This was perfectly encapsulated in episode three (Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster), which marked a low-point for the show. This increases the likelihood that things are going to become more ludicrous, or away from “the realms of extreme possibility”, which was the original ethos of the show. Eventually, you use up all the mythologies and ancient stories that can fit in any way sensibly into the show you have created. It is hardly surprising that after nine seasons and two movies (not to mention the “season 10” comic book), there might be some difficulty thinking of more stories to tell. So, why did it do so poorly in such (theoretically) favourable conditions? If only everything else about the show was as good. The only thing everyone could agree on was that it was great to have Mulder and Scully back on the screen. Having completed the latest six-episode run, the show was met with a a mixture of mostly indifference and outright hostility. So, surely for a show that had spent so much time and effort exploring such vast conspiracies, this was the perfect time to return? It was this world into which the mini “event series” of The X-Files was released. Government conspiracies, we found to our horror, were real, and there was nothing we could do about it. Whereas once such scenarios were mostly considered to exist only in dystopian fiction, or consigned to the annals of less sophisticated moments of history, they were once again brought to the fore. Then everything changed.įrom 9/11 to the (still on-going) “War on Terror”, to the revelations of prisoner torture and global mass surveillance systems, the idea of vast global conspiracies, war-warmongering misinformation campaigns, and “Big Brother”-style monitoring became all too real. To such an extent that a show about a vast government conspiracy to facilitate the colonisation of earth by extraterrestrials, seems almost optimistic by today’s standards.Īt its launch, it managed to tap into the Zeitgeist, mixing tales of untrustworthy governments with a new-found fascination with the paranormal, to create a world where our greatest fears could be explored, safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t true. In the time between the end of The X-Files‘ original run on the small screen and its mini “event series” rebirth in 2016 (the 2008 movie, The X-Files: I Want To Believe, notwithstanding), the world has changed a lot.
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