6 Things I Never Realized About The X Files When It Originally Aired

I finally finished re-watching The X Files  season 1-7 on DVD, and I am gonna go out on a limb and say: this blog entry recommended mainly for people who also actually watched The X Files. No overall writing ideas to take home here, I’m afraid — just goofy nostalgic fun.

1. About half of Gillian Anderson’s job as Scully consisted in making “WTF?”, “I can’t believe you just said that,” and “No, really: What. The. F***?” faces.

That’s okay, though, because she’s amazing at making the audience understand exactly how Scully feels about this particular insensitive and ridiculous thing Mulder has just said. Which is good, because Scully usually gets surprisingly little to say about it otherwise.

2. The show had a great sense of humour about itself.

In my opinion, there’s nothing The X Files did better than make fun of itself or its protagonists. From the hilarious UFO-abduction-plot send-up “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” to minor character-specific barbs (Scully and her nonfat tofutti dreamsicle; Mulder dying of auto-erotic asphyxiation or spending an afternoon flinging pencils at the ceiling) to the deliberate juxtaposition of regular “paranormal” elements in unlikely contexts (“X-Cops,” in which our two favourite agents wind up on FOX’s police reality show Cops), the show knew never to take itself too seriously.

3. It had intriguing themes.

OK, some of them weren’t that intriguing, just the usual heroic trope stuff: don’t believe what people tell you! Stand up for what you believe in, and never give up! And it’s true that the show never even dipped its toes in the waters of true moral dilemmas that might have given us more insight into its themes.

But for a show with the tagline trust no one, The X Files came down pretty hard on the side of, “Actually, do trust people, because you’ll never get to the truth unless you work together and incorporate multiple perspectives”. Yes, Scully was usually wrong, and Mulder was usually right… about the big issue of the episode. Still, without Scully’s medical and scientific expertise, Mulder’s conclusions were often useless (not to mention that his a** was grass without Scully jumping in at the last minute to save his life all the time, and vice versa).

The agents often did a pretty good job of collaborating — even the episode about points of view, “Bad Blood” (in which our heroes get all Rashomon on us and tell conflicting accounts of what really happened when they went down south to confront a teenaged small-town vampire) ends up with both protagonists getting closer to the truth by piecing together their stories.

4. Fans weren’t being totally off-the-wall when they suggested Mulder and Scully started dating after the kiss in 7×04 “Millenium” but their relationship just wasn’t shown on screen.

I remember thinking back in 2000 that half of fandom had gone crazy, and I still don’t think the evidence adds up to support the idea that the showrunners 100% intended for Mulder and Scully to be having an off-screen romance during season 7. I can believe they wanted to keep their options open, in view of how nobody was sure whether the last episode would be the finale of the season or of the series, but other characters who would probably know and would have no reason to lie (e.g. super-creepy Cigarette Smoking Man — see #6) explicitly say they’re not a couple.

That said, something really does change about the vibe between the two characters, whether from deliberate writing and acting choices or off-screen ploys/drama/ideas/etc., who can say? But their physicality and chemistry does come across the way most non-PDA couples come across when they’re in a public or professional space — suddenly, there’s a comfortableness to it that wasn’t there in previous seasons.

5. The showrunners did not understand computers.

There’s more than one example of this, but all I really have to do is explain the seventh-season episode “First-Person Shooter,” which is like TRON except… somehow, it makes even less sense. A video game company is testing the titular first-person shooter game they’ve been developing. It’s unclear whether the game is supposed to be a virtual reality experience or whether they’re just testing a console game in a virtual-reality environment with dudes in special suits running and jumping and shooting*. But either way, it makes no sense. If the first, then how the heck does the game “ship” to the mass market and why don’t any of the characters mention the hardware manufacture when they’re ranting about their sunk costs? If the second, just… wait, what?

Anyway, this nonsense becomes even more perplexing when a video game character starts killing the players with her VR weapons in ways that their VR suits can’t account for. Okay, yeah, it’s The X Files, but to top it off, Mulder physically disappears into the game when someone shuts it down while he’s playing. What the heck is going on in these writers’ minds when someone says “virtual reality”? I can accept that weird supernatural stuff happens on this show, but usually when the aliens or the Flukeworm Man show up, someone’s all like, “OMG! Aliens! Mutants! THIS S*** IS CRAZY!!!!” In “First Person Shooter,” no one’s reaction indicates this is something that changes everything we thought we knew about computers. Or, you know, reality.

Or maybe Mulder and Scully really are living in Mainframe…

6. The showrunners also really did not understand appropriate/inappropriate ways for men to talk to women.

There are an unfortunate number of episodes in which a female character (usually Scully) has a character fall in love with her or try to connect with her in a way that would have most women I know thinking, if not saying, “Hey, Creepy McCreeperton, please go creep somewhere else, or you will get this can of pepper spray right up your creepy a$$.”

Instead, Scully starts to get sympathetic with them, on account of they’ve just opened up their heart to her and all. See, for instance, the episode “Milagro”, in which the creepiest writer who ever existed keeps informing her how she feels, based on his frankly stalker-like observations of the details of her behaviour. Scully is somehow drawn to this. But the best/worst example has to be from “En Ami”:

(Keep in mind, as you read this, that CSM is essentially her best friend’s father. But he’s evil and has tried to kill her and her best friend in the past, and has occasionally just randomly been there in her apartment when she opened the door.)

CSM: (out of nowhere, in the middle of a long car trip) I’ve studied you for years… and if you would permit me, I’d like to make an observation. You’re drawn to powerful men, but you fear their power. You keep your guard up, a wall around your heart. How else do you explain that fearless devotion to a man obsessed, and, yet, a life alone? You’d die for Mulder but you won’t allow yourself to love him.

Regardless of your gender, you probably have at least one female acquaintance with whom you, y’know, sometimes hang out, but whom you wouldn’t feel comfortable inviting to spend some time one-on-one. Imagine suddenly turning to her and telling her this (with an appropriate substitution for “Mulder”). See? You know better than CSM.

* House did this too — in one episode, the patient is some programmer who’s making this video game for which his testers run around with VR goggles, light guns, etc. In a later episode, we see House (and Cuddy) playing this video game on what appears to be an ordinary XBox-like console, with regular XBox-like controllers. I… I don’t think I understand what “computer programming” means in TV-land.