The X-Files Season 10 Review:  I Still Want to Believe (Someday)

This isn't me trying to hate on The X-Files.  I love The X-Files and Mulder and Scully are my two favorite characters of all time.  The X-Files is ground zero for the television landscape that exists today and I still consider the original series one of the greatest TV dramas of all time.  But I don't believe The X-Files is immune from criticism and after taking a step back and looking at Season 10 in its entirety with respect to how it fits in with the original series at a macroscopic level, for me the Revival didn't work.  I feel it ended up squandering the precious time it was given with this six hour event series and I'm not convinced more time would have helped.  I do still cautiously want a Season 11 but I also don't feel there should ever be a Season 11 unless various problems that plagued Season 10 can be course corrected, which I'll try to articulate below.

Season 10 failed to recognize that you cannot re-examine Mulder and Scully with new dynamics after 14 years and not also re-examine how all the other elements of the world they inhabited would have evolved across the same time period.  How has time changed other critical characters like Marita Covarubbias or AD Skinner?  Where is the Alien Bounty Hunter?   What exactly happened to the Faceless Rebel Aliens, Black Oil, Alien Colonists, and Super Soldiers between 2002 and 2012 or even 2012 through 2016?  What really happened to the ashes of the failed Syndicate project?  What is the purpose behind the Biblical allegories surrounding William's miracle birth along with Jeffrey Spender's actions after he was born?  Why is Season 10 intent on maintaining continuity with the death of TLG while ignoring all continuity regarding CSM? Season 10 bizarrely ignores all the chess pieces laid out during the original series and also fails to explain how the ghosts from the original series might still haunt the world today. For a series that was always driven by the incredible chemistry of its duo, Mulder and Scully are bottled up and rarely allowed to interact with one another.  When they are together, their quest is unclear and seemingly has no connection to their experiences in the original series.  With no clear quest despite rejoining the FBI, there is no journey to explore the MSR relationship and move Mulder and Scully forward as human characters.  Drama relies little on investigative storytelling and more on simply attempting to guess which aspects of the original series are still considered canon in CC's head.  I feel I have a greater understanding of Season 10 from CC’s post-finale interviews versus from watching the episodes themselves, which is very disappointing.

On the surface, Season 10 feels like a failure because Chris Carter ignored the entire mythology and characterization of the first nine seasons.  At a deeper level, I feel like CC ultimately failed to understand the importance of using his own universe as a setting. The X-Files wasn't a perfect show but it was magical because it always existed in its own universe that was somewhat dissimilar to our own reality. If you re-examine Season 8, The X-Files aired in a world burdened by 2000 politics, the USS Cole bombing, the end of the Dot-Com bubble, etc.  It was designed as an escape mechanism from our reality and was framed around Scully's quest to find Mulder along with her desire for motherhood and finding happiness in life. Trace elements of our world could be felt inside The X-Files through it's cynicism and general atmosphere but our politics were never the focal point of the show.   Season 10 exists as a separate entity in a universe that feels completely inverted from The X-Files universe.  With Season 10, I feel like CC translocated his characters outside of The X-Files universe and placed them directly inside 21st Century America as it exists today in 2016.   Mulder and Scully feel less like a duo on a mission and more like time travelers.  I feel this decision destroyed Season 10 because the original X-Files universe purposefully diverged away from the world we live in across its nine year run.  By 2002, Mulder and Scully lived in a world so disconnected from our own reality that there is no coherent way for their universe to ever reconverge with ours. Season 10 does not seem to exist in this universe and appears to be more of a mirror than an escapist world.

The X-Files worked 23 years ago because it existed in a paranormal world that was just a bit dissimilar to our own and it felt larger than life. The boogeymen were monsters and aliens lurking in the shadows. The paranormal elements in Season 10 are nothing more than directionless and contradictory veneer used to mask the fact that we are now watching a show framed around nothing more than the normal.  The greatest threats presented in Season 10 are typical 21st Century CNN and FOX News headlines such as Islamic terrorists, ISIS, Wall Street One Percenters, etc.  Season 10 has no sense of scope or danger, and the "Apocalypse" in the season finale felt more routine than the evening news.   Unfortunately, CC chose to ram Season 10 into a universe it did not belong in. He did it by slamming a square peg into a round hole with a sledgehammer, and I fear he may not stop until he destroys the show along with its characters.

The X-Files Revival needed to do one of two things.  It needed to either provide closure to the original nine seasons or provide Mulder and Scully with a new endgame that strengthened all of the material presented in the first nine seasons.  My final take on Season 10 is that the six-part miniseries was an absolute failure at every level sans Darin Morgan's wonderful 'MASMTWM'. Darin's episode was the only episode I felt retroactively strengthened the original series, which should be the sole goal of any revival.  'Founder's Mutation' and 'Home Again' were fine but not worth giving CC a blank check to further derail the show.  Perhaps it is CC’s intention to use a future Season 11 to recontextualize Season 10 and resynchronize it with the old mythology, but I feel this is a very bizarre usage of time for a beloved show that is now running on borrowed time.  Due to Season 10's bizarrely incomprehensible vagueness, I really don't know if CC actually retconned any of The X-Files old mythology.  I feel like there's still an untouched X-Files universe out there somewhere where the Faceless Rebel Aliens, Black Oil, Alien Colonists, and Super Soldiers are still running amuck in 2016.  The X-Files still has all the ingredients to achieve greatness again but CC needs to hand the reins to someone else and let Mulder and Scully return home to fight the future.