I want to believe…that Fox Mulder isn’t Alex Jones
After 9 memorable seasons followed by a 14-year break, Chris Carter’s iconic TV show The X-Files has once again graced the airwaves in the shape of a 6 part mini-season. The original characters that we all grew to love (or hate) were all accounted for, from Mulder and Scully to Skinner, and even that nicotine-loving male who lurked and interfered from the shadows. Watching the new mini-season made me immediately feel right at home, almost as if the last 14 years had never happened. And because it is assumed that viewers are familiar with the show and are up to date, very little time was wasted on exposition, allowing us to delve straight into the latest conspiratorial shenanigans.
The opening of episode 1 takes us back to 1947, where we get to witness the spectacular crash of that famous flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico, where the craft lies partially buried. A uniformed military scientist, accompanied by a man in black, is led to the downed UFO, where an alien survivor is discovered trying to drag itself away from the crash site. Cue a present day Mulder and Scully.
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Episode 1, titled My Struggle, (Mein Kampf?!), is all about bringing our pair of heroes together again to get the X-Files reopened for one Tad O’Malley, a YouTube conspiracy nut theorist who manages to uncover more hard evidence of UFO’s and government coverups in a very short time, than Fox and Dana could do in 9 years. A brief chat by Tad with the former FBI agents in the back of his bulletproof limo is all it takes to persuade the pair to help him “blow open maybe the most evil conspiracy the world has ever known.” After Tad introduces the pair to Svena, a young woman who’s been an alien abductee since childhood, Mulder quickly ditches his former beliefs. A bit too quickly in my opinion. I found it difficult to swallow that Mulder would so easily buy into Svena’s story like that. Episode 2 was more like The X-Files we knew and loved, and it started taking us in a direction that felt right. Perhaps it was seeing the pair wearing suits again, and Mulder having shaved off his whiskers.
The difference from watching the show now rather than back then, is that 14 plus years ago, no one had easy access to all the conspiracy stuff that was a huge part of The X-Files, whereas now everyone has YouTube and can probably rattle it off word for word. Because of this and the fact that I use YouTube on a daily bases, as I imagine do most folk, episode 1 felt almost like watching infowars.com with Fox Mulder playing the part of the ultra loud and gravelly Alex Jones, as he yells about lizard people in the White House and the Illuminati taking over the world after it becomes police state.
While I enjoyed the show and will most definitely watch the remaining 4 episodes, I do hope it treats us to something a little different. The old conspiracies are just that. Old!