I Want To Believe

The X-Files (1993-2002)

The Midnight Channel is normally a movie review blog. However, with The X-Files back on the air this weekend, and the whole series (bar the two movies) available on streaming services, how could I talk about anything else?

You probably know the basic setup. FBI Agent Fox Mulder is a conspiracy theorist whose unconventional beliefs and methods have resulted in him being stuffed away in a basement office where he investigates the X-Files, an ever-growing collection of unsolved cases with a possible paranormal or extraterrestrial element first started by J. Edgar Hoover. At the beginning of the series, Agent Dana Scully is brought in, ostensibly to debunk and disgrace Mulder's work. They clash at first, but over the course of the series, they develop a complex relationship and uncover a vast governmental conspiracy. The show was divided up into two types of episodes: "Myth Arc" episodes, which chronicled the central conspiracy and a coming alien invasion and generally fell apart as it went on because series creator Chris Carter didn't really know where it was going; and "Monster of the Week" episodes, where the agents investigated a one-shot threat, be it a genetic human/fluke hybrid preying on sewer workers, a man who projects his dreams into reality to deadly effect, or just a family of particularly depraved hillbillies. There was a memorable recurring cast. Let's go over the central players.

Agent Fox Mulder

Mulder was actually my least favorite member of the central cast. When he starts out, he's a bit of a dick, and he gets much more entertaining when the series is comfortable enough with its characters to start making him the butt of a good amount of its jokes. There's a certain element of self-deprecation in his character, poking fun at the show's audience through its main character. Mulder is a determined agent whose suspicions are often correct, but he also calls phone sex lines, grandstands whenever he's given an audience, owns about 10 of the same black suit, and jerks off to videos of Bigfoot.

Agent Dana Scully

Scully is the ultimate badass, and if there was a show where she and Xena teamed up to solve crimes or fight the Greek gods or whatever, it would be the best show ever made. She basically keeps Mulder from running off the leash, and while she remains skeptical (except in cases involving religion, in which case Mulder, of all people, becomes the skeptic) throughout, her sharp mind and level-headed pursuit of mundane explanations while Mulder is jumping on the nearest wild theory actually ends up uncovering more than the people who assigned her to the X-Files ever expected.

Assistant Director Walter Skinner

Skinner is Mulder and Scully's grouchy, bespectacled superior, who generally takes no bullshit from either of them or from anyone else. He's entertainingly gruff and abrasive and plays the straight man to a lot of jokes over the series. He's also probably Mulder and Scully's greatest ally, even though the show tries to throw a shady light on him at first.

The Smoking Man

My favorite character in the series, the Smoking Man was the closest it really had to a single main villain, so it's curious to note that he's not actually in charge of the conspiracy, even though he's the face we put to it - he's more like middle management. While his superiors are working with the aliens to save their own skin, the Smoking Man seems to be involved simply because he hates people and believes they're incapable of survival without someone to keep them in line, yet he keeps having to kill the few people he respects, including JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., for the danger they pose to the conspiracy. He shapes history and nations like an evil version of Forrest Gump, and at one point even delivers a misanthropic variant on the "box of chocolates" speech. Given that I found him the most relatable character on the show, I'm probably some sort of terrible person.

The Lone Gunmen

A trio of lovable conspiracy theorists that Mulder hangs out with and gets information from sometimes. They're weirder than him, although they say Mulder's weirder than them. They're the show's comic relief, and they had a very short-lived spinoff that had its own bit of conspiracy surrounding it because its pilot episode, which aired before 9/11, was about a CIA conspiracy to hijack a couple of 747s and fly them into the World Trade Center so they could blame Middle Eastern terrorists and justify an increase in defense spending. Yeah.

It's impossible to overstate the impact The X-Files had on television as a creative medium, or how much it is a 1990s period piece. Along with Seinfeld and Friends, it was one of the defining shows of the decade, and perhaps not coincidentally, its post-90s seasons just plain sucked - as if that decade were a Petri dish outside which the show could not sustain itself, withering and dying with the series finale "The Truth," which might still be the worst two hours of television that I've ever watched, resolving nothing, and survived only by an underwhelming stand-alone movie in 2008 that was basically an extended monster-of-the-week episode. Its first six seasons, however, are without a doubt some of the best TV ever made, and the series is one of the few shows I will "binge-watch."

From the beginning, it's steeped in the politics and culture of the 90s. The internet is a new thing, only occasionally important as a plot point, and even then, we see AOL chat rooms and databases, not a hint of social media just yet. The agents' cell phones are bulky, with big green digital readouts. Beneath the unmistakable aesthetic runs a current of paranoia also particular to the 90s. With the relative peace and prosperity of the Clinton presidency in effect, there remains a dark thread of post-Vietnam, post-Cold War unease, the same wellspring from which the Metal Gear Solid video game series draws the best of its lore. The show makes you nostalgic for the days before the anti-vaxxer movement and Benghazi and the birthers, when all the conspiracies were about aliens, mind control and human experimentation. When the crap people thought the government was up to  was really out there, not just pants-on-head stupid. It's a kind of snapshot of a 10-year-period that saw an immense amount of cultural and technological change.

The series clearly has its roots in Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a series that may have simply come along before its time, and The X-Files' early seasons tend to follow the same sort of formula, with the monsters of the week being slight variations on standard-issue horror creatures: a ghost, a werewolf, a rogue AI, even the Jersey Devil. As it went on and acquired its own identity, its monsters got stranger, and the series often dipped into absurdism and parody with episodes such as "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'," which deals with a Rashomon-style investigation into an alien abduction framed as a series of interviews with a Truman Capote stand-in played by Charles Nelson Reilly. It's widely considered one of the best episodes of the show, and its writer, Darin Morgan, is back for the new season to write episode 3, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster." Season 5 had a crossover episode with Homicide: Life on the Street with a guest appearance by Richard Belzer as John Munch, and season 6 saw a crossover with Cops, another distinct relic of the 90s. Other monsters got weirder as well - a scientist with a shadow made of dark matter, a guy who regenerates by eating cancer, a trash golem that patrols a gated community and kills residents whose lawn decorations aren't up to code. Sometimes, the threat isn't supernatural at all - it might just be a crocodile or a serial killer or simply mass hysteria.

The X-Files is also where an absolutely ridiculous number of actors got their start. It launched the careers of both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. More future celebrities than I can count show up all through the series - Seth Green, Jack Black, Giovanni Ribisi and Bryan Cranston, to name a few, and in fact Cranston owes his star-making role as Walter White on to his appearance on The X-Files, as the episode was written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Dozens of TV shows owe their existence - or at least their popularity - to The X-Files. We certainly wouldn't have Supernatural or Fringe or Grimm, and even non-paranormal conspiracy shows like 24 and The Blacklist owe an immense debt to Carter's series. It came along at the right time, took root in a particular era of American culture, and it changed television. Even the term "shipping" had its origins on X-Files message boards in the 90s.

Which is why I can't help but worry a little about the new episodes beginning Sunday. People who watch Seinfeld these days, too young to have watched it during its original run, don't see what's so funny about it precisely because everything it did has been aped by nearly every post-Seinfeld sitcom to the extent that the original seems old hat. Seinfeld built the modern sitcom. The X-Files built the modern conspiracy show and the modern monster-of-the-week paranormal investigation series, so what does it have to offer us now? At the very least, I think it has an opportunity to update its conspiracies to the post-9/11 era, the age of the Patriot Act and drones and constant surveillance and cyber-warfare. If it does that, it could still end up being really interesting and setting itself apart from other series that followed in its footsteps. We'll find out tomorrow night - which seems so very distant. If you're looking for a few episodes to watch before the premiere, here's my personal top five.

1. Jose Chung's "From Outer Space" (S3E20): A near-perfect piece of television. It's experimental, funny, poignant and deeper than its comedic bent leads one to believe. It's ultimately a story about our desire to connect with other people, despite the fact that we are all, in our own way, isolated by our perceptions. It's also got a pair of Men in Black played by Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek.

2. Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose (S2E04): Also written by Darin Morgan. Peter Boyle plays a world-weary psychic who helps Mulder and Scully find a serial killer. He can't tell the future - all he can see is the way a person's going to die. Including himself. Again, one of the funniest, saddest episodes of the series.

3. Squeeze (S1E03): The third episode of the series, and the first really good one. This episode scared the living hell out of me when I first watched it during its initial broadcast. It still scares the hell out of me.

4. The Host (S2E02): A great monster of the week episode, with Mulder and Scully hunting down a fluke man created by radioactive mutation. Also, the fluke man was played by Darin Morgan, though he didn't write the episode. I think he might just be involved in all of the best things this show has ever done.

5. Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip (S2E25/S3E01/02): The season 2 finale and first two episodes of season 3. This three-part story is where the conspiracy arc really hit its stride, and it was never this strong again. Mulder and Scully clash with the Smoking Man over a buried train car that may or may not be full of alien corpses, and for the first time, the agents suffer dire consequences for their actions.

Remember, the truth is out there. And trust no one.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video.