After weeks of news rumours that The X-Files was on the verge of returning to television with its original cast, Fox has finally made it official: The series will return for six episodes, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprising their roles as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Show creator Chris Carter will guide the mini-revival, the network announced on Tuesday.
For me, the truth is found in two seemingly conflicting thoughts: First, if more recent attempts to reach beyond the show’s cultural home in the ‘90s and connect The X-Files with the 21st century tell us anything, the revival has a decent chance of being terrible.
And second, I am a little bit excited about it returning.
In other words, let the takes pile up into the sky and brush the underbellies of the UFOs hiding among the clouds. I am going to enjoy the idea of The X-Files returning for as long as I wish, up to — and, God willing, including — the moment the first new episode starts to air.
It is a little strange to be a current fan of a former television show; there’s a difference between “I enjoyed The Sopranos when it aired” and “I still think about The Sopranos and will talk your ear off about it given the smallest opening.” It is stranger still to be a current fan of The X-Files, which for many people faded away slowly over its last few seasons, as its stars reduced their presence on the show or left it altogether. There was also the curious late-season implosion of the series’s main “mythology” plot line, which at some point just seemed to stop making sense, even for a conspiracy theory.
Every fan seems to have his or her own date of spiritual death for the show. Some say it’s no good past the third season out of nine total, but those people are very wrong. Sure, Season 3 had Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, which is widely considered to be the best (or one of the best) episodes of the series’s entire output, and Pusher, my personal favourite. But the show is enjoyable much later into its run.
Yet nothing lasts forever. I’ve had Mulder’s badge number memorised since middle school, but I still haven’t seen every episode of the show’s final season. I did watch the 2008 film revival of the series, I Want To Believe, but let us not speak of it. And yet, I return again and again to this show.
I’m not exactly sure what it is about The X-Files revival that triggers unqualified excitement for me. It could be nostalgia. It could be the personal early influence of a show that featured a female character who was a smart, grumpy sceptic-type. But I do know I’m not alone. And,
I bet more people than you’d think have their own X-files, a cultural artefact they’re waiting to see again in the present day.
And don’t tell them that what they’re waiting for might not be exactly as good as what they remember.
We don’t know a lot about what Carter has planned — he told the Daily Beast on Tuesday that his team hasn’t written the episodes yet. But he noted that the new episodes will be “honest to the characters, and what happened to them since the series ended and the second movie.”
I am fully aware that the six new X-Files episodes will probably not be Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, or even X-Cops, the Cops-style Season 7 episode that served as a self-referential smorgasbord of in-jokes for longtime fans.
For now, I am choosing to assume that there is a chance the revival will be everything great about the show and the many careers it launched. I refuse to listen to any of your reasonable, rational explanations about how disappointing this new series could be. Instead, I will cover your doubts with a million posters, showing an alien ship hovering in the sky, over the words, “I want to believe.”
