X-Files Revival Guide: My Struggle

Written & Directed by Chris Carter

Well, you've got to hand it to Chris Carter. After years of struggling, he managed to get the X-Files back. And in the new episode of the reboot, he gives the fans just about everything that they came to expect of the series. What's more, he has a budget that even at the original series' peak he probably could never use - not even in either of the big budget movies. We finally get to see alien technology.  After a decade of using Roswell as a go-to device for every conspiracy episode, we finally see what actually happened that fateful night nearly seventy years earlier. There are shots of alien experimentation that actually give an idea of how horrible that not event the scenes torturing Mulder in Season 8 managed to capture.

There are a lot of sights and sounds in the return - but it doesn't change the fact that My Struggle offers precious little that is really new, and what it does offer is so much of what made even the most diehard fans grow sick of. There are sequences of voiceovers with stilted dialogue. There are long speeches of supposed exposition that very quickly grow into more involved double speak. There is the idea that everything we saw on the X-Files was essentially a lie, that there really were no aliens. There's something that's rumored to be the key to the X-Files that is something we've seen before. All the evidence is erased before the end credits roll. And oh yes, a long believed dead character is still alive.

This was hard enough to take when the X-Files was on the air. What makes it even harder to bear is the fact that by this point in TV, almost every other series was a serialized drama. Many new series were trying to be mythology based, and as if they hadn't learned the lessons X-Files had taught them, it was a lot more dissatisfying. In the interim between the show's end and its revival, Lost had come and gone, and while it had done many things better than X-Files, it ultimately left nearly as many people unsatisfied when it ended.  The series that weren't sci-fi based also told long-running story, but most of them knew would be on cable where the risk of failure was smaller. 

Carter was right that the mood of the country had changed so dramatically over the last fourteen years, the belief in conspiracy theories had practically become mainstream. In that sense, one of the wiser things about the new series is the character of Tad O'Malley. (This is probably another bite at the hands that fed Fox broadcasting at the time, but unfortunately, its not that far removed from the truth. Considering the last of trust that Mulder and Scully have received from the government when they were at the Bureau, its fitting that the Internet is what comes to their rescue right now, though it is a little odd that any pundit would dare risk things by even suggesting he believed in UFOs. And indeed, the theory that the government has been using alien technology to try and control the populace is a theory that has a certain amount of merit. It would be more effective, though, if the show hadn't flirted with the idea in Season 3 and again in Season 5 only to discard it. And the fact that an alien ship shows up before the episode ends seems to indicate that even in this limited series, Carter is hedging his bets.

Carter does much better when it comes to characters. It would have been easy to have Mulder and Scully come back, and finally be together where we basically left them at the end of I Want To Believe.  To have them essentially broken up because of Mulder's obsession is a daring thing - it finally takes the will they or won't they thing dance out of play. And Duchovny and Anderson (who, let's be honest, look really good in their fifties) manage to play notes that we're not used to seeing in them. Mulder is now finally so cynical that he initially has no strength to believe now that belief itself has become a punch line. And Scully has gotten to the point where she genuinely wants to try and move past everything that has happened. It's telling that the most powerful moment of the episode comes not when we see proof of alien technology, but rather when Scully is told by Sveta about the emotional and physical toll that being part of the X-Files has been. Credit should also be given to Joel McHale for tweaking his smarmy comic persona just enough to make himself sound like a real believer. (Then again, he did spend all those years on E! so he probably didn't have to strain that hard.) And Anhet Mennedru, an actress who was so good on The Americans  gets to play an alien abductees with such vulnerability that I wasn't quite sure she was capable of.

But the sad fact is My Struggle seems so much of an old X-Files episode that you wonder why they revived the series if this what we're going to get. And it doesn't help matters to have the Smoking Man to turn up again. At this point, he no longer seems like a villain but something like a joke. The really mystery is how he managed to get blowed up and come back to life essentially whole, albeit still smoking from that hole in his neck. I love William B. Davis, I truly do, but I just think they should've tried to leave him out of the return.

I have no doubt that Carter wrote My Struggle bearing in mind that this is what the fans wanted to see. But what we get is more or less an updated mythology fill in the blanks that it hardly seemed worth the effort. If the revival was to be worth taking seriously, the writers would have to show that it wasn't more of the same.

My score: 2.25 stars.