The surprising skepticism of The X-Files

Note: To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of The X-Files, I’m republishing a post that originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, on September 9, 2013.

Believe it or not, this week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of The X-Files, which aired its first episode on September 10, 1993. As much as I’d like to claim otherwise, I didn’t watch the pilot that night, and I’m not even sure that I caught the second episode, “Deep Throat.” “Squeeze,” which aired the following week, is the first installment that I clearly remember seeing on its original broadcast, and I continued to tune in afterward, although only sporadically. In its early days, I had issues with the show’s lack of continuity: it bugged me to no end that after every weekly encounter with the paranormal—any one of which should have been enough to upend Scully’s understanding of the world forever—the two leads were right back where they were at the start of the next episode, and few, if any, of their cases were ever mentioned again. Looking back now, of course, it’s easy to see that this episodic structure was what allowed the show to survive, and that it was irrevocably damaged once it began to take its backstory more seriously. In the meantime, I learned to accept the show’s narrative logic on its own terms. And I’m very grateful that I did.

It’s no exaggeration to say that The X-Files has had a greater influence on my own writing than any work of narrative art in any medium. That doesn’t mean it’s my favorite work of art, or even my favorite television show—only that Chris Carter’s supernatural procedural came along at the precise moment in my young adulthood that I was most vulnerable to being profoundly influenced by a great genre series. I was thirteen when the show premiered, toward the end of the most pivotal year of my creative life. Take those twelve months away, or replace them with a different network of cultural influences, and I’d be a different person altogether. It was the year I discovered Umberto Eco, Stephen King, and Douglas R. Hofstadter; Oliver Stone’s JFK set me on a short but fruitful detour into the literature of conspiracy; I bought a copy of Very by the Pet Shop Boys, about which I’ll have a lot more to say soon; I acquired copies of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories; and I took my first deep dive into the work of David Lynch and, later, Jorge Luis Borges. Some of these works have lasted, while others haven’t, but they all shaped who I became, and The X-Files stood at the heart of it all, with imagery drawn in equal part from Twin Peaks and Dealey Plaza and a playful, agnostic spirit that mirrored that of the authors I was reading at the same time.

And this underlying skepticism—which may seem like a strange word to apply to The X-Files—was a big part of its appeal. What I found enormously attractive about the show was that although it took place in a world of aliens, ghosts, and vampires, it didn’t try to force these individual elements into one overarching pattern. Even in its later seasons, when it attempted, with mixed results, to weave its abduction and conspiracy threads into a larger picture, certain aspects remained incongruously unexplained. The same world shaped by the plans of the Consortium or Syndicate also included lake monsters, clairvoyants, and liver-eating mutants, all of whom would presumably continue to go about their business after the alien invasion occurred. It never tried to convert us to anything, because it didn’t have any answers. And what I love about it now, in retrospect, is the fact that this curiously indifferent attitude toward its own mysteries arose from the structural constraints of network television itself. Every episode had to stand on its own. There was no such thing as binge-watching. The show had to keep moving or die.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why even fundamentally skeptical viewers, like me, could become devoted fans, or why Mulder and Scully could appear on the cover of the Skeptical Inquirer. It’s true that Scully was never right, but it’s remarkable how often it seemed that she could be, which is due as much to the show’s episodic construction as to Gillian Anderson’s wonderful performance. (As I’ve mentioned before, Scully might be my favorite character on any television show.) Every episode changed the terms of the game, complete with a new supporting cast, setting, and premise—and after the advent of Darin Morgan, even the tone could be wildly variable. As a result, it was impossible for viewers to know where they stood, which made a defensive skepticism seem like the healthiest possible attitude. Over time, the mythology grew increasingly unwieldy, and the show’s lack of consistency became deeply frustrating, as reflected in its maddening, only occasionally transcendent reboot. The X-Files eventually lost its way, but not until after a haphazard, often dazzling initial season that established, in spite of what its creators might do in the future, that anything was possible, and no one explanation would ever be enough. And it’s a lesson that I never forgot.