12 Things I Would Like To See In The X Files Miniseries
Happy Pesach! Did you hear? The X Files, everyone’s favourite ’90s paranormal procedural, is hauling back David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Mulder and Scully for a six-episode miniseries. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, is on board! He’s had thirteen years to think about it! Whee! (Best finding-the-afikoman-prize ever!)
There are lots of things I love about The X Files. But things have changed since Scully first stumbled into the basement office of the FBI’s Most Unwanted. What do I want to see in this 2015 miniseries? So glad you asked…
More Mulder and Scully interaction
Mulder and Scully have always been the heart of this show. Mulder does something ridiculous. Scully raises an eyebrow. Mulder believes in UFOs. Scully believes in empirical scientific research. Mulder scoffs at religion. Scully is a devout Christian. They are complete opposites but can arrive at the truth only if they pursue it together.
Show us how, after all these years, even after everything they’ve both seen and experienced, their core personalities haven’t changed. Show us how they both want to believe in different things and how, because of that, they will always clash their way to the facts in between the extremes.
Less Mulder and Scully UST
Don’t get me wrong, I loved me some Unresolved Sexual Tension when the show was on the air. But we’re way, way past that now. Once your protagonists have had a baby together (see next point) and are shown sleeping in the same bed in a long-term relationship, the will-they won’t-they ship has sailed.
Instead, give us their romantic relationship as a given, and show us gut-twisting dilemmas that put it under stress. I don’t want to transition from “will they hook up” to “will they break up”; I want to see them put in unbearable conflict with each other. I want the question to be “how will they get past…?” and not “will they get past…?”
More William
Remember Mulder and Scully’s Not the Messiah Just a Very Naughty Boy (except probably actually the Messiah) son William whom they gave up for adoption for his own safety? I really hope so, especially if you are Chris Carter, because I’d like to see him again.
He’s obviously still on Scully’s mind (since she mentions him in the second movie) and he’s just as obviously on mine, because, hello, drama. From Camp Half-Blood to Agatha Christie denouements, everyone loves the moment when a character finds out their parents are important and/or exciting people.
Come on, writing team. You don’t even need to mess about with child actors. You can go right ahead and cast a twenty-year-old to play him as a teenager.
Less supersoldiers plot tedium
Stick with the aliens. We know from the series finale that the aliens are coming in 2012 (… guess that one’s off the books too, huh? Can we dig up some calendar variant that says now is actually 2012? Or maybe we can all agree that CSM* just lied about the exact timing for the lulz?)
More creepy MOTW (Monsters of the Week)
Leonard Betts, the paramedic who had to eat cancer to survive. Eugene Victor Tooms, the liver-eating, hibernating Reed Richards. Flukeman. They can be an eerie mutant Avengers for all I care. Just let us see that wicked weirdness that graced our TVs every week (when we were lucky and it wasn’t a nonsensical dud).
Less butt-genies/magical barfing-up-resurrection nonsense
Season 9, you know what you did.
More diversity of casting
Let’s be frank, X Files. Even in your heyday, you had a nasty habit of exotifying any tradition that wasn’t white, middle-class Anglo-Saxon. On your bad days, other people’s stories turned into weird campfire scares. So let’s make a deal: no more stealing from other traditions, unexamined, for cheap thrills. What is different isn’t always strange.
Instead, let’s have some recurring characters (’cause you’ll need them — you killed off a whole bunch, remember?) who are people of colour, LGBTQ people, and/or people of different traditions than our “all-American” (*cough*whitestraightmiddleclass*cough*) leads. You did it with the two new FBI agents in the second movie — do it again!
Let’s see more diverse traditions examined with thoughtful respect.
Less weird stuff about women
Please do not have Scully fall for creepsters who try to mansplain her feelings to her. Or at least, let us see that this behaviour is as upsetting and predatory as when Pusher plays mind games with Mulder or Krycek taunts Skinner with nanobots.
Please pass the Bechdel test at least once per episode.
Please do not bring back Mulder’s old flames as antagonists for Scully. (If you want to make them and Scully bffs, though, I’m down.)
More tongue-in-cheek self-parody
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best things about the original X Files series was how it wasn’t afraid to poke fun at itself. Episodes like “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” “X Cops,” and “Bad Blood” got us laughing at (and with) our heroes without losing the emotional resonance of the main plot.
It’s over a decade since the show went off the air, and all of us have had a chance to think about it with the critical distance of time. I can’t speak for any fan except myself, but if the writers want to engage with the show’s meta-issues as well as its plot, I’m on the same page
Less 90s-style conspiracy
When The X Files originally aired, it played perfectly into the contemporary political landscape. The Internet was just fledging; in a time of relative economic prosperity, we didn’t have the same worries about money, jobs, and the future. And awareness of civil rights issues like marriage equality, rape culture, and the consequences of militarized police on racialized citizens wasn’t as widespread or urgent.
But in 2015, after 9/11 and Occupy Wall Street, blaming the bad things in society on a cadre of shadowy powerful dudes can seem somehow… disingenuous. We’ve learned that in many ways, we are the conspiracy. Our complicity in the status quo permits much worse than the Black Oil virus ever wrought. The worst things in our world are less the product of selfish individual evil and more the outcome of regular people wanting to preserve our current level of comfort.
Absolutely, the show should finally show us what’s the deal with the alien invasion. But I think that pervasive feeling of “Them” watching and using “Us” was most effective back before the mainstream began to recognize that “We” are “They.”
So let’s see Mulder and Scully find out where they fit into the conspiracy, willingly or not — and how they struggle to rise above it before the final invasion.
More sceptical Scully
Gillian Anderson will wear out her eyebrows long before I get sick of Scully giving Mulder the “the whammy?” look. Scully is at her best when she’s here to voice reason and chew gum, and she’s all out of gum. Even when her scientific explanations don’t make that much sense (ahem), Scully’s disagreements with Mulder fuel the comedy and drama of the series.
OK, yeah, if Scully doesn’t believe in aliens and other weird stuff by now, she’s stubborn, not reasonable. But scepticism doesn’t have to be about the paranormal for it to work. In the last movie, we saw that Scully was sceptical about the direction her and Mulder’s lives had taken. Can they make a difference? Is more suffering necessary? When is the price for being brave too much to pay? Those could be some very divisive, very exciting questions to explore.
Less Scully-turned-into-Mulder
When David Duchovny left the show during season 8, everyone shifted up a seat. Scully became the believer, insisting that a UFO had taken her partner. Newbie Special Agent John Doggett turned into Scully, the honest sceptic.
That dynamic worked okay, but I didn’t find believer Scully as compelling as sceptical Scully. She was too much like Mulder except with consideration for other people’s feelings and convenience, which made it less interesting. If Scully is going to believe, I want to see her do it in her own way, and I want to see it spur her to kick butt and take names.
Honestly, I don’t know what to expect from this new miniseries. Probably none of the things I’ve said I wanted, but who cares? No matter what, I’m invested in these characters, and I’ll sure as heck be tuning in to find out what happens to them.
* The Cigarette Smoking Man (aka C. G. B. Spender), played by William B. Davis. Not exactly like he has a track record of honesty.