![]() I certainly count myself a fan and I think most like-minded folks would likely agree that Seasons 1-6 are essentially solid. Before my two rewatches (about two years apart) I'd really only seen the show sporadically when it was in production. Largely it's been a fun ride and only the second time I've watched the series all the way through. Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our Twitter account and you're all set.I'm almost through my X-Files marathon rewatch at about two-thirds through Season 9. The time has finally come to make The X-Files the Ex Files. Gillian Anderson has said she'll never do another season again, but might she say yes to a final episode that puts a giant big, black marker-printed full stop on the series? If the series could haemorrhage 77% of its viewers over the course of a Scully-loaded season, what chance does it have without her? So, our wish is, give Chris Carter one last chance to wrap it all up. With seemingly no other shows in development (all of his other TV ventures were short-lived), Carter seems stubbornly committed to The X-Files, continuing at whatever cost to its already scarred reputation. It's aggravating that Dana Scully, and the show itself, was denied a proper, book closing send-off. Whether The X-Files returns or not, one thing's for sure: Gillian Anderson won't be anywhere near it. ![]() ![]() Darin Morgan's 'The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat' was a reliably loopy treat from the series' most idiosyncratic writer, while his brother Glen's 'This' was a giddily propulsive episode that traded just enough off the series' past glories and gave Mulder and Scully some relishable duologues.īut it's Chris Carter's growingly preposterous and and suffocatingly po-faced arc episodes that have come to define The X-Files.Ĭritics and fans alike roasted that season ten finale (Rotten Tomatoes assigns it a 32% approval rating), so the assumption was, going into season 11, that Carter might lighten up on the series' ever more swollen mythology (which by now involved a doomsday virus and the pursuit of Mulder's son-not-son Jackson, aka William – the shape-shifting teen conceived by alien DNA, Mulder's dad-not-dad Cigarette Smoking Man and, oh yeah, Scully).īut instead of correcting course, season 11's opener saw Carter doubling down, almost obstinately, on many of that previous season's worst excesses. Season 11 deserved the brickbats, but there were saving graces. Like Lenny Kravitz crashing an Ed Sheeran gig. Chris Carter, the show's creator and showrunner, may have garnished those new mythology episodes with burningly contemporary references to YouTube and Trump, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, but they still felt like relics from a different storytelling age, a little shaft of 1993 piercing the here and now. Truth is, the audience has changed and The X-Files hasn't. That Donald Trump seems to buy into much of it (he was an eager apostle of the Barack Obama 'birther' nonsense) really is Exhibit A for that argument. When people now think of conspiracy theorists we don't think Warren-Commission debunkers or harmless "Elvis is alive" cranks, but 9/11 'Truthers' and Sandy Hook deniers. Today, in the mainstream world, there's a greater public queasiness over conspiracy theories. Conspiracies in 1993 didn't then have the whiff of lunacy and cruelty about them that they do in 2018. Unusually smart for a network drama series of the time, it took the post-Watergate paranoia of movies such as All The President's Men and The Parallax View and gave them an intoxicating science-fiction makeover.īut mistrust in the political establishment has a different flavour today. When The X-Files debuted in September 1993 it really was like nothing else around it. With FOX looking less and less likely to renew the reactivated X-Files for a 12th season, and the now departed Gillian Anderson openly scoffing about the 77% plunge in viewers, as well as joining the Twitter chorus mocking the season-finale twist, where does this leave The X-Files? How did we get from the hysteria of 2016's "event series" to this? We chose to remind ourselves of Eugene Tooms, Deep Throat and Clyde Bruckman, Jose Chung and Duane Barry… We chose to look back to a time when we believed – oh, the naivety – that Chris Carter had a coherent plan for those mythology episodes. We decided instead to remember those ratings-conquering early years, when The X-Files had, it seemed, hit the world's cultural G-spot.
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