses off. “I’d better follow him,” he said in his best approximation of actual human English. Then he, too, pursued the path that Dudley had just disappeared through, but before he could reach it, he was shot twice by the Feds.

“We’re not the Feds!” A faux-burly waif with a trying mustache yawped. “Freeze!”

One bullet struck Harry in the chest, another in the calf. He stumbled, gasping, to the pillar, and in a frankly more rubbery and less impressive flash, he too vanished.

List of Demands:

• more skin on CBS