In an era of de facto reboots, the best of the lot are those which take to task one’s love for the original property. They ask: Why not leave well enough alone? “Reboot,” after all, can be a loosely translated term. With similar intents, it represents both this century’s Battlestar Galactica and next month’s Fuller House: Mine what was so endearing about the original installment, and attempt to carry that spirit forth in perpetuity, no matter what kind of all new cultural context it has to navigate. If Fuller House is anything like Girl Meets World, it’ll struggle to prove its pure-cheese core was so much more than a gold standard of early-’90s sitcom traditionalism—but the “reboot” of The X-Files has a clear benefit: Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) have never been far from our minds.
From the show’s end in 2000, through a second film and the rise of stream-binging TV, to today’s six-episode miniseries, fans have been able to follow a slick trail of black ooze through nearly two decades of prestige TV. While ratings were never deplorable in the end, and while the second film gave ’shippers the fan service they demanded—at least to the extent that I Want to Believe was able to net more box office receipts than its substantial budget, thereby justifying its existence—rarely are Seasons 8 and 9 of The X-Files ever celebrated. Mostly, they’re tolerated. So in the shadow of one flimsy goodbye after another, the premiere episode of this functionally tenth season must prove it’s more than yet another attempt to make up for past crimes. This it does, and then some, both literally rebooting the mythology of The X-Files while convincing us that there are still so many stories to tell for our beloved agents. It really is something special to behold on network TV.
“My Struggle” begins, like so many episodes past, in voiceover. And, like in so many episodes past, that voiceover is a stilted, dreamy fustian of a line-read, as if the character is speaking post-hypnotic suggestion, or reciting passages from the Bible. Enter the deadpan sound of former Agent Mulder, his ties to the FBI very loosely defined, who offers a cursory explanation of the United States’ history concerning extraterrestrial contact, beginning ostensibly with Roswell but ballooning his purview into even the ancient world, where Lovecraft-ian evidence suggests aliens were here long before us, and probably even had something to do with our evolution. Mulder’s explanation serves as prelude to a flashback in which a baby-faced doctor (Giacomo Baessoto) is bussed, blindfolded, to the site of the Roswell crash in 1947, just in time to witness American soldiers unload their guns into a little green(-ish) man attempting to crawl away from the crash. Already, this feels like The X-Files.
This act of violence on our military’s part is far from surprising—look only to prominent Republican candidates to understand how United States history is clearly limned in the blood of Others—but for X-Files mythology, it’s a total coup. The waning seasons of the previous X-Files run, especially after Duchovny had taken a hiatus from the show and Anderson was playing more of an outside consultant than a devotee of the Files themselves, lost all sight of its initial conceit. If the show was initially spurred forward by Mulder’s drive to figure out what happened to his sister Samantha—who disappeared when they were little, hypnotherapy convincing Mulder that she was the victim of an alien abduction—once he actually did figure out what happened in Season 7, the vacuum left by such an emotional arc was filled with increasingly incoherent mythologizing and serialization. While the vast conspiracy is way too convoluted to relay here (involving alien colonization through alien-human hybrids forged from a tenuous treaty between the shadowy Syndicate, who secretly, simultaneously were attempting to discover their own cure for the “black oil” which the aliens would use for their invasion, which would happen in 2012…or something) rest assured that you aren’t alone in your confusion even if you did watch the series and still had no fucking idea what was going on. My point is that in The X-Files of seasons 1-9, the aliens always had the upper hand, but here, upon potentially the first time our modernized race met theirs, human beings quickly and brutally took control. In this “reboot,” the power dynamic has shifted.
Since last we saw the for-once insanely happy couple in 2008’s film, Mulder has succumbed to his paranoid tendencies, driving Scully from his life and moving into a crazy-person’s unibomber-y cabin away from the hustle and bureaucratic bustle of Quantico. Scully, who regardless of whatever was happening in her life was always able to keep her shit together, bounced back from their break-up by throwing herself into her medical work. When we meet again in 2015, this work involves research and procedures into a rare genetic disorder which leaves children born without ears—ironically resembling, as one character points out, the archetypal aliens so often portrayed in science fiction. Though ’shippers may be heartbroken, it’s a brilliant move on creator (and writer and director) Chris Carter’s part to bring back his leads as leading separate lives. Mulder has always been a man defined by his demons, and Scully a woman defined by her science—two empirical character traits threatened by their content coupling. The best way to ensure that Season 10 endures with the tension and dynamic that first endeared audiences to the characters is to split them up and encourage them to find that spark once again.
The two reconnect when contacted by hunky “YouTube” (or the off-brand equivalent) conspiracy theorist Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale). O’Malley, part Bill O’Reilly and part Godspeed! You Black Emperor, brings Mulder and Scully to see Sveta (Annet Mahendru), an alleged multi-abductee with the scars—both physical and psychological—to prove it. That’s not all, because O’Malley knows Mulder’s met enough abductees to choke a horse—the mother of his child, after all, was one—but Sveta, he claims, is special: She’s got alien DNA in her, the only successful melding of the two races the world has witnessed thus far. Scully, being a doctor and therefore capable of pretty much any medical test Mulder needs, is tasked with determining if there is, in fact, alien DNA in Sveta—because SCIENCE!