By Steve Dinneen
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the X-Files first airing in 1993. A global smash of almost unprecedented levels (the premier of the 2016 reboot attracted 50 million viewers), it left an indelible mark on popular culture.
I still vividly remember hunching over our ancient TV set every Monday evening, obsessing about a show that felt unlike anything I’d seen before.
In the three months leading up to the anniversary, I rewatched the entire thing – all 218 episodes, both feature-length films and the 13 episode spin-off series The Lone Gunmen – to search for the secrets to its lasting appeal. It involved plenty of cancelled plans and there were times when I questioned my life choices, but after more than 10 continuous days of X-Files, here are 30 things I learned.
1. Gillian Anderson is a far better actor than David Duchovny. From the very first episode there’s a clear gulf in the quality of acting between the two leads. Duchovny has bags of charisma and he excels at comedy but his dramatic acting chops leave much to be desired. He happily hams it up when required but there’s none of the quiet pathos that Anderson imbues her character with. It’s no surprise that Duchovny’s career peaked with the X-Files while Anderson went on to conquer both stage and screen.
2. It’s an incredible cultural artefact. Future generations will study The X-Files as a relic of a bygone age. Even today it feels like a 90s period drama. There’s an unmistakably pre-millennium aesthetic to everything from the costumes to the American small towns that Mulder and Scully habitually visit for their cases, and for people of a certain age it feels impossibly nostalgic.
3. Conspiracy theories aren’t what they used to be. In the X-Files, conspiracy theories are a way for Mulder to speak truth to power. It’s about the oppressed fighting back against the tyranny of the elite. But in the years since the show began, conspiracy theories have increasingly become tools of propaganda. The X-Files attempts to address this in its (pretty terrible) eleventh and final season, which aired in 2018, but conspiracy-nut Mulder still looks unhinged by association with what has become one of the more toxic aspects of modern culture.
4. Finding light switches is hard and torches are cool. Mulder, Scully et al never met a light switch they liked, preferring to whip out their gigantic flash lights, which they would routinely swoosh across the camera lens, momentarily blinding viewers at least three times an episode.
5. “The truth” is a tricky McGuffin for a TV show. The entre raison d’être of the X-Files is to uncover the ephemeral concept of “The Truth”. If you were to play a drinking game every time the T-word is mentioned you would be dead before the first season was over. The problem is, “The Truth” can never really be uncovered, otherwise there would be no more X-Files, so the show ends up stuck in a kind of limbo, with its characters – especially Scully – forever on the cusp of a major discovery before essentially resetting for the start of the next episode.
6. The X Files straddled the era when episodic TV was giving way to long-form drama. In 1993, most prestige TV took the form of self-contained stories, only loosely held together by an overarching narrative, largely because studios were scared viewers wouldn’t return were they to miss an episode (David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which first aired in 1990, is an outlier here). Continuous dramas, on the other hand, were seen as disposable, trashy affairs. The X-Files helped to shift that perception, even if the “monster of the week” episodes tended to be better.
7. The X-Files was progressive in many ways but boy have some episodes aged badly. Series creator Chris Carter’s show is, at its heart, a critique of technocracy and a rejection of the military-industrial complex. Scully is a smart, independent woman, albeit one who has the truth pointed out to her by a man literally every week.
But when dealing with race, gender and sexuality it often feels horribly outdated. There’s an episode called “Gender Bender” featuring a bunch of gender fluid serial killers.
There’s a borderline unwatchable episode in which an evil spirit steals the pigment from black people’s skin.
More insidious is the use of spooky “ethnic panpipes” every time a character from a different culture appears, and the clumsy stereotypes adhered to throughout the series, from Haitian voodoo practitioners to gambling Chinese-Americans to wise old native Americans.
8. The flip side of this is that the X-Files gave a generation a knowledge of obscure folklore. Even three decades after I first saw the episode, I still remembered the Latin American Chupacabra – literally “goat sucker” – a fearsome, vampiric yeti-esque monster that terrorises rural communities in Mexico and the American South. Other creatures from real-life folklore include Chinese “Hungry Ghosts”, the Jersey Devil, and the Algonquin werewolf known as the Manitou.
9. Up to 24 episodes a season at 45 minutes each is too much. There’s a reason why the best TV shows – The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men – tend to average 13 episodes a season. The X-Files suffered from spreading itself too thin, especially from season four onwards, when Chris Carter had burned through his best ideas.
10. There were some classic X-Files baddies but none who made quite as lasting an impression as Eugene Tooms, the stretchy man who sneaks through your air vents to eat your liver. In X-Files lore he’s next due to appear in… 2023. Time to seal up your house. Shout outs also go to creepy mortician Donnie Pfaster, serial killer Luther Lee Boggs and, of course, recurring villain The Cancer Man.
11. As well as making international superstars of its two leads, The X-Files helped launch the careers of dozens of now-famous faces. Jack Black, Bryan Cranston, Seth Green, Shia LaBeouf, Ryan Reynolds, Lucy Liu, Aaron Paul, Octavia Spencer, Luke Wilson, Danny Trejo – the list sounds like the cast of a Wes Anderson film. The X-Files was to Hollywood what Casualty was to British dramas, a never-ending conveyor belt of talent where the stars of tomorrow began their careers.
12. The very first episode deals with ‘little green men’ – AKA ‘greys’ – coming to earth in their flying saucers and this remains a key passion for Mulder throughout. The X-Files was perhaps more prescient than it realised – just last month David Grusch, a former US intelligence officer, appeared before congress claiming the US government is in possession of “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots of crashed UFOs. Perhaps the truth really is out there.
13. The X-Files was so popular that the real-life story became almost as riveting as the one on-screen. Duchovny, at the time more famous than Anderson, always harboured ambitions beyond the show and was itching to leave for several seasons.
There were reports of a rift between the two stars, who rarely spoke unless they were sharing a scene (Anderson later claimed the spat was down to the humidity in Vancouver, where the show was shot, which made her hair frizzy and meant she had to spend more time in hair and make-up). Add to all this the salacious reports of Duchovny’s sex addiction and you had a veritable off-screen soap opera.
14. Ideas of masculinity have changed since the 90s. While generally presented in a positive light, Mulder is a problematic guy by today’s standards. He’s possessive over Scully (especially her love life), watches porn in his office, and drags his colleagues into unspeakable danger without filling in a single form. Time for a meeting with HR.
15. It seems absurd in hindsight but Gillian Anderson was considered risky casting and Chris Carter had to fight to get her on the show. Studio executives were keen for someone more “conventionally attractive” – whatever that means. She went on to be voted world’s sexiest woman in FHM, an accolade that also feels problematic these days.
16. The spotlight may have been on Mulder and Scully but the series’ most enduring sex symbol might just be Assistant Director Walter Skinner. The barrel-chested, bald-headed boss-man responsible for keeping Mulder and Scully in line has inspired a rabid devotion in the X-Files fan community.
17. The X-Files helped solidify the myth of the noble FBI agent. Alongside the likes of Twin Peaks and Silence of the Lambs, the show cemented the stereotype of FBI agents in trench coats and power suits going up against terrible forces in the name of protecting the public.
18. The show had some really wild ideas. The episodes charting the overarching narrative – known as the “mytharc” – went to some strange places. There was a deadly virus – or was it a vaccine? – being spread by… bees? And there was a black goop that went into people’s eyes that might have been an alien, or alien DNA. I think the bees were linked to that. I’ve watched over 230 hours of this and I still don’t really know.
19. There is also the question of what the hell is going on with Mulder’s sister. Abducted by what appear to be aliens, she is the key motivation for Mulder to join the FBI and start the X-Files. She turns up every five minutes throughout the series, often turning out to be an alien clone and melting into a puddle of toxic goo. The resolution to that story is one of the more disappointing moments in the X-Files, managing to be both unsatisfying and utterly bonkers.
20. Disappointing endings is a common theme for The X-Files. The show has finished several times (only to be rebooted) and it has never managed to stick the landing. Chris Carter just can’t seem to find a way to wrap up either the sprawling mythology of the show or the complex entanglements of its characters.
21. The spin-off series The Lone Gunmen is not worth your time. Some of the best recurring X-Files characters were the ‘Lone Gunmen’, a trio of noble conspiracy nuts and proto-hackers who would help Mulder when things got tough. They were so popular they got their own show, a 60s-inspired spy caper that may be the worst thing I have ever watched to completion. Let me take this bullet from the Lone Gunmen for you: avoid at all costs.
22. Chris Carter’s other TV series, Millennium, is also technically part of the X-Files universe. When that show was cancelled after three seasons, Carter used an X-Files episode to wrap the story up, dragging its characters into the orbit of Mulder and Scully. I agonised over whether that meant I had to rewatch this too but thankfully Millennium is now impossible to stream and the DVDs are out of print so I happily ticked it off my list.
23. The X-Files has one of the most iconic opening credits of any TV show. Would it have captured the imagination in quite the same way without Mark Snow’s iconic soundtrack? Or that enigmatic opening sequence that shows a series of mysterious images (the guy who made it has since revealed they were just things he thought looked cool rather than anything related to the show)? Even after rewatching hundreds of episodes, I never once skipped the credits.
24. Movie spin-offs are hardly ever a good idea. Taking place between seasons five and six, the first X-Files movie was a bombastic take on the show’s mythology, delving deeper into the inscrutable bee storyline. But it didn’t look like the X-Files, it looked like a movie, and there was a tendency to use the big budget on what are now incredibly dated special effects and unnecessary explosions.
The second X-Files movie was equally uninspiring, despite sticking to a self-contained ‘monster of the week’ story. This one starred Billy Connolly as a paedophile priest and does little to justify its extra run time nor the extra budget. The X-Files is just better as a TV show.
25. Between seasons four and five, filming moved from Vancouver to LA. This marked a turning point for the show – suddenly The X-Files looked just like every other show made in LA. Gone were the moody grey skies, the constant drizzle, the verdant greenery, and the thick, ominous forests. It was never quite the same.
26. Summer is not the ideal time to rewatch The X-Files. The few evenings of sunshine we got this year I spent indoors with the blinds closed. There moments during the ‘Scully has a baby now’ storyline that I considered abandoning the entire project. There’s a reason it was broadcast in the autumn.
27. You can survive losing one of your stars. After years of speculation, Duchovny left the X-Files as a regular character at the end of the seventh season, something many saw as a death knell for the show. He was replaced by Robert Patrick’s (Terminator 2) Agent John Doggett, a sceptical straight-shooter with a tragic past. This ended up being a shot in the arm for the series, allowing Scully to finally take the role of the “believer”. Anderson and Patrick also developed some great chemistry.
28. But you can’t survive losing both. After two seasons pairing Doggett and Scully (the second of which petered out hard), it was Anderson’s turn to take a back seat, with Annabeth Gish’s Agent Monica Reyes taking her place. A lack of chemistry with Robert Patrick, lack of acting talent, and a general lack of ideas on the show made this the worst X-Files season – a real drag.
29. Despite fizzling out somewhat, the X-Files made a cultural impact the likes of which have rarely been seen. A rare confluence of talent, timing and execution helped lay the foundations for a new wave of quality TV. There’s a reason people who weren’t even born 30 years ago know all about Mulder and Scully, and that Mark Snow’s score now appears on countless TikTok videos. It’s a modern classic – albeit a flawed one – and is rightly revered.
30. It’s worth rewatching – just prepare for a mammoth undertaking. There were times during my rewatch that it felt like I had always been watching the X-Files and would always be watching the X-Files. But for the most part it was a blast, both as a cultural excursion into the recent past and as a warm, cosy hit of nostalgia. And Eugene Tooms is still terrifying.
