The truth is out there
LONG- SIMMERING TENSION, MYSTERY AND ALIENS: THE X- FILES WAS PEAK TV BEFORE PEAK TV EXISTED.
Given how people have acted in the 14 years between the end of The X- Files proper and its much-hyped miniseries return, you could be forgiven for assuming the primary attraction of the show was to sit around and yell “Kiiiiiissssssss” at the screen. This is what happens when you hire the narrator of a soft-core cable skin series to be your nerdy recluse conspiracy-theorist FBI agent.
Not t hat waiting f or David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to explore the unsolved mystery of each other’s bodies wasn’t some part of the appeal of what in retrospect was one of the most important shows of the ’90s. But for all its primacy in X-Files fans dreams, the long- simmering tension between them is as much a sign of the show’s exceptional blend of old-school and forward-thinking television craft as it is fuel for online slash fiction. On television sets that still used cathode ray tubes, it was hard to find a show as good at hooking you, and the lessons it gave can still be seen on HD screens today.
Excepting the push to get its leads to bump pretties, it was the show’s reasonably neat division into two intricately connected but discrete packages that really sticks out. Fans cottoned on to this before too long, and gave these two modes the names Monster of the Week and Mytharc.
The former refers to episodes that essentially wrapped themselves up neatly before the hour was out, fea- turing one bit of unexplained phenomena — it was usually a monster, hence the name — that Mulder and Scully would work to, you know, explain. The MOTW is the part of the show that is essentially just a dark ’ 90s update on Twilight Zone gotchas, albeit with a more sophisticated take on dramatic irony. It let the show most purely explore its classic fire- and- ice dynamic, as infinitely credulous Mulder chased literal ghosts and aliens, and endlessly skeptic Scully frownily blamed hallucinations caused by swamp gases, or whatever else was handy.
When people talk about the best ever X- Files episodes, it’s almost inevitably ones in this category. As the series went on, the writers got increasingly playful with premises, recognizing that the show’s base could be spiced with just about any flavour and still work: grouchy psychics, desperately restless cranks, role reversals and some of the most genuinely creepy “people” to ever appear on the small screen. It was here that X-Files really established something that Joss Whedon’s Buffy — and a handful of others, though few as successfully — would pick up on: supernatural goings- on combined with well- established characters basically gives you carte blanche to make your show whatever you want it to be week to week.
As much it would be nice to have more shows willing to throw out everything but the basic premise whenever they felt like it — the shows that currently do this best are comedies like Louie and Master of None — the more lasting effects of The X-Files was the Mytharc, the longer- term story about the alien invasion and black oil and Smoking Man and the like. As a rule this was not quite as deftly handled as the individual episodes, although it had the pull of any good long mystery: if the MOTW was the reason you might start watching, you probably kept coming back to find out what was up with the aliens.
The arc would barely qualify as noteworthy now, when the best shows are swirling together worldbuilding and episodic thrills — if they really even bother with the latter — but for the time it was one of the most major attempts to string a grand story across multiple seasons of television. A certain class of reasonably adult drama (or even comedy) before this would watch its characters grow and develop — thirtysomething springs to mind, and then contemporaries like ER or NYPD Blue — but would still tend to keep its episodes self- contained, at best maybe short arcs during sweeps to try to goose ratings.
The X- Files proved fans had the attention and interest to follow a story across years, and would even do a fair bit of the work of keeping informed themselves. Because of its sci- fi roots, The X- Files was one of the first shows to be party to intense Internet dissection, or at least as intense as you could get in the age of message boards and spinning gifs in a webring. It also had the proud distinction of being the first puzzlebox series to massively disappoint its fans with its finale, but years on that now seems like an inevitability, especially once people can disseminate their theories on their own (a hive mind is always more clever).
It’s probably fair to say that there aren’t a lot of direct descendants — although Breaking Bad is the next step in a lot of these lessons, and not just because X- Files is where Vince Gilligan cut his teeth — but as much as anything, X- Files opened up the landscape of possibility, told the higher- ups what people could handle as much as it created the expectations in an audience. That a lot of those expectations were of Mulder and Scully getting down says something about our sex drives, but there’s plenty else about the series that lingers longer than a simple kiss.