Confessions of an Ex-X-Phile: Notes on the X-Files Series Finale

by Dr. Chris Carey

Even though the writing had slipped on all of the afore-mentioned shows during their last seasons, even though pivotal characters had left and long-time actors on the shows seemed to be phoning it in at times, I still felt like I was losing something with their cancellations. Our relationship to characters on TV may be an imaginary one, but it is occasionally a more regularly-practiced engagement than the one that we have with the real characters that crop up in our lives - imagine if we made a date to spend from 9-11 PM every night completely attentive to them! While I am not suggesting that TV is a good replacement for real-life interaction, I know that we all miss our preferred TV characters when they are gone from our favorite shows. To what extent we miss them depends on how dedicated a viewer we were - whether we were a fan or not.

Up until about a year after the movie, I will admit that I was a big fan of the X-Files, an X-Phile, if you will. Although I was not ardent enough to attend conventions or stalk the cast, I never missed an episode of the show, and often taped them to watch over again later. I owned several of the episode guides and followed the convoluted Chris Carter 'mythology' for the series, eagerly anticipating what CC, Morgan, Wong, and even Duchovny would contribute next to the increasingly Gordian knot of plotlines for the show. I enjoyed the movie, even though I was a tad bit disappointed by the inevitable mainstreaming of its script, so that people who hadn't seen every episode leading up to the film might still plunk down nine bucks to watch it at the local multiplex. I hung on afterwards to see how they would bring the story back to the small screen, back to the slower pace of weekly incremental plot development, whether they would try to continue to broaden the X-Files' appeal or play to their core diehard viewers, the X-Philes. It seemed that they tried to do both, with mixed results.

But once David Duchovny left two years ago, I really lost the faith. I had seen this happen on too many of my beloved cult favorites - the star got too big for his britches and headed off for the oft ill-fated film career. I wasn't sure that I was willing to see the inevitable train wreck this time: instead, I averted my eyes. I laid bets that the show wouldn't last more than a season without the Mulder-Scully interaction. I had nothing against late arrivals Robert Patrick or Annabeth Gish, but I no longer felt invested. Chris Carter claim that his grandiose, pre-planned vision for the culmination of the X-Files story could go on unabated was really the final nail in the coffin for me. I suppose that I was too cynical to buy that claim and too devoted to the idea of a show with its own mythology to accept a jerry-rigged substitute. I simply stopped watching.

I am glad that the X-Files and Chris Carter proved me somewhat wrong in my prediction, lasting two more seasons after Duchovny's departure from weekly participation in the show, although I have been told by several fellow fans who kept watching that at times it was hard to do. And, to its credit, the series' finale, "The Truth," seemed willing to welcome back those who had strayed from the fold, recapping some of the show's recent events and tying up a lot of the loose ends, although not so many that they can't follow-up with a second, I fear ill-advised, movie. The finale gave casual fans and X-Philes alike an opportunity for a sense of closure - Mulder and Scully were together again, there were the almost obligatory flashbacks, ghostly visits, and cameos by various departed and/or minor characters from the past nine years, and we got to see Cigarette-smoking Man get sent to H-E-double hockey sticks again. What more could you ask for?

A lot, actually. I do think that the broad gestures were fine, laying out much of the conspiracy so that we all could glimpse "the Truth" that had been just beyond our sight for nine years. And while I am glad that we got to say goodbye, however enigmatically, to the various characters that populated the X-Files mythos, I could have done with far better writing from a continuity standpoint, and far less melodrama from an acting standpoint. The idea of Mulder on trial to answer for his actions was a fine one, but the whole idea of a puppet tribunal was so ham-handed in execution that it left me missing the crispness and subtlety of so many wonderful X-File episodes of seasons past (even those that dealt with the big, sweeping conspiracy storyline), rather than enjoying the script of the Finale. How could the FBI bring in its own 'judges and lawyers' to a military court? How could, with today's DNA analysis, a corpse of the wrong guy be entered into evidence with a straight face? Why would anyone be surprised that the X-Files were trashed after the trial? I liked when enigmatic things happened on past episodes of the X-Files. I chuckled and accepted some of the goofier premises, too. But I was very disappointed at the lack of attention to detail in this last episode. I wished that Gillian Anderson could have taken it down a notch and that David Duchovny could have racheted it up a bit. I wish that everyone had their make-up done better - way better. Dark mood lighting is one thing we have come to expect in the X-Files; adorning the cast with enough ghoulish paint to be the chorus line in Cabaret is another. It was meant to reflect inner malais, I suppose.

The X-Files has marked various places on my 20-something journey - it started when I was just about to turn 20, and I began to watch it soon afterward. I watched the X-Files for half of my undergraduate collegiate experience, faithfully though my Master's, and up halfway through my Ph.D. It is tempting to indulge in what-might-have-beens. Would I have continued to remain a fan if Duchovny had stayed on board, or was nothing going to tear me away from my Ph.D. dissertation, even the most entertaining escapism on the small screen? Was the fact that the television viewing I replaced it with, when I did have time to watch, of much lesser quality than the halycon episodes of earlier X-Files' seasons a testament to my devotion to their integrity or a demonstration of my own unwillingness to keep up with myriad conspiracy theories? And, since the ratings indicated that I was not the only one who stopped actively searching for the truth until the bitter end, why did we stop collectively caring? Did we get lazy, did the writing get lazy, or did the gestalt of conspiracy theories in the relative mainstream of cult television simply play itself out (did it belong to the nineties instead of the aughts)?

While we could already see the slide in ratings before September 11th, was it a contributing factor in our loss of devotion near the end? Did the fact that our real-life men-in-black were once again seen as a necessity in the wake of 9/11 cause the X-Files to become a superfluous story? Why look for an imaginary enemy from outer space when we are being attacked by forces that seem just as mysterious in real life? Don't we secretly long for a guy like Cigarette-Smoking Man to be working overtime on readying Osama Bin Laden's dirt nap? Don't we want our intelligence agencies to be even more on the ball than the shadow governments and syndicates depicted on the X-Files, and less helpless and uncoordinated than they are in real life?

It is really too bad that the X-Files ended with many fans and, clearly, some of its cast and writers feeling apathetic, because at is zenith, the show made us feel anything but apathetic while watching TV. I am profoundly bummed about my own apathy. And while I don't think that any show can replace the X-Files in terms of engendering a sense of paranoia and an interest in the paranormal in quite the same way, I really hope that something comes along soon to restore quality to the small screen like that which we saw in the mid-Nineties, because the present fodder is not promising.

The NY Times ran an article on the X-Files' demise ("What Friends Has That X-Files and Ally McBeal Lacked" by Caryn James, NYT May 20, 2002), as compared to the longevity of Friends, which snapped me out of my exX-syndrome funk somewhat today. Nothing like a cheap shot to restore my faith in fandom. The NYT's writer suggested that the X-Files had lost touch with its audience where Friends had, despite using every cliche in the book, kept its connection to its audience. This exaltation of the lowest common denominator showed me that perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way. Instead of bemoaning the inevitable fall-off in quality of a show after its seventh season, shouldn't I instead be marvelling that a show with such a demand on the attention of its viewers, willingness to tackle 'outside stories,' and often-sophisticated writing had a nine-year run? Conspiracy theories, collective paranoia and the paranormal will always have a place in cult entertainment, and they probably will continue to operate increasingly on the periphery if the commodification of culture in America continues on its downward slide. So, it was nice to see the X-Files surface on the cultural radar for so long.

-New Jersey, May 20, 2002