Mulder and Scully return to spooky duty on Sunday
Mulder and Scully reunited in much-vaunted Vancouver-shot revamp of beloved sci-fi series
The X-Files
Debuts Sunday, CTV/Fox There are so many reasons not to believe in the upcoming miniseries revival of The X-Files. Viewers tired of reboots, viewers tired of too much TV. Creases in the original show deepened by time, maybe even creases in a few faces deepened by the same.
But, says creator and executive producer Chris Carter, context is everything. And in the post-9/11 era, ideas that might have been heresy before could now seem poignant, plausible even.
“In 2002, when we went off the air, the world looked to government to protect them and us. It was not a time when people wanted to discuss government conspiracies. They were only looking at foreign conspiracies and terrorist conspiracies,” he tells reporters.
“We are now looking at a world that is now upside down from that period, when governments are now suspect. When they rolled back freedoms and rights for us, we suffered, and now there are reports and actually admissions of widespread spying on us. I think that the government is in our crosshairs, and certainly in the crosshairs of The X-Files going forward.”
Hence the supernatural drama that stretched between 1993 and 2002, and spawned two films, isn’t the same X-Files you’ll see in the six-part miniseries debuting Sunday. (Part 2 of the première airs Monday, and future episodes air subsequent Mondays.)
But much remains the same. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are back as FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Her skepticism spars with his hope, and paranormal phenomena mingle with normalcy. New to the cast are Toronto-born Robbie Amell as Agent Miller and Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) as Agent Einstein — both will appear in episodes 5 and 6. Also, Annet Mahendru (The Americans) plays a woman whom Mulder believes is “the key to everything” in the première.
The first and last instalments, says Carter, will add to the X-Files mythology with background and context, and hopefully provide a few long-awaited answers. The rest will stand on their own.
“We have what I would liken to two monster-of-the-week episodes, very human monsters in this case, but very much in keeping with the kind of monsters you would come to recognize in The XFiles, kind of in the mode of Eugene Tooms or the Peacock family or the Flukeman episodes,” says Carter.
“There’s another episode that deals with terrorism, and I think that it is more relevant today certainly after the attacks in Paris and now here in San Bernardino, Calif., than it might have been even before when we were filming the episode. That will air as Episode 5 before the series finale.”