On Sunday night, The X-Files returned to television.
It had been nearly 15 years since Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) allowed viewers to dip into show creator Chris Carter’s phantasmagoric world, each episode bringing with it a new monster or conspiracy theory. Rarely preachy, and often humorous, one had the sense that the show did not take itself terribly seriously. Like its ancestor, The Twilight Zone, The X-Files made you think. Just not that hard.
But for those viewers—on the left and right—who were inclined to believe in shadow governments and global cabals, the show must have felt exhilarating. Here, finally—and on Fox no less!—the truth was revealed. Most important of all, Mulder, the only character in the series that truly believed was vindicated, week after week; Scully, the Catholic rationalist who held tight, more or less, to her belief in the goodness of the state, was proved wrong time and again. Then, right around the time America was attacked and the drums of war started to sound, the show went off the air. Suddenly, for many people, fear of a strong government with technological prowess abated. Anti-government conspiracy theorizing lost its sheen.
And then, in 2013, Edward Snowden committed treason; a trove of classified NSA documents was revealed to the world and the mind of every cuckoo set ablaze. One particular cuckoo—who also happened to be the creator of The X-Files—decided it was time for a revival. This was Chris Carter’s moment:
The new X-Files, it seems, is Chris Carter’s version of raising a fuss.
Episode one starts predictably enough. The X-Files section of the FBI has been out of commission for about a decade; Scully is a practicing surgeon, Mulder is a laze-about. Out of the blue, assistant director of the FBI, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), calls Scully, anxious to set the team up with right-wing conspiracy theorist and popular television host, Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale). From here, we are off to the races, and by the time the episode ends the government is revealed to have had secret alien technology for 70 years, Scully has sequenced her genes to discover she has alien DNA, Mulder theorizes everything in their past was a lie (what a shame!), and the Cigarette Smoking Man returns.
This is all well and good; the only problem is we’ve seen this all before…in the original X-Files! Though the technology has changed—Mulder now fiddles with a cell phone and is conscious of drones overhead—the conspiracy theories have not. The same storyline of a new world order, controlled by an elite group of men bent on global domination, remains in place. How boring.
Hopefully in the next episode we get monsters.
