The X-Files

This new batch of episodes is considerably stronger. Even the ones that don’t really do much but spin their wheels do so with feeling, and when the show is great--as it is, yet again, in Darin Morgan’s episode--it’s downright sublime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

True believers who have devoured most if not all of the 208 previous episodes likely will find it thrilling simply to be strung along anew. Those of us who have been less dedicated to the cause perhaps can be more forgiving of the show’s loopy transgressions.

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]

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.

What they’ve [Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan, James Wong and the creator, Chris Carter] produced is intelligent, stylish and always graced by the wonderful performances of Ms. Anderson and Mr. Duchovny. It also feels more formulaic than ever.

The X-Files is back with a mix of convoluted mythology and more satisfying stand-alone stories.

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.

Since the show is Carter's baby and he isn't going anywhere or loosening up on the reins, you either find the bursts of inspiration and spookiness worth the plodding stretches of perfunctory mythology or you don't.