IDW’s “X-Files: Season 11 comic series (August 2015-March 2016) is the latest epic story to get truncated due to outside commercial forces. Usually, those outside forces are bad (see the cancellation of TV’s “Angel” and “Dollhouse” due to low ratings, or the cancellation of the “Star Wars” Expanded Universe – two years ago to this day – to make room for Disney’s vision). In this case, those outside forces are good – the return of “The X-Files” to TV, with six episodes earlier this year and hopefully more in the future. But it still led to the shortening of Joe Harris’ meticulously crafted Gibson Praise saga – which started back in Season 10, Issue 1, in 2013 – and that’s a shame.
In a letter at the back of the conclusive Issue 8, Harris admits:
“(I)t wasn’t without sadness when we realized the story I had originally projected to run for another 15-plus issues would need to be reimagined after early news of the show’s return began to trickle out last year, and the desire to launch a new comics series that would reflect the show’s lead seemed an obvious move.”
As with “Star Wars” EU fans, this is a case where the die-hard “X-Files” fan gets pushed aside for the casual fan. It’s a supreme irony that the comic is considered to be aimed at die-hard fans, yet it also needs to be canceled so as not to confuse casual fans, who might pick up an “X-Files” comic and become a serious fan. The circular logic is almost as mind-boggling as Praise’s machinations throughout Seasons 10 and 11.
I would’ve liked to have read Harris’ full 25-issue Season 11, but since I’m in a group deemed to be the minority (the group actually purchasing every “X-Files” comic), I’ll never get that. So all we can judge is his eight-issue Season 11. As someone who loves a tight continuity in my sci-fi sagas, the thing I most hoped to see in the conclusion was Gibson using his time-manipulation powers to position Mulder and Scully back in 2013, thus “wiping out” the events of the comic series from the characters’ minds – similar to how Mulder has had his memories erased after seeing flying saucers — while still retaining them as a “true” part of the saga. Harris doesn’t precisely do that, but he kind of does, through the invention of a “crucible” in “Endgames” (Issues 6-8), the trilogy that seems to mark the point at which he had to aggressively re-imagine and the Season 11 arc for the sake of shortening it.
Mulder: “What is this place, Gibson?”
Gibson: “A looking glass with infinite planes and surfaces. A focal point, where that temporal phenomenon so artfully employed by those beyond the stars is harnessed. In this crucible of my design and creation, almost anything is possible.”
Artist Matthew Dow Smith draws images on the prisms of the Crucible, and one of them shows Mulder wearing the jacket from the premiere of the 2016 miniseries, with his back turned to Scully. This seems to indicate the alternate (“true,” if you will) reality of the TV timeline, where M&S’s relationship is strained. Issue 8 ends with Mulder stepping out of the Crucible. However, there is no timeline reset; we’re left with the notion that the Seasons 10-11 comics timeline goes forward, even as we readers will be switching over to the TV miniseries timeline when the new ongoing “X-Files” title launches this month. So, to summarize: Seasons 10-11 exist in the same multiverse as the TV miniseries, but not the same universe — Harris doesn’t directly link the two timelines together. Basically, he splits the difference.
Consider me mildly satisfied.
Setting aside continuity concerns, is Season 11 any good from a story perspective? Mostly, yes. Much of the season consists of Gibson controlling people with escalating levels of power. Praise gets Scully to help apprehend Mulder for the FBI, and controls Skinner in the finale. Gibson’s machinations would have been more satisfying if we could’ve seen where Harris planned to go with them in a 25-issue arc. Even his origin story, Issue 5 (“My Name is Gibson Praise”), didn’t allow me to totally grasp his perspective or sympathize with him. I get the idea that he’s lonely because he’s super-smart. But how that necessities or excuses him causing mass destruction and death, I’m not sure.
As it stands, we get gray aliens, faceless alien rebels, Mulder on the run from his own employers – a lot of old-hat stuff. The revelation that Mulder and Scully’s boss, Deputy Director Morales, is a faceless alien rebel, is pretty satisfying, as it links with the end of the 2015 “Season 11 X-Mas Special” wherein she was (inexplicably at the time) narrating the story from an alien point-of-view. Harris’ chronicle of CANTUS – a powerful force in the military-industrial and governmental spying complexes – is on-point and timely (he even makes use of the real-world NSA facility in Utah), but I miss the deeper levels he would’ve explored in a full-length season.
The highlight of Season 11 is actually its lone Monster of the Month arc, Issues 2-4 (“Home Again”). Admittedly, “Home Again” does have a substantial amount of mytharc material, but even Harris would probably admit the main point in having Gibson send Mulder to Garden County, Nebraska, to rediscover the Peacock family is to tell a good horror sequel. Interestingly, the TV miniseries features an episode titled “Home Again,” but even though it’s written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, the scribes behind Season 4’s “Home,” it is not related to “Home.” Season 11’s “Home Again,” on the other hand, is a sequel.
And it’s a darn good one, even better than Season 10’s “Hosts,” as Harris delivers great sexual horror, particularly at the conclusion of Issue 2 when Mulder is coerced into procreating not with the young female Peacock – who is not particularly attractive, but who at least looks human – but rather with the old limbless matriarch who is rolled out from under the bed! Pepper in swarms of Peacock toddlers who have faces of deformed old men, Edmund’s method of feeding his mother by chewing and regurgitating food, and the implication that failed Peacock babies are fed to the pigs, and this is envelope-pushing “X-Files” horror in the finest tradition of the original “Home,” which Fox refused to air in reruns for several years.
Additionally, Harris gives us flashbacks to the car crash that killed the Peacock patriarch and maimed the mother. This adds another level of horror because we can now sympathize with the Peacocks on a human level, whereas in “Home” they were safely in the category of the unrelatable “other.”
If IDW’s new ongoing “X-Files” title is going to tie in with Chris Carter’s TV plans like it promises (I don’t necessarily believe the promise, as Season 10-11 was supposed to be the “official” continuation, too … until it wasn’t anymore), it will want to consider using the Topps and Wildstorm approach to “The X-Files” – telling stories set before the current point of the TV narrative. This means more standalone issues, which might be disappointing for Harris, whose work so far has been 75 percent mytharc stories. On the plus side, “Home Again” demonstrates that he has tremendous talent for writing Monster of the Month yarns, too.
Comments
I also was very disappointed that the timeline was accelerated from 25 to 8 issues. An odd decision, since comic book buyers are the kind of crowd you would expect to know the difference between comics series set in one continuity and one in a different continuity, but IDW preferred to sabotage its own product.
I found the resolution quite satisfying, especially given the constraints Harris had. His writing was quite dense and I had to read each issue a couple of times to understand the implications. I like the ending precisely because of this: it goes beyond just a Gibson-Mulder stand-off but has implications on thwarting Earth’s colonization by aliens in the future (a future?). Essentially the resolution of the entire series’ mythology! Something we might or might not see in the live incarnation of the show.
My Seasons 10/11 reviews: http://www.eatthecorn.com/season-10-11-issues-list…# Posted By orodromeus | 4/3/17 9:09 AM
Thanks for the comment. I’ll have to check out your in-depth X-Files comics reviews. Should keep me busy for a while. # Posted By John Hansen | 4/5/17 1:42 PM