In a mythology episode, Mulder is usually given a hot tip about a smuggled alien instrument or operation, or dropped a tidbit about his family’s tangled history with America’s corrupt legacy, normally by whoever in-the-know informant is serving the Deep Throat function at the time. Even by the standards of chase narratives, which is what many of the mythology episodes essentially are, the plots are the same, which is mercilessly clear when they’re viewed in short succession. At the time, and even now, here and there, the mythology is bearable for poignantly grounding Mulder and Scully’s lives in a sense of existential crisis, while clearly anticipating the similarly controversial narrative games of “it’s the journey, not the destination” that were played by shows such as Lost.īinged on over a period of days, the mythology episodes span the spectrum from intense to sporadically amusing to interminable and back to intense again, repeating that cycle every few episodes until I personally hit a wall somewhere in the sixth season, defaulting permanently to the MOTWs. The mythology episodes have a shaky reputation, but it’s worth remembering that bits of this arc were parceled out piecemeal, in bite-sized chunks over weeks at a time, periodically reminding viewers that Mulder and Scully had something else going on when they weren’t investigating inbred monsters (from the still remarkably brutal Home), human tapeworms ( The Host), or cancer-eating mutants ( Leonard Betts). The former suggest All the President’s Men and The Parallax View, the latter The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Kolchak: the Night Stalker. The mythology episodes obsessively circle Mulder and Scully’s quest to expose the Syndicate, while the MOTWs detail the cases they take on the side as distraction from the puzzle consuming their lives. She was a scientist who saw Mulder’s conspiracy yearnings for what they may or may not have truly been: a narrative feverishly spun from the grief of losing a sister, Samantha, to a childhood kidnapping. He was a self-contradictory mixture of cynic and idealist who believed that nearly every significant event in Earth’s history was rooted in the involvement of extraterrestrials, who’ve been conspiring with influential, traitorous “shadow government” the Syndicate since the Roswell crash to enslave humans. well, who knows? Even the nature of the broad strokes of their investigation was intensely debatable. Like many, I was put off by the unrelieved intricacy of the years-spanning “mythology” episodes – the ones about the overarching theory that there is a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of alien life.īoth types of episodes, which intersect and comment on one another in myriad fashion, largely concern Fox Mulder ( David Duchovny) and Dana Scully ( Gillian Anderson), odd-couple FBI agents who were always just on the brink of discovering proof of. I always wanted to like The X-Files more than I actually did, as it was catching steam while I was in high school.
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They had a sense of play and ambition that tested the elasticity of a series that blended stories of government corruption with the paranormal. I recall some of the episodes written by Vince Gilligan, who’d go on to create Breaking Bad, and fondly remember the team of James Wong and Glen Morgan.
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(A development that could be taken as a symbol of evolving TV culture: for many, a series might have once been work, rather than the highest artistic calling.)Īt the time of the show’s initial run, I was a casual teenaged fan. There are 202 episodes of creator Chris Carter’s original series, harking back to a time when a TV season was comprised of over 20 episodes, rather than the comparatively compressed 12-14 episode arcs we see today. The immensity of The X-Files, which ran on Fox for nine seasons from 1993 to 2002, is never more apparent than when scrolling through the vast season-by-season directories on Netflix.
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