Almost 14 years after the broadcast of its series finale in 2002, and eight years after feature film sequel ‘I Want to Believe’, The X-Files has returned to television. The show finds former FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) doing about what you would expect: Mulder sequestered away in some obscure corner of the Midwest, the webcam on his laptop taped over, pursuing odds and ends of alien conspiracies; Scully assisting in surgeries at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, still in amicable touch with Mulder but otherwise steering clear of his obsessions.
Naturally, the two quickly find themselves drawn back into the alien conspiracy game when ultra-right-wing personality Tad O’Malley (Community’s Joel McHale) seeks them out via their old boss at the FBI, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), to enlist their help in revealing the sinister conspiracy behind the abduction of a young woman (Annet Mahendru) and a top-secret government technology project. We are also treated to flashbacks to the experiences of a young doctor at the Roswell crash in the 1940s, whose relevance is revealed late in the episode.
All in all, the premiere turned out to be a classic ‘X-Files’ “mythology” episode (aka an episode that moves the broader arc of the season and series along), and therein lies the problem. There are, in fact, multiple issues at play here, not least that the “mythos” of The X-Files was always its most poorly thought-out and executed element; a delirious grab-bag of conspiracy theory and alien folklore that never actually cohered into anything satisfying. One could argue that’s largely beside the point, given the sometimes-great stories it enabled, but foregrounding it so thoroughly in the big series revival will leave those without intimate knowledge of the series (like this viewer) somewhat lost at sea.
Additionally, there is the unfortunate loss of most of what made the series aesthetically compelling. The ‘X-Files’ was always a dark show, literally. Heavy shadows, suited men having cryptic conversations in dark rooms, cigarette smoke thrown into relief by the light of solitary desk lamps; even broad daylight looked muted. The first episode of the revival, directed as well as written by series creator Chris Carter, has traded all that in for the dull blues of your average Fox procedural, with precious little of the macabre touch of the old series. Carter is not the greatest director of actors either, with absolutely atrocious line-readings abounding throughout the episode.
Yet perhaps the most pressing issue facing this latest truncated season is why it even exists in the first place, beyond capitalizing on fan nostalgia and a recognizable brand. One is left wondering just what The ‘X-Files’ could possibly have to say in 2016, and the answer is…well, it’s not entirely clear. Carter attempts to address the contemporary post-9/11 landscape of American culture, somewhat ham-handedly, but it doesn’t really work. There’s an admirable attempt to re-orient the series’ mythology solely to the actions of powerful men rather than aliens, and to engage with current late-capitalist turmoil, but half of it gets put in the mouth of right-wing nutjob O’Malley and the rest is obscured in a haze of lingering plot threads.
The original ‘X-Files’ was a paean to a weird America that was already, in 1993, beginning to disappear with advent of the Internet, the margins being pushed back further and further until they disappeared entirely. It used the whole of post-war American conspiracy theory and folklore as a canvas on which to project what was, essentially, an anthology series with a recurring set of protagonists, fueled by pre-millennial anxiety and the dynamite chemistry of Duchovny and Anderson, and looking damn good while it did so. It’s too early to say for sure what this latest rendition of ‘X-Files’ will be, but it’s not likely to be anywhere near as interesting.
