Still out there: The X-Files at 30

The actual anniversary date whipped past me before I noticed, but apparently The X-Files is thirty years old? Let me settle back into my mummy case and enthuse about it.

I’m also late to this party, but it turns out they did a whole remaster/cleanup on the show a few years back, presumably for Blu-Ray, and those copies are whats streaming now. They went back and rescanned the original film and rebuilt the edits from there, and he show looks amazing! Haircuts non-withstanding, it genuinely looks like it could have been filmed this year, unlike a lot of it’s contemporaries. We’ve been watching them on and off, and man, what a fun show that was! There are very, very few shows where you can almost just pick episodes at random and know you’ll enjoy them quite the way you can with The X-Files.

I actually didn’t come in on the show until halfway through the second year; but I was immediately hooked. My initial reaction was that this was as close as we were ever going to get to an “American Doctor Who” (or really any new Who at all there in the wilderness years of early 90s). A pair of FBI agents solving supernatural/monster/alien problems on a weekly basis? And mostly solving those problems by not just, you know, shooting them? Yes Please!

That said, I’m pretty sure I was the one one that saw a Doctor Who connection. While the cited inspiration is always Kolchak, and UFOs and conspiracy theories were hot in the 90s, The X-Files always struck me as a show designed outward from trying to figure out how to make Twin Peaks viable as an ongoing show.

It took the core premise, “Eccentric FBI agents investigate possibly supernatural crimes in small town America” and then made several very savvy changes.

First, everywhere Twin Peaks satirized nighttime soap operas, X-Files swapped that out with the shape of a standard police procedural. Gone was the sprawling ensamble cast, replaced with a core regular pair and a one-off guest cast, in the mold of something like Law & Order. Instead of a single small town, it was a new semi-rural location every week, freeing up the guest cast to meet the needs of the mood of the week instead of servicing their own stories. The relationship between Mulder and Scully was similar to that between Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, but both main characters were FBI, freeing the core cast from being stuck in any one location. And as many, many people have observed, making the “believer” character the man and the skeptical scientist the woman went against the grain of the prevalent gender stereotypes of the time, adding a unique flavor to the show almost “for free,” alongside a light dose of Moonlighting-style sparks. (Not to mention The X-Files even stars one of the best guest-stars from Twin Peaks.)

And both the main characters were really fun to spend time with. They were interesting, and complicated, and had a unique relationship, and were both actually really good at their jobs. Personally, I always wanted to be Scully when I grew up (not a gender thing, I just wanted to be really good at my hard job, be well respected by my peers, have cool banter with coworkers, and then once or twice a season haul a pistol out and shoot a monster without missing. Mulder tended to miss a lot for drama reasons, but if Scully pulled her gun out, someone was getting shot.)

But most critically, it learned the most important lesson of Twin Peaks: that Laura Palmer was too central, and revealing her murderer effectively ended the show. The X-Files’ equivalent, Mulder’s sister’s disappearance and the alien conspiracy, would be an ongoing concern, but was never as omnipresent as Laura Palmer, and was never fully explained or revealed. Of course, X-Files ended up overcorrecting too far, and allowed the alien mythology to sprawl out far beyond any reasonable attempt to make sense.

Personally, I always much preferred the monster-of-the-week episodes, and those were still fun long past where the “mythology” imploded into incoherence. And that was the thing: the show was always fun. And we can just ignore those last couple of years where they squandered the built-up goodwill and the alien plot fizzled out.

Thirty years on, though, that’s what fascinates me about The X-Files. There are plenty of examples of shows that were initially very popular that blew the landing. Lost, the”new” Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, even something like Quantum Leap. Mostly, those shows have slipped out of the conversation, and when they do come up, it’s always with a groan about the end first, and usually that’s all. No one talks about BSG’s stupendous first season, they talk about the robot dance party it ended with.

But not with the X-Files! When that comes up, the topic is always the relationship between Multer and Scully, or the best monsters, or the vibe of the thing, and the last years get treated as an afterthought. Most people won’t even remember that it started Terminator Two for a while unless reminded. For a while The X-Files looked like it was going to be the definitive example of how not to do a long-running plot, why you should work things out ahead of time, and for running out clock too long, but no, Lost took that seat.

Why? Why does X-Files get a pass on the ending, which was just as much a fumble as those others?

I think there’s two big reasons.

First, the show’s pleasures extended beyond the “big plot.” Even at its peak, there were plenty of fans who preferred the non-mythology episodes. The big story failing to cohere didn’t intersect with the joy of watching Scully and Mulder deal with monsters, or vampires, or Peter Boyle.

But more importantly, is something a friend of mine said while talking about this: “Everyone quit watching it when it was still good.” And I think that’s it. Those other shows everyone stuck around to the bitter end. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I don’t know anyone other than myself that stuck it out to the last episode of the X-Files. There were plenty of off-ramps: the moves from Friday to Sunday, the movie, Duchovny leaving. It stayed pretty good for a long time past its peak, and most everyone drifted away before it got actually bad.

I mean, Friday Night X-Files was appointment viewing when I was in college, but everyone had something better to do on Sunday nights. (Except that brief window where it was Simpsons-Futurama-X-Files, that was pretty good.)

As such, most people’s last memory of the show is something like Multer being trapped in the past in the bermuda triangle, rather than, say, Bran having the best story, or Sam just not going home, or whatever the hell Lost tried to sell us.

And so I think all that’s the real lesson The X-Files has for us, all these years later. Long-form serialized TV is great, and as a form is here to stay, but if you only have the one big plot, all you actually have is the ending. If your show works week-to-week without that, and it’s full of characters that are fun to spend time with, people are still going to be rewatching it three decades later.