The X-Files: Season 10

IDW

Dec 23, 2013 Issue #48 - November/December 2013 - HAIM By Cody Ray Shafer

The X-Files: Season 10 picks up where the last installment to the iconic sci-fi series left off, 2008’s underwhelming I Want to Believe movie. We find Mulder and Scully living together in retirement—and witness protection—until ghosts from their pasts start showing up. The X-Files have been compromised, but the only bit of information that worries the former agents is anything that could lead back to William, the baby Scully gave up for adoption to protect from otherworldly forces. In an effort to protect the anonymity of her child, FBI agents Doggett and Reyes investigate, while Scully is abducted by a mysterious cabal of super soldiers much like the one that sought after her child years ago.

Season 10, written by Joe Harris and X-Files creator Chris Carter, is an earnest attempt to continue the paranoiac sci-fi saga in the post-Wikileaks age. The characters feel as three-dimensional as they were on TV, and artist Michael Walsh’s minimalist depictions give the drama a noir-like atmosphere. The issues feel like brand new episodes, without whitewashing the characters’ development in I Want to Believe. If anything, it sticks so rigidly to what’s expected from an X-Files comic that it misses opportunities to explore more relevant cultural fears. Still, it is satisfying to finally revisit the series’ acclaimed “myth-arc”—even if it is centered on some of Carter’s more far-fetched ideas instead of the lingering questions about conspiracies and alien invasions. In some ways, Carter seems prepared to ret-con some of the tangled plot twists that burdened the show in the later seasons, but I’m not sure if shape-shifting super-soldiers are the best place to start. Adored characters long presumed dead are given the comic book resurrection treatment, however, and it can come off a little hackneyed.

If Season 10 is the closest we’ll get to an X-Files reboot, it is a fair attempt at recreating the supernatural-meets-bureaucracy mythology of the original series. Carter has a knack for treating crackpot conspiracies like folklore, but the best parts of his universe are the characters’ conflicting philosophies confronting terrifying faith crises. The X-Files was always about the skeptic versus the believer, a dynamic that is more important to revisit than extraterrestrials. Still, Season 10 does the best it can with established character dynamics while advancing the plot into unexplored terrain. (www.idwpublishing.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10

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Average reader rating: 7/10

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Felicia
January 27th 2014
12:01am

For a really smlipe chat program you can just use IRC.You can connect to a chat room (this can be private) and then connect directly to another user (this is called DCC) to transfer files. The nice thing about doing it this way is that the connection to the chat room is persistent. You don’t have to have both computers online at the same time. You can have one computer connect to the room and then wait (many IRC users leave it on for days or weeks) until the other user shows up.

elmo newsome
February 10th 2014
5:03pm

are back issues available such as the 2009 best of the decade .?

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