The truth is still out there — sort of
“Scully, are you ready for this?” he asks.
“I don’t know if there’s a choice,” she answers.
Ah, but there was: Let the nine original seasons (and two films) of “The X Files” remain one of television’s most memorable and most slavishly adored cult shows and don’t even think of trying to revive it.
But creator Chris Carter and Fox couldn’t leave it alone. The result is a belated six-episode reboot premiering Sunday.
The two-episode premiere has some bumps, but it’s fun to watch, mostly because many of our old friends are back. There’s David Duchovny as Fox Mulder, still handsome, although a little more jowl than back in 2002, when the series ended. And he is again teaming with Gillian Anderson as Dr. Dana Scully. And oh, look: FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Nick Pileggi) is back and a few other characters we’ll leave unmentioned so as not to spoil the fun. The old X-Files office at the FBI is empty and long abandoned, but a couple of somewhat rushed and artificial plot points can fix that in no time flat.
The original series was about conspiracies, of course, primarily Mulder’s belief that the government was covering up the existence of extraterrestrials among us. Scully was a skeptic for a long time, and then she wasn’t. She and Mulder developed a strong platonic relationship, and then it became something more. A child was born.
Carter has to update us on all of those topics and more in the first episode. His approach is to dispatch each one so quickly that you barely have time to process any of them. Meanwhile, there’s a new case to be solved, one involving a young woman named Sveta (Annet Mahendru) who claims to have been repeatedly abducted by aliens.
On the surface, the case seems just like old times for Mulder, but the times aren’t old anymore. They’ve changed, and Mulder has more company in the conspiracynut category. Television mouthpiece Tad O’Malley ( Joel McHale), for one, has a bully pulpit known as “Truth Squad” on which he routinely rants about conspiracies.
There’s little doubt Mulder will be lured out of retirement by Sveta’s case — the pasture must have been pretty boring over the years.
Mulder is hooked but not on his usual conspiracy rant. He has a new thought, thanks to O’Malley: What if the real conspiracy was that we were supposed to believe the whole aliens-amongus conspiracy to keep us from learning about a more insidious scheme?
Maybe it isn’t aliens we have to fear but what Mulder calls “a venal conspiracy of men against humanity.” Examples include engineering a massive drought and brainwashing Americans into eating food that’s bad for them and makes them fat.
“I’ve seen this before,” Scully warns Mulder. “You’re on fire with some truth. You want to believe. You want to believe so badly, you’re on dangerous ground.”
For the sake of “XFiles” fans, we can only hope so.
Fox initially offered only the first episodes to critics but, after some tepid early reviews, hastily made two more available. It was a smart move. The second episode, “Founder’s Mission,” centering on an investigation into profiteering from genetic mutations, is better than Sunday’s premiere. The story (by James Wong) is better written, with greater attention to nuance and detail, but by the second episode, we also have accepted that several years have passed in the lives of Scully and Mulder.
The third episode veers into loopy comedy as it unabashedly channels “Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman,” except that there’s no wolfman — there’s a “Were-Monster.” Written by Darin Gordon, the episode focuses on a poor sap named Guy Mann (Rhys Darby) who’s led a happy existence as an insect-eating monster but was bitten by a human and transformed into a polyester-clad New Zealand native appalled at how human beings live.
Together, the three episodes represent what was good and maybe not so good about the original series. They also remind us that, somehow, even when Carter and company went off the rails, “The X-Files” was usually worth watching.
Carter is clearly aware of both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity in reviving the series after 14 years: Time has passed. The world has changed.
The writers openly acknowledge what they’re up against in even attempting a revival of the show when Mulder at one point says, “Scully, since we’ve been away, a lot of things have been explained.”
In other words, the truth isn’t quite so far out there anymore.