Much to the delight of nerds the world-over, The X-Files is returning to the Fox Network for a limited engagement. We are now less than one month from the start of six fresh hours of Fox Mulder questioning the government, chewing sunflower seeds, and being handsomely wry. One Sunday and five Mondays of Dana Scully trying to maintain faithful, scientific certainty in the face of dumbfounding evidence to the contrary. Soon, we’ll be able to ‘ship them all over again, even though we know for certain that they’ve already fallen in and out of love (and totally boned).
Yes, after 9 seasons and two movies the fans are still clamouring for more. But it might be a mistake to think that the brittle 1990s bones of Fox and Dana can carry the weight of modern expectation.
Much like Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, my husband and I fell in love over the X-Files. When we first met, he was working at a small bed and breakfast in Center City, Philadelphia. At midnight, his shift would end and we’d go get greasy diner food at Little Pete’s, then walk back to his house in South Philly, where the X-Files would be waiting with a double-episode block from 2 to 4 a.m.
Our first vacation was to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, home of the Mothman (referenced in “Detour,” season 5, episode 4, which actually takes place in Florida, but Mulder’s first guess is that the creature with red eyes might be related to Mothman). His first gift to me was a necklace with an engraving of the Fiji Mermaid (a creature referenced in “Humbug,” season 2, episode 20, the famous episode with real-life sideshow attractions Jim Rose and The Enigma). For our third anniversary, we bought ourselves the X-Files box set, which is now gathering dust since the show is available on both Netflix and Hulu. For Valentine’s Day a few years ago, he drew us as Mulder and Scully searching for the truth, then had it framed for me. It’s hanging over the crib in our son’s room. This is our mythology.
I bring all of this up not to gloat about how amazing my monster-of-the-week fueled marriage is, but to make sure you know that I’m a fan. Which I hope will soften the blow of what I’m about to say:
Why the fuck is X-Files even coming back?
The last two seasons were…rough. I Want to Believe, the 2008 movie, was nonsense. Didn’t we learn anything from season 7, episode 21 “Je Souhaite”? Don’t bring your dead brother back with a wish from a genie! Or, some wishes shouldn’t come true! Or something else that’s unclear to me because the show was winding down and the episode is really lame and is probably the very episode that made David Duchovny quit in the first place. Why can’t we just leave the X-Files in the drawer, under lock and key and the watchful eye of Mitch Pileggi?
I’m not the only one concerned. A lot of culture outlets are expressing both an obvious excitement and a poorly disguised fear. “But, Veronica Mars!” they say. “24! Community! Arrested Development!” they argue, pointing to other examples of successful reboots, but no one is talking about how those shows had much more recent shows to necromance.
In the mid-1990s, the show ascended in dark contrast to laugh track riddled goofballs like Friends, Martin, and Roseanne, and felt somehow more realistic than gritty dramas like ER or Homicide—shows that said their own things about the culture of the time, but didn’t teeter on that glorious edge of possibility. And, looking back, rarely do those shows of yore hold up the same way the X-Files does.In the past three years alone, we have seen new developments in the current breed of strange, creative, amazing television like Jessica Jones, The Leftovers, Mr. Robot, Fargo, and American Horror Story. Thanks to a more open market for creatives, more insight from audiences, “hipster cable,” and the rise of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, video entertainment is seeing some serious glory days, accessible to almost anyone. For that reason, I’m very concerned about X-Files making it’s “triumphant” return to the screen. No one wants to see someone they love embarrassed in front of an audience of millions.
Chris Carter knows what he’s up against. He’s no dummy. He helped launch the careers of those who created a lot of the shows that set the new gold standard of television: Vince Gilligan [Breaking Bad], Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa [Homeland], Frank Spotnitz [Man in the High Castle]. So I’ll be very interested to see how Carter and the show’s writers—many of whom are returning for the reboot, including James Wong and Darin Morgan—update the show to stay competitive. (I hope they maintain just enough of the original look and feel to keep it consistent, riding the coattails of novelty can produce garbage. Think Nightrider 2000, Melrose Place, and I can’t see into the future but, surely, Fuller House.)
The X-Files was an amazing staple of 1990s television. For me, X-Files fit perfectly in the space between Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings, and Are You Afraid of the Dark? As a pre-teen, tween, and teenager growing up with the X-Files, it was the last time in my life that I was able to “believe”—monsters, ghosts, aliens, honest government officials, and law-abiding police officers. A lot of that belief is gone because of the unfettered access the internet provides and the up-to-the-minute news flashes of how incredibly broken our government is. Incredible stories go viral and are disproven. Curious about something? Google it. Snopes is always there to kill your buzz or prove you right. None of that was possible in the 1990s. That kind of access to “the truth” just didn’t exist.
Recently, I read Inkoo Kang’s excellent piece on Vulture from 2013 (which I really wish I’d written), all about how loudmouth truthers and real-life conspiracy-theory-wielding squeaky wheels combined with the “political vulnerability” of the X-Files have ruined the Kang’s enjoyment of the show. Initially, I wanted to write something about why it is that we need the X-Files now. What work do Mulder and Scully have left to do in our culture and lives? Why did we raise the X-Signal and summon them from the dead? But Kang’s piece answered so many questions for me and I see now that the answer is plain: We’re more suspicious of the government than ever (rightly so), and if we’re able to find such horrors through the transparency, what else must be hiding just beyond what we can see? X-Files aims to capitalize on that by reminding us that Mulder saw it first and saw it best.
And though Kang’s piece positions Mulder as a truther and “the angry but noble muckracker that Patrick Henry wannabes saw themselves as, while waving misspelled posters as their versions of ‘the truth is out there’ slogan,” she ends with an optimistic spin that I hope to be the case: “Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden ignited a national discussion about government secrets…In another ten or twenty years’ time…Mulder might lose his tin-foil hat and look like pop culture’s greatest whistleblower. Transparency — so revered in peacetime, so easily and irreparably abandoned during war — might be the spark to help me fall back in love with The X-Files one day.”
Anyway, maybe it’s not that deep. Maybe, given the #XFiles2015 social media campaign by The Nerdist, driven by a podcast episode featuring Gillian Anderson, the answer is much simpler: Because we want it. Because we can have it. (Or, because everyone is still too horny for words and needs to see Fox and Dana make love…just once.)
Regardless, my husband and I will cuddle up to watch and fall in love all over again, even if it’s just with each other.
Courtney Algeo is a human person living in Minneapolis, MN with her husband and son. Every now and then she dusts off her @icecrmsocialite Twitter account, mostly to talk to Shonda Rhimes because, damn, there’s just something about Grey’s Anatomy.
I’m trying to think of even worse reboots of hit series.
‘The New Breaking Bad’: Walt didn’t actually die in Uncle Jack’s underground meth lab. He works for Jesse now, but has to keep it a secret because he’s trying to get back together with Skylar.
‘Soprano & Son’: Tony’s completely legit now, runs a tony restaurant in Tribeca with AJ. Neighborhood guest stars (Robert DeNiro, Taylor Swift) drop in and get into embarrassing scrapes.
Stephanie Scott (@StephScottYA) says
I could have written those same thoughts on my fandom to X Files and my very real hesitation. I remember working my way backward through the series to catch up from where I started in season six. I watched Ice alone in my dorm room on a weekend where everyone seemed to be somewhere else. I stayed up late one Christmas with a goldmine of late night X Files reruns and devoured them even though I had to wake up early the next day to face extended family. I have so many memories like this that binge-watching 9 seasons in 2 months cannot capture. The X Files spanned almost a decade, and to watch a show as it unfolds is a very different experience, and I think we attach ourselves to it in a different way.
Season 9 was a real chore, though. I never got through it during it’s original run, but finally got my series completion T-shirt two years ago. And yes, I’ll be watching the new episodes!