That ’90s show

FBI alien seekers Mulder and Scully return for a timely, short TV run

January 30, 2016 12:00 am | Updated September 23, 2016 04:06 am IST

The miniseries is a television nostalgia trip.

The miniseries is a television nostalgia trip.

‘I want to believe,’ reads a flying saucer poster on a wall in the basement office assigned to Agent Fox Mulder at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The year is 1993. In the pilot of a series called The X-Files , we are introduced to Mulder, and then Agent Dana Scully who walks into his office questioning everything at the heart of that simple notion. She doesn't want to believe, not yet. She's a sceptic.

The X-Files managed to do then what the world struggles to do even today. It juxtaposed belief and reason embodied in the principal characters, Mulder and Scully, without either one of them ever coming to blows. The sceptic and the believer got along, sharing an easy banter, even rubbing off on each other that at times it appeared they had reversed roles.

In the 90s, The X-Files tapped into our credulous preoccupation with the inexplicable. Episodes embraced everything from the things that went bump in the night, cryptids, the paranormal, mutants, zombies, vampires, UFOs flitting in the skies and the big-eyed aliens presumed to emerge from these saucers.

The X-Files premiered on bulky television sets still running cathode-ray tube technology more than 20 years ago, at a time when very few had heard of planets outside of our solar system. In a universe that now hosts smartphones, thousands of exoplanets and possibly a mysterious ninth Planet X in our very own Kuiper Belt, enter The X-Files: Event Series truncated to a six-episode miniseries.

Back in the pre-millennial ’90s, which witnessed the advent of ubiquitous cable TV, television shows began to be transmitted close to real time throughout the world. American science-fiction series like The Twilight Zone that had aired in the ’60s would never enjoy the same worldwide, cross-cultural dissemination of its descendant, The X-Files . The success of the show also had a lot to do with the instant chemistry between boyishly gullible Mulder and petite rationalist Scully, played by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

Wrought stories took centre-stage over character development and this wasn’t a detriment. For almost a decade, the creator and brains of The X-Files, Chris Carter, insisted on maintaining a platonic relationship between Mulder and Scully creating a tension in the show that sustained it for years. Critics and viewers alike speculated frenziedly about the ‘will-they-won’t they’ game the two agents kept playing.

Thankfully, Carter did not fall into the trap that many other shows fell into in the following years. At one point, it was implied that they had a child named William together, but nothing was made clear on that front. It is simply left to the imaginations of the fans, who like to call themselves X-Philes. Even in the 2008 film The X-Files: I Want To Believe , when the two were shown in a relationship, it was done obliquely with little focus on the particulars of their intimacy.

The series featured two types of episodes: an over-arching alien conspiracy arc and government officials going to any means to cover it up; then there were the ‘standalones’, which had the two agents investigating a monster or creature sighting, usually in a small town with quirky residents.

Besides the two protagonists and an assistant director at the FBI, the only other recurring characters consisted of a cabal of conspiracists, chief among them dubbed the Cigarette Smoking Man, Well Manicured Man and Deep Throat. There was also an archetypal nerdy trio called the Lone Gunmen who sat at their computers and searched archives to uncover precious hidden data for our heroes.

By the time the show closed out Season Nine in 2002, the Cigarette Smoking Man, who started out as an extra in the pilot, came into his own, ultimately becoming the personification of science fiction evil, the Darth Vader of The X-Files universe. It helped that the character was a chain smoker and had a nicotine delivery device dangling from the corner of his stained lips in every episode featuring him, almost a foreshadowing of the television times in which we now live. Not a day goes by without a ‘Smoking Kills’ logo splashed across our flat screens to warn watching children of the dangers of a life addicted to tobacco.

Even the iconic animated series The Simpsons featured an X-Files spoof in 1997. Springfield resident Homer Simpson stumbles across an alien in the woods, and the FBI sends experienced alien hacks Scully and Mulder to investigate.

When a show acquires cult status, the milestone is marked on television with a pop culture reference on The Simpsons . In this case, an entire cross-over episode was dedicated to The X-Files alien myth arc.

Revivals are all the rage now on television and in film. Gilmore Girls is almost certainly coming back and so is Full House . The Coen brothers’ film Fargo was re-imagined as a miniseries to great acclaim. These reboots celebrate cult shows and movies from past decades. In these rapidly evolving, shifting times, television nostalgia is perhaps one safe harbour.

The X-Files Miniseries debuts tonight on Star World Premiere HD at 9pm.

The author is a freelance writer

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