Spooky doings afoot at FBI again
‘The X-Files’ is back for an 11th season, less as a revival, more as a genuine new season.
Two years ago, “The XFiles,” which ran on television from 1993 to 2002 and jumped to the big screen in 1998 and 2008, returned from narrative limbo for a six-episode “special event” season.
It left behind some memorable moments and the impression that of all the people who should be writing and directing the series now, creator Chris Carter, responsible for the season opener and closer, was possibly not among them.
Still, a good enough time was had by the people who needed to have one, and enough money made by the bodies that needed to make it, that the principal partners have reconvened for a 10-episode 11th season. It debuted Wednesday on Fox.
The good news is that a longer season gives other writers more time, and leads Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny seem more comfortable this time out as partners in spooky crime fighting and something more than pals. It comes off less as an exercise in brand revival and more a genuine new season of “The X-Files.”
The 10th season ended with the arrival of a giant spacecraft over Washington, D.C., where Fox Mulder (Duchovny) was dying from a virus — the work of William B. Davis’ Cigarette Smoking Man — and Dana Scully (Anderson) was without any handy options to save him.
Reviewers were asked to refrain from revealing how this was resolved, but suffice it to say, as with “Flash Gordon” serials of yore, a certain amount of rewinding was involved. Also suffice it to say that Mulder survived into the new season. He would have to, of course, although I, for one, would watch a series called “Scully.”
Carter once again wrote and directed the season opener, “My Struggle III” (numerically following Season 10’s opening and closing episodes), and as before, it was surprisingly awkward. His dialogue is prosaic and ponderous by turns, and there are times I laughed out loud at an exchange not meant to be funny. Nearly without humor, the episode seems composed with the urgency of Jean-Paul Marat writing his 14th of July call to the people of France.
Indeed, a memo appears to have gone out from Carter to his writers to make sure to address the year of Trump, if avoiding any mention of his name. (He is seen, a little, in the montage that opens “My Struggle III.”) The fact that a conspiracy theorist is occupying the Oval Office would naturally tend to take some fun out of a show that brings pseudoscience to life.
“The world has become too crazy even for my conspiratorial powers,” Mulder says at one point. But now even the villains know what’s what: “Every day a new disaster,” the Cigarette Smoking Man says. “We refuse to imagine our impending extinction, the acceleration of the cataclysms. We’ve thrown science out the window in favor of scandal and opinion, cant and all manner of ridiculous untruths.”
After the mythology-encumbered “My Struggle III,” things quickly improve with the opening of Episode 2, from Glen Morgan. Mulder and Scully are hanging out, feet up, watching old footage of the Ramones on television, as an old friend calls from out of the ether and a station wagon full of goof ball assassins barrels their way.
Punk rock also opens the following episode, written by Carter — better here — in which Mulder suggests to Scully that they “jump onto I-95 and get back to our bread and butter,” which is to say, hunting monsters. (The episode features Karin Konoval, the mother in the Season 4 episode “Home,” in a sort of quadruple role.)
I am sure there are viewers for whom the mythology is the thing — from Mulder’s search for his sister, whom he believed abducted by aliens, to the “black cancer,” to Mulder and Scully’s son, William, given up for adoption to protect his life. The big themes have made “The X-Files” feel grand at times, but they can also grow tiresome — not you again, Smoking Man. Go on, end the world already!
At this point, the show works best as a kind of ritual, a collection of moments from which you can pick the ones that make you happy without worrying too much about consistency or canon — as a celebration of itself. That’s why Darin Morgan’s “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” an unreliable comic turn through an alternate history of the series, is the most effective of the five episodes available for review.
It is not the only time it looks backward. Throughout, there is not a little talk of simpler, smarter days; even the monsters have lost their mojo. “This is my problem with modern-day monsters, Scully,” Mulder says of an illustrated beast, all teeth and mucus. “There’s no chance for emotional investment, like Frankenstein, Wolfman... There was pathos.”
“There’s a lot of money to be made in scaring people,” says Scully, who has been paying attention.