In 2002, I watched “The X-Files” series finale with a couple of friends at a friend’s apartment. Obligatorily, we watched it with no lights on. I had been keeping up with the series, and was generally an apologist for it even though I didn’t pretend to understand the details of the alien colonization/government conspiracy mythology. My two friends had stopped watching the show years earlier, but felt they should watch the finale for old times’ sake and see how it wrapped up.
Like most viewers, we were unimpressed with the conclusion; in my rewatching project, I still didn’t like the two-part finale (“The Truth”), ranking those episodes at No. 16-17 of the 20-episode final season. But at least it put a bow on things: The Cigarette-Smoking Man was dead (again … but this time in an unambiguous explosion) and we were told the colonization would begin in 2012, perhaps setting the stage for another movie. But in 2002, “The X-Files” was closed.
After a couple of brief relaunches – a mostly disliked 2008 standalone film (“I Want to Believe”) that reaffirmed Mulder and Scully’s love and a 2013 Season 10 IDW comic that found Chris Carter plotting the first arc and making sure it fit with canon — “The X-Files” returned to TV on Sunday for the first of a six-episode miniseries (it continues over the next five Mondays on Fox). A return to the small screen – and the fact that people are excited about it — would’ve seemed miraculous to those three friends in the darkened apartment watching the series wither and die. But it’s less miraculous in an era where “Star Wars: Episode VII” exists and where “Twin Peaks” is shooting new episodes.
The first episode back, “My Struggle,” might remind fickle types why they lost interest 14 years ago. Or it might spark their interest anew. Writer-director Carter repackages the old mythology as if it’s something new, but he’s just restating the old themes. I imagine the fan base will be split on whether it feels fresh enough; I’m on the fence myself.
A lot of “My Struggle” is a listing of tropes. We meet a girl, Sveta, who has been abducted several times; she’s the latest take on Cassandra Spender. The Cigarette-Smoking Man – who appears in the final scene – is a major player, as yet again, the fact of his death means nothing on this show. (All snark aside, the image of an assistant helping the CSM smoke through the hole in his neck is deliciously villainous.) A laconic monologue by Mulder opens the show, recapping the events up through the closing of the X-Files in 2002 (and ignoring the ’08 movie, because nothing much happened there, and the IDW comics, which switched from canon to non-canon when this miniseries came about).
Aside from a quickly dismissed red herring about how the aliens may have been a government cover story (something teased and refuted once before, in Season 4), “My Struggle” clearly lays out that the shadow government (the old Syndicate’s bosses?) is in the midst of a push to shape the world as it sees fit. The baddies are more aggressive than in the ’90s: We see a flying saucer blow up Sveta’s car “Independence Day”-style. Mulder and “Truth Squad” TV host Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale) specifically describe the post-9/11 world, from the Patriot Act to the NDAA to the FEMA camps to police militarization to the endless wars.
At one point, Skinner (Mitch Pileggi, who joins David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in the vintage-style opening credits) – still an FBI assistant director — tells Mulder that things have only gotten weirder since the X-Files were closed. However, hearing Mulder and O’Malley outline the way the world has changed doesn’t make things weirder, it makes things clearer. Rather than a shadowy and shifting conflict, the battle lines are now clearly drawn.
While the 2008 movie and IDW’s Season 10 and 11 (so far) failed to address the 2012 colonization promise from “The Truth,” “My Struggle” does, albeit in a throwaway line from O’Malley. It turns out that 2012 marked the beginning of this more aggressive push by the aliens and their human conspirators. It’s not overt colonization, like most of us pictured in our heads. Rather, 2012 marked the ratcheting-up of the shadow government’s game; perhaps that year signaled a switch from discrediting alien abductees to flat-out killing them, as they do with Sveta. It would’ve been nice if Carter had given us an overt example from 2012, because as far as I can tell, that was just another year on a continuum that dates back to 2001, a truer example of a sea-change date (although Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex in 1960).
Just as “The Truth” is a summary of the first nine seasons, “My Struggle” is a thesis statement of the miniseries. But there’s still a mystery to unravel, and we don’t get any hints about that mystery in this episode. In the real world, the aforementioned abuses of civil liberties happen because of the inertia of governments: They get bigger and more powerful for the sake of getting bigger and more powerful. In “The X-Files,” there has to be more to it, otherwise it’s just a libertarian ranting on Facebook rather than a compelling storyline.
Still, it is a pleasure to see the ol’ agents again. Duchovny and Anderson continue in their depressed mode from late in the original series and “I Want to Believe.” It’s not that the actors are unengaged, it’s that the characters are depressed: Mulder because he can’t comfortably pursue his life’s work and because Scully has split from him, Scully because she’s exhausted from trying (and failing, it turns out) to live with Mulder and for taking on the world’s most challenging medical problems in her day job.
Even when she has an amazing success, like implanting ears onto a kid born without them, Scully can’t enjoy it. Part of it is because she’s cursed by life – the latest twist is that, sigh, she learns she (and therefore her son, William) possesses alien DNA. But part of it is that she gradually became unhappy as she followed Mulder down his rabbit hole of investigating the shadow government. Rather than the type to enjoy a drink with her coworkers, Scully is the type to address a familiar colleague as “Nurse.”
Mulder gets some of the old spark back when O’Malley takes him to see an ARV (alien reproduction vehicle) that was made by a secret group that seemingly splintered off from the shadow government. Sure, Mulder is cynical in his middle age and he rips up his “I Want to Believe” poster upon revisiting his old office. But he perks up when he sees a demonstration of the ARV’s ability to hover using free energy and to temporarily disappear from space and time.
Just as Carter effortlessly riffs on his familiar themes, Duchovny and Anderson have not lost any of their chemistry. The same goes for Duchovny and Pileggi. Skinner has slightly mellowed, but – in vintage Skinner fashion – he gets in Mulder’s face and tells him to calm down before they both get “pissed off.” Throw in some Mark Snow music and the typewriter-font title cards – and I dutifully turned off all the lights to complete the mood — and there’s no denying we’re firmly back in “The X-Files” world. Not the 1990s, but the 2016 “X-Files” world, which – as Mulder and O’Malley’s recitation of our government’s moral crimes attests – is more “X-Files-y” than ever.
It might’ve been nice if “My Struggle” offered up a truly fresh storyline rather than making us wait another night, but it’s undeniable that the return to the world of this beloved TV show is pretty thrilling by itself.