I Saw An Episode Of The New Season Of THE X-FILES
This weekend I had the unusual experience to watch a whole bunch of episodes of The X-Files on the big screen with an enthusiastic audience, an experience that utterly transforms the show. Although it predates widescreen TVs and the modern idea of ‘TV is the new movies,’ it turns out that not only are old episodes of The X-Files incredibly cinematic, they make for wonderful communal experiences. We’ve been missing out for decades by watching them on our couches.
The event was a marathon at LA’s unbeatable Cinefamily, hosted by Kumail Nanjiani, the host of the X-Files Files, and it was to celebrate the coming revival of the series on Fox. We watched six old episodes - some chosen by Kumail, some chosen by guests Glen Morgan, Darin Morgan and Chris Carter (and one chosen by David Duchovny, who couldn’t make it) - and then we got a chance to watch an episode from the new season. But Fox didn’t show us the first episode (which has been met with some pretty unpleasant reviews from TV critics) but rather the third - the one featuring Kumail.
That episode, Mulder and Scully Meet The Weremonster, comes from Darin Morgan, the guy who wrote Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Humbug and Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, episodes that brought a whole new flavor to The X-Files. These episodes were often meta, very funny, grounded in humanist philosophy and always quite touching, and Mulder and Scully Meet the Weremonster is no different. It made for a weird first episode to see from the new season - it’s got a lot of commentary and meta jokes, like Mulder having the X-Files theme as his ringtone - but by the end I realized this was probably the best episode to show hardcore fans.
I can’t talk much about the episode itself - there’s a basic twist in the premise that I want to keep pristine for the fans - but I will say that it felt like a classic Darin Morgan episode. Heavily comedic, MASMTWM takes an unexpected left turn into an examination of just what it means to be human, from the mundane - alarm clocks! - to the sublime - a deep need for affection - and filters it all through a Monster-of-the-week story. The ending left me choked up.
The episode comes right in the middle of the new series run, and it occupies an interesting place in the X-Files mythology: this is the episode where Mulder gets his mojo back. It seems that in the years since The X-Files: I Want To Believe, Mulder has lost his drive to explore the unknown, and the proliferation of the internet as a mass debunking tool has left him exhausted and depressed. He sits in Scully’s office (it’s not his anymore, and neither is the “I Want To Believe” poster) and goes through his old X-Files lamenting how many of them have been either solved through regular science in the last 20 years or proven to be hoaxes or mistakes. He feels like he wasted his entire life.
Meanwhile, Scully is trying to ignite the fire in Mulder, to bring back the man she once knew (and loved). This creates some nice moments of levity as the two bounce off each other in ways that slowly begin to resemble the classic Mulder/Scully back and forth from 20 years ago. These two have a complicated history (they had a child together that Scully gave up for adoption because the Cigarette Smoking Man’s son told her she should!) but it looks like a lot of that has been wiped away, leaving Mulder and Scully in a place to pick up their most classic dynamic. Shippers will be delighted. Me? I’m curious to see what the arc of this season is, if Mulder becoming a believer happens about halfway through.
As for the rest of the marathon: it was a delight. The episodes we watched were almost all home runs on the big screen, with only the Duchovny written and directed The Unnatural being a miss. That episode is charming, and has some terrific directorial flourishes (the final shot is wonderful), but the conflation of grey aliens and the Negro Leagues never quite gels into anything at all.
Home, about incestuous backwoods mutants, played like the great horror movie it is. Clyde Bruckman’s comedy worked so well that lines were drowned out in immense laughter. Drive - the episode that introduced Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan to Bryan Cranston - has the energy of a great thriller on the big screen. Chris Carter’s great Post-Modern Prometheus is gorgeous when its crisp black and white photography is blown up for the cinema, and Folie a Deux - a big episode for shippers and maybe an underrated one - took on shocking new life, especially in our modern mass shooting era.
Every other episode we had guests, and the Morgans were especially delightful and full of great behind the scenes stories. There had been another actor originally intended for Peter Boyle’s role in Clyde Bruckman, but it turned out he was both unavailable and impossible to work with, and so they ended up with the absolute best possible actor for the part. Vince Gilligan had wanted Drive - about a man who must remain in constant motion at a certain speed or his head will explode - to be set on a ferris wheel. Glen Morgan had wanted to bring back the Peacock family from Home on the semi-spin off show Millennium to goose ratings, but a Fox exec ixnayed it, saying ‘Those characters will never appear on our network again.’
What was especially cool was having the experience of watching these episodes with their creators; when you work in TV you don’t get to see your work in a crowd, and so for all three guests this was a unique opportunity to hear and see just how their creations impact people. For a whole bunch of hours a group of dedicated X-Philes (some of whom had been lining up since 5am) had a chance to commune with each other, the show and the creators. I’ve been to a lot of fan events in my time, but this was one of the most intimate and fun.
Will the new season of The X-Files be any good? David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are definitely older, and they approach their characters in new ways… but at the same time the heart of what has made me a fan of the show was there in the episode we watched. It’s different, but it’s the same, if that makes sense (and it has the original opening credits, by the way!). I don’t want the new season to just be an attempt to recapture the glory days, and it doesn’t seem like that’s the plan. And it also seems like the plan isn’t to just end it here, as Chris Carter let us know that the final episode has quite a cliffhanger. The X-Files season 11? I’d love for the truth to continue being out there.
