Is the truth still out there? It’s not in this X-Files reboot
In its Nineties heyday, The
X-Files (Channel 5) was great water-cooler TV. By tapping into homespun myths about UFOs and alien abductions, it could present itself week to week either as terrifying horror or knowing satire. All the elements were there: mutant monsters, paranoid ravings, esoteric weirdness and a simmering will-they-won’t-they relationship.
But as ratings soared, with viewers obsessed with FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully’s (Gillian Anderson) quixotic investigations into the unknown, so the show became bogged down in its own mythology. Out went the deadpan humour; in came a wearyingly serious determination to create an overarching narrative.
The X-Files eventually bowed out with a whimper in 2002, while the 2008 film, The X-Files: I Want to
Believe, did little to restore its credibility. Sadly it was in its latter-day guise that the drama made its muchanticipated return last night. Titled My
Struggle – an appropriate description of what it felt like to watch it – the episode began with an effects-filled flashback to the Roswell crash, intercut with a dour voice-over by Mulder distilling the key moments from the show’s nine-year run.
From here it lumbered on, laden with ponderous exposition. Scully, we discovered, was now a successful surgeon, while Mulder had become a grizzly, internet-perusing recluse. Soon, however, they were reunited, when a cable-news conspiracy nut (Joel McHale) brought to their attention the case of a Russian girl who claimed to have been continuously experimented on by aliens.
When Mulder and Scully weren’t reeling off modern-day references – Google, Uber, Edward Snowden – they were lobbing lines of weighty portent at each other. “All these years we’ve been deceived”, “Roswell was a smokescreen”, “The truth is still out there”, “I believe”. It was as if the show’s creator Chris Carter had taken all The X-Files buzzwords from over the years and dumped them into one frightful farrago.
Above all, though, in bulldozing much of the show’s mythology and building a new one (apparently humans, not aliens, are responsible for staging all the “UFO abductions” Mulder has investigated over the years), it brazenly implied that the previous nine series, not to mention two feature films, have been a colossal waste of time.
The only saving grace was the chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson, Mulder and Scully’s affection for one another only marginally tainted by the fact they were no longer romantically involved. Reviews in the US also indicate that the series vastly improves. But on this form, it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most loyal X-philes still believing.
‘Make sure you have no pornographic material,” bellowed master-at-arms Ian Gritt, as he greeted the wet-behind-the-ears recruits to the training scheme at HMS Raleigh in Cornwall. “That includes no inflatable dolls.” In Royal Navy School (Channel 4), a closely observed, at times humorous account of the programme that transforms young recruits into elite sailors, no nuance of the process escaped our attention. Anyone who watched Royal Marines
Commando School on Channel 4 two years ago would have known what to expect. Press-ups, dressing downs, home sickness, calls to “man up”, triumphs over adversity – all present and correct.
Among the 60 recruits, a third of whom we found out won’t complete the process, we met naïve 18-year-old Hugh Harland, who had the temerity to babble “Cheers chief ” to a senior officer, and Jimmy Myatt, 29, whose main reason for signing up was that he “always wanted to be a pirate”. There was poignancy, too, thanks to Craig Rowan, a 32-year-old so determined to succeed that not even a heart problem could dampen his spirit.
Presiding over their training, meanwhile, was petty officer Chantell Cox, a fearsome drill instructor with a brusque, sardonic manner. “This is not Flares nightclub,” she told the floundering newbies. “I’m not asking you to do disco moves.”
In terms of drama, however, the opener lacked the ferocious, mudcaked intensity that made Royal
Marines Commando School so compelling. In truth, the process presented here felt altogether less brutal – a far cry from the legend written on Gritt’s coffee mug: “Daily flogging will continue until the crew’s morale improves.” The X-Files Royal Navy School