There have been many media articles written in the past which posit the 1990s as a sort of historical transition point between the end of the Cold War and the fears of terrorism that have dominated the 21st century. For Americans, it was a time of relative peace and prosperity. The United States had declared itself the sole remaining superpower of Earth, with the biggest national crisis during the decade conducted not over a war or a budget, but whether the president received oral sex.
However, during this time there was also a significant undercurrent of distrust toward government as an institution of authority, which was evident in some elements of both sides of the ideological spectrum. Whether it be the vestiges of untruths and half-truths from Watergate, Vietnam, and other real incidents of government impropriety, or modern conservative fears of federal government overreach that led to militia movements and the Oklahoma City Bombing—when a society has no external threats on which to assign blame for their troubles or the unknown, certain segments have a tendency to turn their suspicions inward in search of enemies and answers (i.e., terrorist sympathizers or secret government conspiracies) or really, really outward (i.e., aliens and lizard people). Because the least satisfying phrase in the English language is “I don’t know,” and sometimes people will find a reason to believe bullshit if it confirms their ideas.
One of the most popular TV series of the ‘90s was Fox’s The X-Files, which used this sort of paranoia as a jumping-off point into a search for a truth usually being hidden by powerful forces. Created and produced by Chris Carter, the series followed FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigated paranormal incidents and battled a massive conspiracy to cover up the existence of aliens. Moreover, the show presented a world where normalcy was a facade, with fascinating and dangerous possibilities always lurking behind the veneer. The X-Files seemed to come around at just the right time to catch the cultural zeitgeist, where people were still pondering whether Lee Harvey Oswald really killed President Kennedy and were willing to giggle at suggestions that modern computers and cellphones are reverse-engineered technology from the Roswell UFO.
With the return of the show for a six-episode miniseries run, The X-Files arguably still taps into societal fears about lack of control, especially in an age of nebulous fear and constant surveillance, and there’s nostalgia in seeing Duchovny and Anderson together again. But this time around are the conspiracy elements as fun, since they sound like something a Tea Party member might concoct?
I remember reading an interview with Chris Carter from back during The X-Files’ original run where he discussed the fundamental element at the core of the series being belief in something for which there is little to no evidence. Even though the show positions the Mulder-Scully dynamic as true believer versus skeptic, both of the characters share this trait, just in different selective ways (e.g., for Mulder it’s aliens and the paranormal, and for Scully it’s her religious beliefs). And if you replace the word “alien” with “God,” some of the same issues apply. Mulder is at times tilting at windmills on a quixotic quest to prove something that is absurd when written down in a chart or explained with words, and at times seemed like he would be an insufferable asshole to live and deal with, as much as any real-world conspiracy theorist one might have read about or heard.
As the series returns for this six-episode miniseries, we live in a world where a large number of people cannot be reasoned with, and cling to fantasies about Kenyan birth certificates, 9/11 truthers, Obamacare “death panels,” vaccines being dangerous, Jade Helm 15 takeovers, FEMA death camps, and government stormtroopers coming to get their guns. And this new iteration of The X-Files seems to fold almost every right-wing conspiracy theory into the show’s mythology.
Fourteen years after the closure of the FBI’s X-Files division, Mulder is contacted by his former boss, Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), who requests he and Scully speak with a right-wing webcaster named Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale). Instead of confirming what Mulder has been led to believe during his investigations, O’Malley—who’s a sort of cross between Alex Jones and Glenn Beck —claims to have evidence proving everything which was part of the The X-Files’ prior mythology was a smokescreen to cover up the real truth of a quasi-governmental human conspiracy to use captured alien technology for taking over the United States and then the world. This all connects to a woman (Annet Mahendru) with weird DNA and fragmented memories of giving birth to something that wasn’t exactly human, a triangular ship with some cool properties, the Roswell crash, and a certain man who likes his cigarettes.
Of course, this leads to some standard elements of The X-Files, which include abductions, alien-human hybrids, Scully questioning whether the whole mess is bullshit, Mulder thinking he finally has proof before it all gets destroyed, and then both characters coming together to move forward as a team while sinister forces prepare to oppose them. That it fall backs into this formula is both comforting in a nostalgic sense and frustrating, since this miniseries allows the opportunity to truly breakout in different directions. All in all, it’s a messy episode, and it’s messy because it has to reintroduce the characters while creating a new alien mythology for the show while throwing out a good bit of the old one—which made not one lick of sense by the end of the series’ original run.
If you’re a fan of the show, it’s good to see Mulder and Scully working together again, and Duchovny and Anderson’s chemistry is the same as it ever was. And while I didn’t think this was that great of an episode, there’s potential for the series to use that chemistry for good storytelling.
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The miniseries will not be all alien mythology all the time: Without going into any spoilers, this miniseries really stretches its legs and breaks out of the formula in its future episodes, since they function as stand-alone stories more inline with Carter’s inspiration for The X-Files: the television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Episode 3, which was written by X-Files vet Darin Morgan and called “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” is a stand-out, since it plays around with the series’ monster-of-the-week formula by going meta with it.
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Godwin’s Law: The name of the first episode is “My Struggle,” with the phrase being the English translation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. However, Carter has stated in interviews the title is supposed to be a reference to Karl Ove Knausgard's Min Kamp.
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Pay equity: According to Gillian Anderson, she was offered half of David Duchovny’s pay to appear in this X-Files miniseries, which mirrored her treatment during the original series.
Anderson found herself fighting just to stand on (literal) equal ground with her male co-star. The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.”
“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!” … The work Anderson put into securing equal pay back in the ’90s seemingly came undone when it came time to negotiate pay for this year’s event series. Once again, Anderson was being offered “half” of what they would pay Duchovny.
“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson says of the pay disparity, first disclosed in the Hollywood Reporter. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it. “Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”
She stammers for a moment, at a loss for words. “It is… sad,” she finally says. “It is sad.”
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Knowing when to end: An argument can be made that The X-Files is a prime example of a series that should have ended around season 7 during its original run. Are there episodes in seasons 8 and beyond which are enjoyable? Yes, but when Duchovny left the show, it wasn’t the same. Elements of those seasons will appear in this miniseries, most notably Annabeth Gish as Monica Reyes.
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December 22, 2012: One of the many reasons the show had to reboot the original alien mythology is the original series finale implied the black oil/grey aliens would invade Earth in December of 2012, and it was the true reasoning behind the end of the Mayan calendar. Another aspect of that reveal was what seemed to have been the on-screen death of the Cigarette Smoking Man in the final episode, with him now alive again in this miniseries.
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Go big or go home: Carter has said in interviews he felt the second X-Files film — I Want To Believe — was a “mistake,” since it was too small of a story. And if there’s a third movie to come out of this, he wants it to be big in scale.
“If there is a third movie it’s got to be a gigantic movie,” Carter said. “It would have to be a big-budget movie; that’s what X-Files fans want. We tried to do a very small movie about faith the second time out. And it was released in the middle of summer tentpole movies. It was a misstep in that way. I think [a third movie] has to be more like the first movie.”