E.T., Phone It In
Inept ‘X-Files’ treatment of modern paranoia
IT’S safe to say the new sixepisode miniseason of “The XFiles,” which wrapped up Monday, was something of a misfire. Confronted with an audience that hadn’t seen a new episode in almost 14 years — longer, if you’re one of the folks who checked out when Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) left the show — the new run relied heavily on exposition and canonical rewrites to get viewers up to speed.
Sure, a couple of the new episodes were passable. One, about a lizardturnedman struggling with his newfound humanity, was even pretty good, a classic “monster of the week” comedy. But the mythologyladen episodes for which series creator Chris Carter became so famous were dense, and not just in the sense that they were unbearably (and incompetently) talky.
Indeed, the show’s opening episode was almost comically dumb. In it, Mulder learns more about the conspiracy he’s been chasing for decades in about 15 minutes of screen time than he did in the show’s whole previous run.
Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale), a conspiracy theorist with an Internetbased news program prone to ranting about FEMA camps and chemtrails, shows Mulder a variety of shocking sights, such as a replica of an alien ship that runs on energy pulled from the sky for free. This technology has been hidden from the people, of course, because of the need for big business to protect profits, or something.
In the equally inept finale, we learn that the government conspiracy — still headed by the Cig arette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), despite his having been blown up by a Hellfire missile in the original series finale — is more than just a scheme to line the pockets of a shadowy cabal. It has infected a portion of the population, including Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), with alien DNA to help them survive a viral apocalypse aided by immune systems weakened by governmentmandated vaccination programs.
As had been hinted at throughout the show’s original run, the endgame for the Smoking Man was all about population control. He had to empty the planet in order to save himself and his friends and leave them something to rule over.
“I didn’t set out to destroy the world. People did. We have just had the hottest year on record on planet Earth. I didn’t do that. I’m not responsible for the 40 percent loss in bird life or the decimation of the mega fauna,” the disfigured conspirator says when Mulder criticizes his plan to reduce the population. “Look at world history, Fox. Neither you nor I could save mankind from selfextermination.”
We saw an interesting echo of the Cigarette Smoking Man’s plan in last year’s hit actioncomedy, “Kingsman: The Secret Service.”
In that film, a globalwarmingobsessed tech billionaire played by Samuel L. Jackson organizes the elimination of mankind with the help of the global elite — politicians and pop stars alike come together to create a brave new ecofriendly world birthed in blood.
And if you doubt that fears about the global elite are working through the body politic right now, just Google “zika virus depopulation” and see how far down the rabbit hole you get before your head starts spinning. None of this was new ground for “The XFiles.”
“American television seems to be returning obsessively to plots about porous borders, alien invasions, threats to the traditional American way of life, the hybridization of identity in a globalized world, the dissolution of the nuclear family, and the dangers of global technocracy,” Paul Cantor wrote about “The XFiles” and other ETheavy shows in his 2012 book “The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV.”
“The XFiles,” then, is just picking up where it left off. With a lot less skill and a lot less deftness, certainly; as the great TV recapper Alan Sepinwall wrote after the finale, “Carter has lost all grasp on how to write these characters and this show.”
It’s too bad Carter is so inarticulate, because he clearly has a sense for the fears — warranted or not — that have swirled through the public’s subconscious since the 1990s. Indeed, they may have only amplified as the world has become increasingly interconnected and the global elite has grown more vocal about the dangers the common man poses to the “common good.”