It's been confirmed that '90s pop-culture behemoth THE X-FILES is returning to television as a six-part "event series" (increasingly popular after last year's 24: Live Another Day and this summer's Heroes Reborn). Is this good news, or bad news? Fire up your FBI-issue flashlight, here are 11 thoughts on the pro's and con's of more Mulder and Scully:
- The gang's all back! The Holy Trinity of any X-Files reunion is getting creator Chris Carter back to run it, joined by original leads David Duchovny (as Mulder) and Gillian Anderson (as Scully). The trio's involvement has been confirmed by Fox, and it helps that said actors don't look decrepit considering XF began 21-years ago. It's all in the genes!
- The X-Files released two feature-films (one at the peak of its popularity in '95, one years after in '08), but television is its natural home. An event series is the ideal compromise between the two mediums, although it remains to be seen if we're getting six serialised mytharc hours, or six standalone 'monster-of-the-week' stories (with a loose arc running through them).
- XF streams for free on U.S Netflix, so chances are there's a whole generation of new fans who didn't watch the series between 1993 and 2002, but have since been converted . Scarily, some may not have been born when it was first on-air! For them, this may be a very exciting project because they can finally watch along with everyone else.
- SPOILERS! The mythology of the show famously declared 2012 as the start-date for alien colonisation, but that year's been and gone. A third XF film was intended to debut that year, but when the 2008 film flopped the plan was mothballed. This Fox series will presumably (a) tackle the situation head-on by having events take place 3 years ago, or (b) explain exactly why the planned colonisation failed to occur.
- Have you seen X-Files: I Want To Believe? That film only came out 7 years ago, which means the show already crashed-and-burned with a minor comeback opportunity. Shouldn't it be left alone?
- SPOILERS! Do you remember how X-Files ended and how XF:IWTB followed things up? Mulder and Scully are lovers and now have a child together. This event series can't erase that, so this won't be vintage XF. Unless a time-travel plot undoes a lot of post-1997's sillier developments and we're back to the basics of two FBI agents investigating weirdness.
- Alien abductions and UFOs aren't in vogue right now--it's all vampires, vampires, vampires. There's nothing to stop the XF event series having a paranormal flavour, but I have a weird suspicion Carter's going to seize this unexpected opportunity to resolve the show's alien mytharc once and for all. Even if the convoluted mytharc's part of the reason lots of people stopped watching in the first place!
- '90s XF was all about government conspiracies and Fox Mulder was a lone figure railing against shadowy manipulators, but today's cultural landscape is very different. Hopefully XF will reflect real-life issues like Edward Snowden, Anonymous, Wikileaks, etc. He would certainly get a lot more sympathy from the ordinary man on the street these days, because nowadays we KNOW governments aren't to be trusted and evidence is leaked online quite regularly.
- If XF can lure back some of its former writers, who've nearly all achieved a lot of post-XF success, that would be very exciting. Glen Morgan's available now BBC America's The Intruders has been cancelled, isn't he? Would he re-team with erstwhile partner James Wong, who's involved with American Horror Story? Vince Gilligan's now a huge deal after creating Breaking Bad, so would he return to the show that nurtured his talent?
- Chris Carter's a good writer whose career achievements shouldn't be criticised too harshly (how many people create pop-culture hits in their lifetime?), but it's fair to say XF went downhill and none of his subsequent projects worked. (I loved Millennium, but its creative peak was during a season Carter wasn't involved with, and it never took off with the wider public.) Only this year, Amazon cancelled his new sci-fi drama The After, amidst rumours it was simply a mess that couldn't see the light of day. XF is his greatest hit and I have faith he can create a worthwhile storyline, but it's also been a very long time since XF was unequivocally a GREAT franchise (I personally tuned out around season 7).
- If nothing else, maybe Fox's six-episode return will finally force them to release a remastered Blu-ray box-set of the complete season, to aide the marketing build-up. That's been a ridiculous oversight for too long.
