I've never understood why a TV show-turned-movie being an "extended episode of the series" is a bad thing. People complained that all the first X-Files movie was was a long episode - but isn't that basically what you'd want to see? A feature-length installment in the series? If you try to make it too different you run the risk of it not being enough like the series it's based on.

And I don't see how you can say that TMP isn't a "glorified television episode" - it's painfully obvious that that movie was intended to be a TV episode, but got a lot of extra B.S. added to it to pad it out to a feature-length story. If any of the films deserve that title, it's TMP.