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Jan 26, 2016 Web Exclusive By Cody Ray Shafer

I am way too young to appreciate the thrill of seeing a new generation of adventures aboard the Starship Enterprise on The Next Generation, and I didn’t discover Doctor Who until years after the new series launched. But The X-Files is a show I was there for from the beginning, and its revival hits a nostalgic nerve I’m not sure anything will be able to replicate. I think we can all agree that for better or worse, seeing Mulder and Scully reunite for a series of weird adventures is something to celebrate.

Thankfully, The X-Files original series run possesses more than a few clunkers, because this new miniseries is off to a pretty rocky start. Blame it on the evolving views or polarization of American paranoia, but this debut takes a wild Glenn Beck-inspired dive into crackpottery, with guest star Joel McHale more or less playing a less obnoxious version of conspiracy entertainment host.

“My Struggle” begins promising enough, initially engaging with the series’ most self-indulgent past times and flipping them. We are faced with the prospect that maybe Mulder’s life long quest for the truth has turned him into a skeptic, demanding proof of aliens instead of merely proclaiming “I want to believe.” But soon enough he clumsily fumbles headfirst into the wackiest conspiracy theory ever put forth on this show, which, I should remind you, previously featured alien super soldiers and a man who can squeeze himself through a toilet.

The 2008 movie (The X-Files: I Want to Believe) wasn’t very well received, and a lot of its criticism involved not resurrecting the show’s iconic mythology. In response, this new series dives so far in the other direction, we are subjected to a needless reenactment of the Roswell crash. Actually, it’s a pretty cool sequence, but jumps the gun on the building tension and never actually resolves. Which is kind of analogous to this entire episode. Mulder is questioning everything he believes, but instead of finding real answers he relies on a smarmy talk show host ranting about FEMA camps and gun control instead of his years of experience as a criminologist and psychologist.

The biggest disappointment comes with Scully though, who initially confronts Mulder’s fears appropriately by calling them irresponsible. But she too falls victim to quack fearmongering, as she pledges to get “those sons of bitches.” Again, we’re seeing a Mulder and Scully who’ve given up on their patience and education for a new kind of paranoid Obama-era derangement syndrome. By the end of this episode, its feels like an angry Facebook post shared by your Trump-supporting uncle.

A few lingering questions are answered right out of the gate, which saves us some time mucking about wondering like most of the 2008 film. Yes, Mulder and Scully dated, but they broke up because Mulder suffers severe depression. So there’s that. I wonder if Mulder’s mental illness with play any role in the perceived train wreck this season is apparently hell bent on embarking.

When it comes down to it, The X-Files was a hit because it triggered irrational fears without feeding too much into them, and giving us a pair of iconic heroes that incapsulated two competing worldviews; Scully’s rational skepticism against Mulder’s obsessive belief in the supernatural. Of course, over nine years we learned there was so much more to these characters than their base descriptions. But so far even those assumptions are left on the back burner while Mulder and Scully indulge in fear mongering, isolationist, clap-trap, techno-paranoia-as Scully so succinctly puts it before she too succumbs to Mulder’s latest conspiracy theories.

The second episode, “Founder’s Mutation,” is a little more familiar, if at least by formula. Mulder and Scully are back on a legitimate case, and Mulder actually looks like an FBI agent again (he went pretty casual in the last few seasons, and especially in the second film), and the patterns of investigations coupled with character insight start to fall into place. It also does a better job of taking a “monster of the week” episode and tying it loosely to the overarching plot, a method Carter has hinted at for these episodes, and it works fairly well here. “Founder’s Mutation” isn’t going to make any lists for best X-Files episodes ever, but it’s a much truer return to form than “My Struggle.”

There was a moment I thought it might have strayed too far in the direction of terrible choices, but thankfully the episode course corrected in the end. Midway through the episode, Mulder and Scully discuss the adoption of their son William, which leads into a schlocky dream sequence of Scully pining over lost moments with her child, like taking him to school, talking about science and medicine, before losing him to some accident. At the moment, it felt reductive of Scully’s character to a longing for maternity, especially when Mulder’s role in their child’s conception and adoption was mostly ignored in the series’ initial run. However, the last five minutes of the episode gives Mulder the same treatment, showing his own alternate history as a father. Separate, these sequences are poorly executed trips into complicated emotions, but what elevates them is that they show a shared hole in both Mulder and Scully’s lives that they are keeping silent. It hints at an interesting theme that hopefully follows through in the next few episodes.

But hey, at least X-Files is back, and there aren’t too many places it can go that are more weird or narratively confounding than the last couple seasons, so we might as well enjoy the ride, right? Duchovny and Anderson are great, as always, and Mitch Pileggi’s return as Skinner is a welcome addition as well. I’ll cover every episode of this series from here on out, and who knows, maybe there is some radical new truth out there that will redeem X-Files’ less-than-stellar homecoming.

“My Struggle”: 6.5/10

“Founder’s Mutation”: 7/10