Best Geeky Finds – The Truth is Still Out There

bestgeekyfindsI was first introduced to the X-Files by The Simpsons. The episode was called “The Springfield Files” and involved Mulder and Scully investigating an alien siting in Springfield. The alien turned out to be Mr. Burns hopped up on pain killers and experimental drugs to improve his age and bones which made him glow. When I was a kid I didn’t understand the in-jokes being made because I had never seen the X-Files. This was the late 90s and I wasn’t a fan of horror.

Then I came across the Lone Gunmen spinoff series. I wasn’t aware it was a spinoff at the time, but loved the characters. Langly, Frohike, and Byers were hilarious. My love of this series, and the amazing final episode which turned out to one of the final episodes of the X-Files began an even greater love of the supernatural which started with The Twilight Zone years before.

The X-Files premiered in 1993 at a time when there was a high amount distrust in the government. Conspiracies had been around for years, some with factual support, others which were crazier than the people who thought of them. Fox Mulder supported both. To repair this fact, Dana Scully was introduced to the X-Files project with the goal of proving Mulder wrong and disbanding the department. To the dismay of the FBI, she grew to fall into the same conspiracies, though never completely agreed with Mulder about space aliens (despite having seem them at least a few times each year, as well as being abducted).

The show ended in 2002 after 9 seasons and a movie with more questions left hanging than were asked throughout the show. Chris Carter attempted to fix this in 2008 with the movie sequel I Want to Believe, but due to the advances in technology, lack of coercive mythology with the series, as well as lack of decent writing or any questions answered, the film failed to reprise what the original show had.

Thinking back to this film, I had a lot of doubt about the newest 6-episode continuation of the series which started this week. If a big-budget movie couldn’t reintroduce the X-Files joy, how could the small screen?

I was wrong.

Part of this was simply the wait. Chris Carter explained in the introductory special to the series:

“One of the reasons I was excited about coming back is we’re dealing with a world that has changed completely from the time when the series ended in 2002, which was not longer after the World Trade Center bombing. The American public had put their faith completely in the government. They didn’t want to know about government conspiracies. They wanted to know that their government was protecting them.”

Fourteen years later, things have changed in the world. People are distrusting of the government. Racism is growing at an unfortunate rate. The police are on trial for murder. Distrust and hatred is too high in the current age. To make things worse, we rely too much on things that control us instead of controlling things. Glen Morgan (1 of 2 of the best X-Files writers in my opinion) explained in the same special, “there feels like a lot of the things Mulder was warning us of kind of came true. All of us are tracked on our phones. There’s drones up ahead.” I try to ignore the fact that not only can I find data and retrieve my email anywhere but others can track this as well, but when one truly considers this, the world suddenly becomes a scarier place—one similar to that shown on the X-Files in the ‘90s.

In the first two episodes of the most recent season, Mulder and Scully are reunited by Internet news anchor Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale) who has uncovered a new conspiracy involving the 1947 Roswell spaceship and the military’s hidden use of consistently renewable energy created from alien technology. O’Malley follows the same conspiracies as Mulder, and has also found a survivor of alien abduction whose child was taken from her with visible evidence. This conspiracy is reconsidered several times over by both Mulder and Scully, leading up to the government’s final control over the situation.

The second episode is a monster-of-the-week episode involving a mind-reader and the suicide of a man who has a high-pitched noise in his head. This episode eventually begins to feel more like an episode of Heroes than of the X-Files, but it is still a wonderful episode to follow the season premiere.

Although there are only 4 episodes remaining, I still have hopes of the series returning for good. With 16.9 million people tuning in to watch the return Sunday night, if this is any idea of how the show is being received, maybe this will help Fox realize another season is needed.

Remember, the truth is out there so don’t quit believing in what is out there.

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