Photo: Robert Falconer/FOX
There’s a moment in an upcoming episode of the new season of The X-Files that’ll bring a smile to the face of anyone who’s stuck with this show through thick and thin. FBI special agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) are in a cemetery, trying to find a certain tombstone, when they begin attaching historically significant dates to the birth dates and death dates on the stones. This one was born on the day this famous person died, and this other person was born on the day another famous person died, and so on. They affectionately bust each other’s chops, as Scully and Mulder always do, and then it inevitably dawns on them that there is a pattern here, one that will lead them to the tombstone they seek, and they discover it intuitively, like little kids making up rules to a new game on a playground. And damned if they aren’t proved right. The most significant element that The X-Files borrowed from Twin Peaks is the freedom to let characters figure things out by listening to their feelings, analyzing their dreams, or just having fun. There are several scenes like this in the new season, and they’re all gifts.
The rest of it isn’t half-bad, either. The last season of writer-producer-director Chris Carter’s never-ending magnum opus got mixed to negative reviews, and deservedly so. You could always feel the goodwill emanating from the screen and fans returned it, but except for the episodes by Glen Morgan (“Home Again”) and Darin Morgan (“Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster“), none it it really clicked in the way that it needed to. It was hard to tell if the season had too few episodes, too many (maybe another stand-alone film would’ve been a better approach), or if Carter and company were simply rusty and slightly out of tune and missing the beat, which tends to happen whenever you try to get the old band back together after a decade-plus of not sharing a garage. This new batch of episodes is considerably stronger. Even the ones that don’t really do much but spin their wheels do so with feeling, and when the show is great — as it is, yet again, in Darin Morgan’s episode — it’s downright sublime.
The season more fully integrates the story of Scully and Mulder’s son, William, by putting him at the center of an international conspiracy to wipe out the world’s population with a plague. (As far as I can discern, anyway.) Intriguingly, while the filmmakers still mix densely packed and relatively humorless mythology episodes about the ongoing international plot to do yadda yadda with one-offs that let Scully and Mulder solve a mystery together, they also pull off a couple of episodes that feel like hybrids of the two forms, including one built around the bureau of the X-Files itself. It all kicks off with another exposition-choked conspiracy episode by Carter — titled “My Struggle, Part III,” unfortunately; let’s presume Carter embraced the Hitler-Knaussgaard echoes for a good reason — which picks up where the cliff-hanger ending of the preceding season finale left off. Carter is one of the most exposition-dumpy TV scribes of all time, and this one is a hall of famer: Not only is it stuffed with dialogue that amounts to little more than the writers preemptively asking and answering questions that might otherwise be posed by literal-minded fans on Twitter, it leans heavily on voice-over that doesn’t always feel organically anchored to the story. But it also features some of Anderson and Duchovny’s best close-up acting, particularly when they’re separated, and it’s a kick to see Carter, always one of the most formally adventurous of the show’s main voices, going wild with the parallel editing, jumping between multiple timelines and hypothetical scenarios as if he’d recently binge-watched the complete works of Christopher Nolan.
The other episodes are strong — maybe not season three or four strong, but season seven or eight strong, which is nothing to sneeze at. There’s an episode set in and around a ghostly tanker with a story line that has echoes of the Slenderman urban legend, and one that puts Scully and Mulder on a case in which multiple murder victims reported seeing doubles of themselves right before their demise. The Darin Morgan episode, titled “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” is a perfect swan dive into postmodernism and goofing around. Among other things, it shoots a stylistically spot-on, nonexistent Twilight Zone episode in black and white, posits an explanation for the phenomenon of false cultural memory that’s as good as the explanation for déjà vu in The Matrix, and treats us to a YouTube video that answers the burning question “What if Thomas Pynchon wrote Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ routine?’” (A comment below the video tells the creator, “The editing could’ve been tighter.”) We also get to see Scully and Mulder have multiple parking-garage conversations with the latest Deep Throat character, a brilliant and theoretically minded nebbish named Reggie (Brian Huskey, who could play Stephen Tobolowsky’s kid brother quite convincingly). “A conspiracy nut is right twice a day,” he tells them, misremembering the saying just as Mulder seems to be misremembering the very first Twilight Zone he ever saw. When Scully suggests that Mulder is confusing a Twilight Zone episode with one from The Outer Limits, he whines, “Do you even know me?”
This season also stages a close-quarters gunfight that’s surprisingly intense for The X-Files, lets Mulder hold forth on his lifelong fascination with Bigfoot, and has Scully talk about a brand of gelatin she loved as a child (except for the lime-flavored version, which she says tastes like “Leprechaun taint”). If you’re a fan of this series, I can’t imagine watching the new season and finding nothing to enjoy. It’s a pleasant, clever, and sometimes inspired reunion with old friends who were right on the verge of wearing out their welcome when they suddenly reminded you of all the reasons why you loved them in the first place.
The X-Files fans may have been waiting for the return of Mulder and Scully a considerable amount of time less than they had this time in 2016, but season 11 has arrived on a wave of anticipation regardless.
Chris Carter's series returns for another run following last year's miniseries which reunited FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully for six episodes that won over critics and fans as it went along.
The reviews have begun to flood in for the ten-episode 11th season which will serve as the swansong for Scully actor Gillian Anderson, and the good news is it's consistent praise all around.
Critics received the first five episodes, with the majority highlighting fourth outing - 'The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat' - as an early highlight.
TV preview 2017-18: Everything to look out for
23 show all TV preview 2017-18: Everything to look out for
1/23 Luther Start date: Late 2018, BBC1
2/23 American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace Start date: January, BBC2
3/23 Britannia Start date: 18 January, BBC2
4/23 Homeland Start date: Channel 4, February
5/23 Altered Carbon Start date: 2 February, Netflix
6/23 The Walking Dead Start date: 28 February, FOX
7/23 Jessica Jones Start date: 8 March, Netflix Netflix
8/23 The OA Start date: 15 March, Netflix
9/23 Westworld Start date: Spring 2018, Sky Atlantic
10/23 Catastrophe Start date: Spring 2018, Channel 4 Channel 4
11/23 The Bridge Start date: Spring 2018, BBC2
12/23 Untitled Alan Partridge series Start date: TBA, BBC Starring: Steve Coogan Created by: Steve Coogan Cult comedy character Partridge will return to the BBC as "the voice of Brexit."
13/23 The Americans season 6 Start date: Spring TBA Starring: Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Noah Emmerich, Holly Taylor Created by: Joe Weisberg The final season of the period drama will offer a dramatic conclusion for married Russian spies, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, and their FBI neighbour Stan Beeman.
14/23 Better Call Saul Start date: Spring 2018, Netflix Netflix
15/23 Call the Midwife series 7 Start date: TBA, BBC One Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Kate Lamb, Stephen McGann, Leonie Elliott Based on the memoirs by: Jennifer Worth The period drama series follows a group of nurse midwives working in the East End of London in the early 1960s.
16/23 True Detective Start date: Late 2018, Sky Atlantic
17/23 House of Cards Start date: Late 2018, Netflix Netflix
18/23 Making a Murderer Start date: TBA, Netflix
19/23 Marcella series 2 Start date: TBC, ITV1
20/23 13 Reasons Why Start date: TBc, Netflix
21/23 This Is Us season 2 Start date: TBC, Channel 4 Ron Batzdorff/NBC
22/23 Unforgotten series 3 Start date: TBC, ITV1
23/23 BoJack Horseman Start date: TBC, Netflix
The New York Times
'Forehead Sweat' guest-stars Brian Huskey (“People of Earth”) as either a madman or a fellow FBI agent from an alternate dimension who is intimately familiar with the show’s heroes, the alien-chasing feds Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). Mr. Morgan uses this premise to provide the ultimate in fan service — constructing an elaborate meta-story that recapitulates the history of the series, with a cracked version of The Twilight Zone as a framing device, and wallows in specific references to past X-Files instalments (including 'Clyde Bruckman’s').
The Hollywood Reporter
Still, anybody hoping for more consistency from The X-Files in this latest resurrection should probably get used to this being what the series is. Since the show is Carter's baby and he isn't going anywhere or loosening up on the reins, you either find the bursts of inspiration and spookiness worth the plodding stretches of perfunctory mythology or you don't.
Vox
What’s striking about watching The X-Files in 2018 is just how rejuvenated it feels. While it’s never going to hit the heights of the third or fourth season from the original series (which aired from 1993 to 2002), the 2018 iteration is a damn sight better than the 2016 one, which boasted some solid instalments but also felt like a show in danger of chasing its own tail so rapidly that it might burrow straight down into the Earth.
Den of Geek
The X-Files is shockingly relevant again and tackling current affairs better than it did in its original run and has a lot of fun doing it. That’s a real feat… or is it?
Uproxx
It’s not peak, season three X-Files, because too much time has passed, too many stories have been told, and the world is too different from the one in which Mulder and Scully first partnered. But, the mythology episode aside, it’s much better than it has any business being, particularly given what we got two years ago.
The X-Files airs in the US on 3 January with a UK release date yet to be announced.
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Technology-based horror is nothing new for The X-Files, which had FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully confront their first murderous AI back in the 1993 episode “Ghost in the Machine.” But technological threats have always had the same status as other monster-of-the week problems on the show, which used to give futuristic fears the same weight as the series’ multiple episodes about killer fungus.
That’s changed since The X-Files returned for its 10th season in 2015. In that season’s premiere episode, Mulder (David Duchovny) learned that the alien invasion he feared for decades isn’t happening, and may never have actually been planned. The revelation helped cut ties with the series’ original nine-year run, and the extremely convoluted mythology it developed from 1993 to 2002. But it also moved the show closer to the focus of one of its most popular successors, Netflix’s horror anthology Black Mirror. The X-Files’ primary conflict is no longer with mysterious extraterrestrials, but with humans who are using cell phones and space travel to their own terrible ends.
That shift has become even more acute in the series’ 11th season. In the season premiere (airing at 8PM Eastern January 3rd on Fox), Mulder discovers a second conspiracy, set up in opposition to his longtime antagonist Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis). The second group is preparing for the possibility that CSM might actually succeed in using an alien virus to wipe out most life on Earth. To prepare, the new conspirators plan to colonize space, and they’ve already started building Dyson spheres and other habitable structures that will house a chosen elite.
The space-race group, led by Erika Price (Barbara Hershey), have access to alien technology they’ve kept out of the hands of the rest of humanity — even though it could have ended fossil fuel use and stopped the planetary degradation CSM uses to justify his actions. That alien tech presumably provided the head start the group needs to get to space. But the real source of those technological leaps is revealed in the new season’s upcoming second episode, “This.” A dark reflection of Black Mirror’s Emmy-winning episode “San Junipero,” “This” starts with Richard Langly (Dean Haglund) of the Lone Gunmen calling Mulder from a digital afterlife he helped design. Glen Morgan co-wrote the episode that introduced the trio of hackers, so it’s fitting that this season, he’s found a way to resurrect one of them.
It turns out Langly helped build a repository for the intellects of dead geniuses, and when he died in season nine, his consciousness became active in a paradise of his own making. But he wants out. He knows his surroundings are a lie, and he says he’s become a “digital slave,” forced to develop space colonization science that the elite will use to leave Earth behind.
That’s an eerie, compelling story hook, combining the dark edges of “San Junipero”’s questions about what parts of us could digitally survive death, and the use of The Attic’s residents in Dollhouse as organic computers. But it’s a shame that Morgan doesn’t explore it more. Instead, “This” is packed with intimate moments between Mulder and Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they try to honor their friend’s wishes, and learn that “The X-Files” are no longer purely physical files. Russian operatives have accessed the files’ secrets via the digital versions, a nod to present politics, and an acknowledgment that cybersecurity is much more important now than it was 15 years ago.
How did Langly figure out his world wasn’t real, since the truth has apparently evaded other dead geniuses, including Steve Jobs? Why doesn’t the episode bother to explain its throwaway claim that a living consciousness and the posthumous simulations can’t coexist? Maybe it’s for the best that the new season of The X-Files doesn’t get too deep into explaining its computer science. Like Charlie Brooker with Black Mirror, the current X-Files team is more interested in how technology affects individuals than it is in dwelling on what made that technology possible. Morgan proved he knows how to make an unsettling episode about technology when he co-wrote the season two X-Files episode “Blood,” where the Lone Gunmen help Mulder and Scully investigate a series of murders committed by people who received subliminal messages via electronic devices. The X-Files has traditionally relied more on strong characters and the ability to evoke mood than on hard science or real-world technological issues.
But even by that standard, Morgan’s explanation about how Langly’s simulation would work is ridiculous. “We can upload a mind now through any smartphone,” Erika Price explains. “No one’s even aware we’re doing it. We can take a piece of your mind any time you make a call. It’s painless.”
It’s also pointlessly simple, since she also says she bribes people to upload themselves by promising they can live forever with their loved ones. (Which again recalls “San Junipero.”) Either way, she claims, she isn’t doing anything horrific or non-consensual. Do people have a choice about whether to get uploaded? “Sure you do. You could not use your phone,” Price says, with a dismissive laugh.
The danger of surrendering power to technology for convenience, comfort, or fun is one of Black Mirror’s dominant themes, and Price’s comment cuts right to it. When she reveals her space-colonization plan in the season premiere, she tries to temper Mulder’s outrage by offering him a spot among the elite. It’s another reminder of the point Black Mirror makes in episodes like “Fifteen Million Merits,” of the ways technological advances in the hands of a few powerful people can reshape society, and warp anyone who wants to share their power. Her reveal about her brain-uploads is just as telling. Mulder is famously paranoid, but he still uses a cellphone and a laptop, and even learning about the dangerous downsides of those technologies doesn’t change his behavior. The convenience trap is powerful: when society relies so heavily on technology, it’s hard to be the first one to walk away from it.
Which leads back to one of The X-Files’ most famous mottos, “Fight the Future.” Black Mirror questions humanity’s willingness to do that — and so does the new season of The X-Files. The Cigarette Smoking Man and other X-Files villains were traditionally seen as despicable for collaborating with aliens bent on subjugating humanity. But the aliens were always mysterious outsiders. Technology is a more intimate and hard-to-resist enemy. In an age where the differences in health, wealth, and access to technology continue to grow, CSM’s conspiracy no longer needs extraterrestrial backers in order to make monstrous choices. They’ve changed with the times.
And that shift is a smart one for The X-Files, giving the creators a chance to make the show relevant to a new generation of viewers who aren’t watching out of nostalgia or habit. Alien abductions no longer have the same power to inspire nightmares that they once did. The X-Files used to center on manifestations of post-Cold War paranoia and secrecy. Now it’s shifting to address the sensation that technology is rapidly changing the world, and only a lucky few are likely to benefit.
So much of what made “The X-Files” wonderful is impossible to attain in 2018. When the series debuted, it presented a twilit, rain-soaked landscape of mysterious occurrences, investigated by two terribly dressed FBI agents who barely knew each other. The show thrilled because of how smartly it turned bureaucratic rigor into the characters’ struggle to understand and accept the unknown — and, of course, because of the devastating sexual tension between Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (a then-unknown Gillian Anderson).
But 26 years and 11 seasons later, the initial charm has been stripped to its bare bones. The mystery, whatever it was, spiraled out of control, got Scully pregnant, made Mulder disappear, and now still taunts the viewer with promises of further answers. The show decamped from its original shooting site in gloomy Vancouver to first Los Angeles and now New York City. Anderson, increasingly a grande dame of Hollywood, becomes more glamorous by the day; Scully’s oversized blazers, severe bob and round glasses have been traded in for a hip, mod-ish wardrobe that accentuates her wasp waist, wavy TV locks and, apparently, contact lenses. Meanwhile, Duchovny — tanned, built and fashionable — looks like the California rocker he’s become, not an aging, nerdy conspiracy nut. (His glasses have also not-so-mysteriously disappeared. Maybe the FBI now covers LASIK.)
As a result, much of the 2016 event series felt hollow, a resurrection gone awry. Showrunner Chris Carter leaned into the mythology of the series with an expanded cast and a matryoshka of conspiracies, each more elaborate than the last. It was a run of episodes that squandered any remaining goodwill I had for “The X-Files.”
Or so I thought.
“The X-Files” returns tonight for a Season 11 that is still uneven, but far more satisfying than the warmed-over mysteries of last season. Carter’s mythology for the series as a whole has never seemed more superfluous, and the episodes still linger too long on the confabulations of the paranoid. But even when stripped down to its bare bones, “The X-Files” has plenty to offer its audience. For one thing, the show appears to be more committed to the relationship between its two leads than ever — the friendship, compromise, cooperation, and yes, romance between the two, a connection that defies most ordinary labels. But perhaps more importantly, the series’ paranoia about a shadowy cabal of men in suits running the national security infrastructure of the nation has never seemed more vital. “The X-Files” is riding the thermals of our current mindboggling political situation to new heights of righteous antiestablishmentarianism; when former FBI director Robert Mueller’s name gets dropped, it’s not a coincidence. And let’s not forget that just a few weeks ago, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a classified defense effort to investigate UFOs. Mulder’s feverish monologues have never seemed more sensible; even the rehash of his greatest hits (Roswell, a faked moon landing, the invasion of Grenada) carries with it a frisson of new fear. After the year we’ve had — after the idiocy, selfishness, and cruelty displayed by the highest echelons of power — it’s much easier to see things from Mulder’s point of view, to give credence to the relentless suspicion of government power that characterizes his paranoia. By contrast, Scully’s faith in common sense — in a reasonable explanation — has never felt more naive.
It’s not just the vivid backdrop that makes this season of “The X-Files” work, though. The episodes released for critics are just better episodes than the first time around — episodes that continue to stage adventures in an inexplicable world, some standalone, some not. Three of the first five episodes are written and directed by longtime “The X-Files” writers — Glen Morgan’s “This,” which revives the specter of the Lone Gunmen; James Wong’s “Ghouli,” which moves the mythology forward in the most meaningful way we’ve seen in approximately two decades; and Darin Morgan’s “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” which has for me made its way to the top tier of “The X-Files” episodes. In the midst of mythology, conjecture, and suspicion, it’s an episode about confronting the past and meaningfully engaging with the present — about the futility of nostalgia, in a vehicle defined by nostalgia. “The X-Files” is doing what few broadcast shows have the opportunity to: It’s mindfully allowing itself, and its characters, to age to the point of obsolescence.
In our current environment of reboots, reunions, and revivals, “The X-Files” might get lost in the shuffle of another beloved property suffering from the imperfection of never quite ending its story. But Season 11 indicates a movement towards resolution and completion, one that nods to the show’s early unexpected greatness and obliquely admits its mistakes. Not everything makes sense — among other things, it’s not totally clear how Mulder and Scully drop back into investigating mysterious phenomena on a regular basis. But it is such a relief: In a world of chaos and confusion, at least we know they are on the case.
