Back to its bread and butter

As The X-Files enters its 11th season, it’s beginning to look more like a membership club than a television series.

And membership has its privileges. Like the country club that still turns out a good porterhouse, The XFiles still produces excellent stand-alone TV episodes — tremendously entertaining hours with the show’s familiar blend of spookiness, selfdeprecating humour and cleverly conceptual in-jokes that only the initiated can really appreciate.

In the five episodes of the new season made available to critics, the winner is the fourth, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat. It was written and directed by Darin Morgan, who also provided the best hour of the show’s revival season in 2016, Mulder and Scully Meet the WereMonster.

Forehead Sweat gueststars 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). 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).

As if that weren’t enough, the episode is simultaneously a running commentary on the current American condition. The name Trump isn’t mentioned, but the season capitalizes on Mulder and Scully’s employment, positing an embattled FBI threatened by a Moscowbased military contractor that enjoys White House protection. In his episode, Morgan goes further, suggesting that the “fake news” era has rendered the X-files moot — in a time when mass delusions are the norm, it no longer matters whether “the truth is out there.”

Forehead Sweat, by itself, will justify the continued existence of The X-Files for the true devotees. But when you take a broader view, you can’t help noticing that of the 10 writing and directing credits in the first five episodes, nine are shared by inner members of the show’s coterie —Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan, James Wong and the creator, Chris Carter.

What they’ve produced is intelligent, stylish and always graced by the wonderful performances of Anderson and Duchovny. It also feels more formulaic than ever. X-Files episodes come in three varieties — mythology, monster and mixed — and their order is predictable.

Mulder acknowledges this state of affairs at the beginning of the episode Plus One when he tells Scully it’s time to jump on I-95 South and “get back to our bread and butter.”

It will be interesting to see whether the addition of new female writers and directors in the second half of the season shakes things up. The familiar pleasures of The XFiles aren’t negligible, but a few surprises would help.