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Critic Reviews
Jun 13, 2013
Season 8 Review:
All this tension turns out to be great for the show's pulse, which had been fluttering last season. In too many of season 7's adventures, Duchovny and Anderson looked as if they'd been asked to go investigate who shot J.R. Ewing; their boredom was showing. ... [This season's first two episodes discover] a new force field of energy.
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IndieWireDec 15, 2017
Season 11 Review:
Season 11 so far isn’t flawless, but it’s a lively, character-focused affair that feels far more unified than we’d ever anticipated, a massive improvement over Season 10 that gives us genuine hope for the second half. For the first time in a while, we’re truly excited to see more.
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Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
But these episodes were produced in 2017, a year overflowing with discussions about the manipulation of news and information and all the ways in which far-fetched falsehoods found purchase with a public hooked on echo chambers and siloed into tribes by social media. ... That may be why these new X-Files episodes feel sharper, tighter and smarter than the first attempt at its revival.
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Jan 2, 2018
Season 11 Review:
What’s striking about watching The X-Files in 2018 is just how rejuvenated it feels. While it’s never going to hit the heights of the third or fourth season from the original series (which aired from 1993 to 2002), the 2018 iteration is a damn sight better than the 2016 one.
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Feb 20, 2013
Season 1 Review:
But the paranormal is not what counts. It's the FBI agents who matter -- they're one of TV's most interesting twentysomething couples. [10 Sept 1993, p.1D]
Feb 20, 2013
Season 1 Review:
The X-Files gets off to a pleasingly creepy start tonight. But even spookier is the thought that some people will mistake it for a documentary. [10 Sept 1993, p.E1]
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
A fun, intriguing new drama...Inspiration is allowed to take all sorts of liberties. Fortunately, the production values of the show are high and no attempts are made to portray aliens on screen, for instance. The director wisely lets us imagine an unexplained power source with a whirl of wind rather than cheap-looking spaceships or funny-looking men with antennae heads. [8 Sept 1993, p.1F]
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
Some UFO cliches - bright lights, mysterious marks, lost time - turn up here (could they be cliches because they're...true?), but intelligent writing and sharp plotting lift the series far above the standard for the genre. The lead characters have a quirky chemistry that (refreshingly) isn't built on the "squabble and kiss" standard. (They're both pretty appealing, however, and if they should eventually kiss, I for one wouldn't mind.) [9 Sept 1993, p.06G]
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
[Mulder and Scully] are a lively team - look for love to blossom if ratings sag - and the show has some clever dialogue, a handsome look, unlimited plots (I'd imagine) and, of course, the specter of Big Brother keeping secrets from us all. [10 Sept 1993, p.Tempo 1]
Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
The mythology arc is absolute rubbish. Fortunately, this new season appears to suspect that and, after that rocky opener, gets down to business. Soon enough, Scully and Mulder are puzzling over a simulated world where great brains like Steve Jobs “live” for eternity. A strange doppelgänger is stalking people. That sounds like a job for the X-Files team. The best of the five offered for review is very good indeed, and it too is a curtain call from an old friend: Darin Morgan.
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Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
If this truly is the last season of The X-Files--and star Gillian Anderson has said it is, at least for her--the Fox sci-fi conspiracy thriller is going out giving what fans want. Mostly. In this, its 11th season, the show brings back familiar faces, opens some new mysteries, solves others and gives plenty of reasons to ship FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson)’s quirky relationship to the stars and back.
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Jan 25, 2016
Season 10 Review:
Other than a few missteps here and ther --Why would someone who claims to have been abducted by aliens several times live in the middle of nowhere away from people and protection?--the reboot feels like Linus’ blanket, warm and comforting. Duchovny and Anderson slip easily back into the give-and-take which helped make the original series so darn entertaining.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
In the opener, “My Struggle,” Carter plays to fan expectations on all fronts as he suggests only the most sinister conspiracy ever, one that manages to shake the typically unflappable Mulder and could up-end the premise of the entire series. It’s just that juicy.... [The second episode is] a perfectly serviceable monster-of-the-week tale. It also features some dopey reveries about Scully and Mulder’s lost son William.
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Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
David Duchovny from "Red Shoe Diaries," "Twin Peaks" and the current film "Kalifornia" combines an off-center earnestness with a weird sense of humor to make Mulder likable and convincing. As Scully, Gillian Anderson provides a cool, logical counterpart for Spooky. It's a perfectly balanced pairing, with only a hint of sexual tension. [10 Sept 1993, p.61]
Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
Carter’s mythology for the series as a whole has never seemed more superfluous, and the episodes still linger too long on the confabulations of the paranoid. But even when stripped down to its bare bones, The X-Files has plenty to offer its audience. ... It’s not just the vivid backdrop [of the current world] that makes this season of The X-Files work, though. The episodes released for critics are just better episodes than the first time around.
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Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
The good news is that a longer season gives other writers more time, and that if anything, 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.
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Jan 2, 2018
Season 11 Review:
Midway through the first episode of the 11th season of “The X-Files,” FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) clutches her head and moans, “What’s going on here?” We can sympathize. Up until then, the episode had played like a frenetic trailer, filled with crazy action and angst. In subsequent episodes, the Chris Carter series settles down to familiar entertaining territory, but there is a danger you might turn it off before then.
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UPROXXJan 2, 2018
Season 11 Review:
It’s not peak, season three X-Files, because too much time has passed, too many stories have been told, and the world is too different from the one in which Mulder and Scully first partnered. But, the mythology episode aside, it’s much better than it has any business being, particularly given what we got two years ago.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
It starts well enough, with effects-filled flashbacks to Roswell 1947 and a call from Assistant Director Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) that brings the old team back together--Scully in her scrubs helping put ears on earless children, and Mulder an Internet-perusing recluse who dresses himself from the Travis Bickle Catalog for Men. But it collapses into poorly motivated, out-of-nowhere speechifying, accompanied by stock footage of old puzzling phenomena. Fortunately the other two episodes push the right buttons.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
The first episode is called “My Struggle,” which aptly describes the experience of sitting through it. It lumbers. It plods. The actors chew sawdusty mouthfuls of expository dialogue.... Thankfully, the second episode shakes the dourness and gives Mulder and Scully more room to breathe. But it’s the third--a comic palate-cleanser in the “monster of the week” vein--that finally recreates the show’s oddball delights.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
This first hour is all about reinvention. It's a rather clunky attempt to remake the 1993-2002 vehicle in a manner that will please loyal fans and new viewers. The second episode, with guest star Doug Savant ("Desperate Housewives"), pushes this redesigned vehicle into a higher gear.... Now this is the X-Files we fondly remember. Can they push this to yet a higher gear? Why, yes, they can, and they do with the third episode.
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Jan 19, 2016
Season 10 Review:
[Chris Carter has] brought back and distilled the show into six hours of pure X-Files, good and bad. Duchovny and Anderson are entertaining and reliably classic (if unsurprising), conspiracies are discussed in clandestine secrecy (if confusingly), flashbacks reveal exciting truths (that feel more important to the characters than maybe to you), and Mulder’s extraterrestrial friends feel tantalizingly closer than ever (and then they aren’t, again).
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Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
It's all played with suitably creepy seriousness, but without the self- conscious weirdness that made the later-day "Twin Peaks" so tedious. Duchovny and Anderson anchor the story through steady performances; we're as interested in what happens to them as in what happened to the teens...It's all pretty silly stuff, but it's silliness done well. If you're willing to give yourself over to it, it should hold your attention -- which is more than one can say for most of the season's new offerings. [10 Sept 1993, p.Ent 20]
Uncle BarkyJan 3, 2018
Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
Something's going on here, but unfortunately not between the two bland lead actors. Duchovny makes a peculiar hero, too laconic even when discussing his passion for tracking aliens. His character needs oomph, but The X-Files already has a nicely offbeat tone. Maybe this is how Fox will revive its still-lamented Alien Nation series. [10 Sept, 1993 p.Life 3D]
TV Guide MagazineJan 4, 2018
Season 11 Review:
We've come to expect the stand-alone episodes to represent The X-Files at it's most excellent, and that's the case in the first half of this 10-episode season. [8-21 Jan 2018, p.13]
Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
The first episode is dragged down by more conspiracy blather, interminable voiceover and way too many apocalyptic predictions of doom. And there are a few too many references to Donald Trump's presidency and friction with the FBI, elements that feel dated even as we watch. But Anderson and Duchovny remain one of the television's best-ever teams.
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Jan 22, 2016
Season 10 Review:
After the catastrophe of the first episode come two self-contained installments, each improving on the one that came before.... [The second episode is] less stilted than the first episode, but still weighed down by extraterrestrial baggage. The third episode, not coincidentally the one in which the show rediscovers its dry sense of humor, finally gets on track.
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Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
An advisory at the beginning of this thing claims it's "inspired" by actual factual accounts...Snort. [10 Sept 1993, p.56]
Jan 3, 2018
Season 11 Review:
Mulder and Scully remain fixed in their philosophical positions and reactions to various wild events, but Anderson and Duchovny have become more subtle performers who are using the fact of their middle-aging as an opportunity to present themselves as more sly, more self-aware, yet eminently comfortable with each other and appreciative of each other’s deepening skills. I wish I could say the same for Carter’s mythology, but, alas, the paranoid conspiracies that were so absorbing, the mythology that was once so satisfying to ruminate upon, has started to seem like dry, barren ground to be trod across, again and again, out of a sense of weary duty.
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TV Guide MagazineJan 28, 2016
Season 10 Review:
After a sluggish start in the opener, which dived too deeply into the murky swamp of alien-human conspiracy.... Things pick up the next night with spooky-icky generic manipulation. Now, at the midpoint: "Mulder & Scully Meets the Were-Monster," by Emmy winner Darin Morgan at his whimsical best. [1-14 Feb 2016, p.19]
Jan 25, 2016
Season 10 Review:
The [first] episode is stilted and odd, the plot not engaging, and no one looks particularly excited to be there. So much time is spent on exposition and reminders of the past that it's groan-worthy. The following two entries are episodic, monster-of-the-week affairs and they reminded me how good The X-Files could be.
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Jan 21, 2016
Season 10 Review:
At a minimum, wait until Monday when the series airs a second episode that's a marginal improvement on Sunday’s dispiriting premiere.... Things do get better in Monday’s episode, which dumps the mythology for stand-alone horror, and with next week’s comic outing as the series continues its tradition of mixing in the three forms. But “better” is not “good”--and nothing shakes the depressing sense that time has passed the series and the characters by.
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Jan 21, 2016
Season 10 Review:
The first episode, titled "My Struggle" (the English translation of Hitler's manifesto, "Mein Kampf," which seems strange) starts off well enough. But then things go haywire.... The second episode, directed and written by X-Files veteran James Wong, is a welcome step up from the first. And the third (only three were made available for screening), is a comic horror gem.
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Jan 13, 2016
Season 10 Review:
They [Duchovny and Anderson] slip back into their roles with a gratifying conviction, if not quite enough to make you forget their recent prominence in Californication or The Fall or Aquarius or Hannibal.... The new X-Files hour is fine for what it is, but it lacks the kick of minty-freshness, in favor of the musty tang of mythology.
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Uncle BarkyJan 21, 2016
Season 10 Review:
Chris Carter seems to be creatively bankrupt at this point, with Episode 3 screaming out a vote of no confidence. For a while at least--early in Episode 1--it was kind of nice to see Scully tell Mulder, “I’m always happy to see you.” And for him to reply in turn, “And I’m always happy to have a reason.” But then the story went on, straining, lurching and tripping before falling flat on its face.
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Jan 25, 2016
Season 10 Review:
The result is a clunky hour of bad one-liners and exposition.... The narrative tightens up in Episode 2, at least, as the series settles into a Monster-of-the-Week format. That allows Duchovny and Anderson to play to their respective strengths, but it also feels like the show is marking time.
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Jan 21, 2016
Season 10 Review:
Mulder’s suspiciousness feels, now, like a dull stating of something close to conventional wisdom, and the show’s mysteries lack the spark they once had. The great success of The X-Files’s paranoid vision may be that its popularity made a series revival feel, ultimately, behind the times.
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Feb 17, 2013
Season 1 Review:
It's not quite sci-fi, not quite fantasy, and yet not quite realistic either. It's not quite a show, is what it's not quite...You may get an urge to take a hike too, but pity the poor critic who has to sit there with a big grin on his face and watch the whole stupid thing. [10 Sept 1993, p.G7]
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