Look out Mulder & Scully — there’s a smoking supervillain after you!
Only one of the ten biggest grossing movies of the nineties was a sequel: 1999’s Star Wars relaunch. But in the past decade, more than half of all box-offices smashes have been follow-ups and reboots.
It’s the same story on television. Revivals and rehashes are everywhere, from the new version of Eighties soap classic Dynasty on netflix (it’s awful), to Twin Peaks on Sky Atlantic last year (incomprehensible), to the reanimated Will & Grace on C5 (still funny, but they look embalmed).
Eventually, there will be no new telly series at all, and we’ll all be stuck watching endless echoing successions of sequels, with stories that can never satisfy because there will never be a conclusion.
The X-Files (Channel 5) is trapped in that infinite loop. Once the most popular show on air, and a high point in the history of sci-fi, it came to a sticky end in 2002: like a demented polar bear in a zoo, it went mad and had to be put out of its misery.
But two years ago The X-Files came back, for a trial run of six episodes — and now it returns for a full ten-part series. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny star as Scully and Mulder: she does that breathy, whispery voice, like an asthmatic in a library, and he whips his sunglasses off and on with every line of dialogue.
The real secret of this show’s success was the sexual tension between the stars. Once Scully and Mulder finally went to bed together, we all lost interest.
X-Files creator Chris Carter is trying to claw back some of that frisson, by revealing that the father of Scully’s telepathic son isn’t Mulder — it’s the villainous Cigarette Smoking-Man, the nicotine-crazed monster at the heart of every conspiracy theory.
A hilarious, and very clever, sequence of doctored footage at the start of the hour revealed Mr Smoking-Man is responsible for everything from dissecting extra-terrestrials at Roswell to shooting JFK in Dallas.
Scully knows he’s planning to wipe out humanity with an alien plague virus, so her cerebral cortex is flashing an SOS signal in Morse code, though unfortunately this can only be seen when she has a brain scan.
It’s all deliriously silly and done with panache. One scene was especially bonkers: Mulder was lured across America to meet a decoy supervillain doing a pitch-perfect impersonation of Orson Welles.
However eccentric The X-Files is, it cannot hope to compete with drama Silent Witness (BBC1), which now exists in a parallel universe consisting entirely of contradictions.
When our heroine, pathologist Dr nikki (Emilia Fox), was pinned down behind a car by a gunman, for instance, bullets were pinging all around her — so her colleagues all yelled at her to stand up and run around.
When she did this, the shooting stopped. naturally, the forensics team immediately started pottering round collecting bits of evidence.
Dr nikki was the only one to panic, perhaps because no one was shooting at her — so she ran into a wood where no one could find her, even though she was wearing a body-camera that streamed live pictures of her location to her boss.
Back at the crime scene, armed police were swarming about everywhere.
Dr nikki’s junior, Jack (David Caves), found an armoury of illegal rifles and pistols, and couldn’t resist pretending to fire them. Why not? In the real world, surrounded by coppers toting machine guns on the hunt for a berserk sniper, that might seem unwise, even reckless.
But not in Silent Witness.