Why The X-Files And Lost Mythology Comparsions Are A False Narrative

 

As I mentioned in my previous article about the thematic comparisons between The X-Files and Lost, I mentioned the biggest similarity was that both were mythology based series. Indeed an interview Chris Carter gave a portentous warning that he knew from past experience “if you stumble, you fall.”

When Season 5 ended many people seemed certain they wouldn’t fall. After the series finale, just as many thought that Lost  had fallen even further than Carter had.

But even then it was clear that there was a difference between the mythology, and not merely that The X-Files had to do with aliens and Lost’s had to do with an island in the Pacific. The biggest difference had to do with when each series was filmed and how each network was willing to deal with the creators. As I have written in other articles Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, near the end of Season Three, negotiated with ABC how they wanted to ended the series. They intended to have three more seasons which would contain 48 episodes at which point they would conclude the show. ABC was reluctant to do so -  the Season 3 premiere had drawn in over 20 million viewers – but the executives conceded and they stuck to the plan.

Chris Carter had a similar structure in mind when The X-Files was renewed: the show was originally planned to run five seasons at which point it would conclude and the franchise would continue in feature films. Had it done so, there would have been logic to it: the final season would lead to a cliffhanger and the movie  Fight the Future would have been the first of many. The problem was, by the time the film was greenlit in 1997, The X-Files had become one of the biggest hits on television. After an episode aired after the Super Bowl 27 million viewers tuned it and the show was averaging more than 20 million viewers for the rest of the year. At that point Chris Carter and Fox decided that the series was going to run at least two more seasons.

This led to multiple problems, starting with Season Five. The X-Files had to spend the next twenty episodes essentially running in place, with no new storylines that could not be developed to spoil the movie, which by the fall of 1997 had already been filmed. The mythology has been stumbling here and there over the first four seasons (we’ll see why in a bit) but at least it had been stumbling forward. Now it’s momentum had been halted and it never regained it after this point. The fact that fight the Future was neither highly regarded by critics or fans of the series did nothing to improve the opinion of this decision.

The series then had another chance to bring things to an end by Season 7. By that point Duchovny’s contract was coming to an end and he had made it clear he didn’t want to return. There were rumors that Duchovny and Anderson were falling out, and both stars admitted they’d be relieved if the show was cancelled. It didn’t help matters that Season 7 is  by far creatively the worst one in the entire run and it shows throughout: the storylines keep getting lazier, both the monsters of the week and mythology episodes are running on empty and Duchovny and Anderson frequently seem like they are going through the motions throughout many episodes.

For reasons that have never been made clear to this day, the show was renewed for an eighth season after the Season 7 finale Requiem, which ended with Mulder’s abduction by aliens and Scully, who had been rendered barren by the experiments on her, inexplicably pregnant. Duchovny agreed to appear for what would turn out to be twelve of the 21 episodes of the season, Season Eight was framed as the search for Mulder and Robert Patrick was signed as John Doggett, an FBI agent tasked with finding Mulder and then becomes lead investigator on The X-Files.

While there are sparks of occasional brilliance, the show handles both of the cliffhangers of the Season 7 finale by essentially ignoring them: the manhunt for Mulder is essentially forgotten for a long series of Monsters of the Week’s and Scully doesn’t even mention her pregnancy (or even show) for the first half of the season. It’s not until the second half of the series that its sensed that Scully’s pregnancy may not be entirely human, Mulder is found halfway through the season dead and is buried – but he gets better – and the season ends with Scully giving birth in an unforgiving landscape.

 If you think can see connections between this part of the mythology and much of Lost’s (Claire’s giving birth to Aaron and his importance for the first half of the series; John Locke dying and apparently resurrecting) I can assure that Lost handles them both infinitely better and they certainly do a much better job of explaining them. By the time Season 8 ends with Mulder and Scully holding their son, once again the show has been given a chance to fade out – and again, it decides to keep going.

And if you’ve followed this description so far, you’ve got to be thinking by now: “Were Carter and his writers just making this up on the fly?”  This is the biggest difference between Carter and Darlton. While the writers of Lost had to improvise after the show became not just a hit but a huge hit, they manage to spend each season after the first one working out the details, figuring out the links between each season and the last one and what their next steps would be. While we might disagree with how their plans worked out (and given the ending of the show, that’s a massive understatement) at the very least they had a plan going forward.

By contrast while reading Monster of The Week, one of the definitive episode guides of The X-Files, we learn at one point that Carter never had a plan for the mythology of the series, that he never even believed in a ‘bible’ the way that so many showrunners then and today did when it came to a plan for their series. Apparently the way he would handle the mythology was to meet with Frank Spotnitz (part of the show since Season 2) would sit down and discuss what the serialized storyline of the season was going to be. “He wanted an endgame or a target, but he didn’t want to be obligated.” He also was collecting events from the news, such as an alien autopsy tape that was critical to Season 3 or a rock with life from Mars in Season 4.

Part of the problems with the mythology were in part because Carter wanted to give the writers freedom to generate new and exciting ideas. The reason he didn’t come in with a bible was that “if the writers who came on would just consult that and wouldn’t watch the show.” There is a certain logic to that: writers were always coming and going from The X-Files over the years but as a result there was no document and nothing in writing and nothing they could look at to remind themselves of where they’d been.

I have to tell you learning this came as no shock to me because by this point The X-Files had released the mythology episodes in a series of DVDs. They were divided into such blocks as “Abduction”/Black Oil/Colonization/Super Soldiers.”  Throughout the series The X-Files kept insisting, literally to the end, that all of this was connected to one grand plot linked together over nine seasons. By dividing the mythology this way, Carter was basically acknowledging that there was no grand theme, he was just making it up as he went along.

So as disappointing as some of you might find the ending of Lost, it’s hard to pretend that whatever problems you have with the ending of it are based on those that was with those of The X-Files. There is something to be said for the style of television that was becoming the focus of the 21^st century they knew it was going to be a serialized show and while there were themes at the center of each season, there was clearly an overriding link between them

With each season Darlton and the writers they assembled clearly had an overriding theme. In Season 1, the survivors of Oceanic 815 were trying to survive and figure out the mysteries of the island around them. That meant learning the stories of the characters before they came to the island and the framing of the narrative around Jack and Locke as opposing forces. Jack was the leader because he was trying to find a path towards survival and rescue. Locke was on his own journey to find out what secrets the island held. Halfway through the first season he would find ‘the hatch’ spend much of the season trying to get it open, and by the season finale the two ambitions of the leaders would collide combined with a crisis of the natives of the island or what would be called ‘The Others’

By comparison The X-Files first season was a combination of monsters of the week and the idea that there might be a government conspiracy about the existence of aliens. Trying to point to mythology episodes in the first season is hard to agree on. We meet an informant Mulder calls ‘Deep Throat’  - even though like many characters on The X-Files he has no name and is only described in the script for the viewer’s purpose. It's not until the season 1 finale: ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask’ that we finally seem to get definitive proof that aliens exist and the government is trying to cover it up.

It is the endings of each season finale that are the clearest difference between the mythology. For all the controversy about after the hatch was blown open, the season ended before we could go inside when the second began, Lost followed through. We spent the next season largely in the Hatch, got our first insight into the Dharma Initiative and began to add new characters to the mix. In this case, it was survivors of the tail section of the plane who had been living on the other side of the island and whose numbers had been decimated by the Others. Our questions would be answered but all they did was lead to more questions.

By contrast when everything is within Mulder and Scully’s grasp at the end of Season 1, it is immediately taken away from them: either by the deaths of those involved, the disappearance of the evidence and in the final minutes The X-Files are closed down. This becomes the pattern of every time the mythology episodes that take place: every groundbreaking revelation that Carter and the show promise are snatched away by the time the episodes are over. Mulder and Scully are always looking for the truth but holding on to it is as elusive as sand.

By the time the aliens begin to take a greater role in the middle of Season 2, the mythology is starting to fray. The series makes it work for an extensive period – at least until Season 3 – by trying a far more daring argument that The X-Files has nothing to do with aliens but rather experiments on humans. This is generally agreed by fans to be the most emotionally satisfying part of the saga because it argues the sci-fi trappings of the conspiracy are merely cover for something simpler and therefore more evil. We’re told that former Axis and Japanese Scientists have been experimenting on humans in our name since after World War II ended, that Scully herself and so many other women have been experimented on by these scientists – and as a result all have cancer that will kill them. Indeed in Season 4 Scully does develop cancer and it is terminal. (Spoiler: she gets better.)

This part of the mythology is in keeping with much of Darlton’s original idea that nothing on Lost could not be explained by science. There are parallels between this throughout the series, particularly in Juliet’s saga. Juliet is a fertility specialist who has completed a groundbreaking procedure that enabled her sister, who was decimated by cancer, to become pregnant. She is ‘recruited’ to the island under false pretenses in order to help resolve a problem that pregnancy will kill the women on the island, a story that is critical to several of the female characters. At one point Juliet demands to go home only to be told by Ben that her sister’s cancer has recurred but if she stays and helps them Jacob will heal it. Juliet agrees to stay on the island, only to be horrified when she learns that Ben – who told her there was no cancer on the island – has a fatal tumor on his spine. Much of Season 3 is built around Ben’s cancer and his manipulation of the survivors of the crash and Juliet’s has now seen being able to tell women they were pregnant essentially a death sentence.

Had The X-Files been willing to stay in the idea that the government conspiracy was about human experimentation, the show probably would have been better but more powerful. But then Carter introduced the idea of ‘the black oil’, which in many ways was a parallel to the smoke monster. Even there Darlton handled it better. They claimed each time we saw the monster throughout the series, we learned more about it and they never changed any of the old details. The ‘black oil’ by contrast essentially was whatever Carter wanted it to be at any given time. In Season 3, it was close to ‘the sickness’ something that controlled people without their awareness. In Season 4, if it possessed you, you were essentially in a vegetative state and extraction of it would kill you. In Season 5, it was essentially the life force of the aliens being used for colonization but it could be removed with a weak vaccine that ‘The Syndicate’ had been working on for half a century to develop to combat the aliens. After that it was mentioned a few more times but then Carter got bored with it and basically dropped from the narrative.

There was also a very clear pattern by now when it came to the characters on the series. Carter was never willing to get rid of them permanently. It seemed in the first two seasons that the biggest threat of the alien was ‘The Bounty Hunter’ and that the only way to kill him was to pierce the back of his neck with a stiletto. At the start of Season 4, after a long and protracted chase, Mulder did just that to the Bounty Hunter.

Except…rather than kill him off, turned out Mulder had missed. The Bounty Hunter roared to life and resumed stalking Mulder and Scully for the next three seasons until Scully finally managed to kill him with a gunshot to the back of the neck (I guess Carter was bored with the stiletto by then.) It’s worth noting that at the end of the season 8 premiere, we saw Mulder prisoner on a spaceship, surrounded by Bounty Hunters all of whom looked exactly the same. It makes you wonder, if that was true, why would Carter spent so much time keeping the first one alive: clones had been a big part of the show since he had shown up. But naturally, immediately after this Carter got bored with this kind of alien and completely abandoned the concept that he’d held for six seasons to move on to ‘super soldiers’ (don’t ask)

This was the pattern with characters throughout the series: we always thought characters we’re being killed off but Carter never gave us closure. The Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) is the most egregious example. At the start of Season 5, the characters goes to Mulder’s apartment and is shot by an assassin. Mulder is told by Skinner that he is dead, even though no body has been found. We never even get a reason why they killed him and by the end of the season, he’s back where he was leading the Syndicate as if nothing had happened. We never get an explanation.

When the Syndicate ends up getting burned to death by another group of aliens in Season 6 (I’ll get back to that too) CSM manages to walk away just before it happens. In Requiem, he’s in a wheelchair, dying of cancer when he pushed down a flight of stairs. He shows up at the end of the series when he is apparently blown to bits by helicopters in the series finale. Naturally when the series was revived fourteen years later, he’d survived that too. (Maybe he knew about the island and took vacations there?)

This was always part of Carter’s pattern: he never wanted to wrap up the mythology he’d created; he kept expanding out further and further. The consequences were the longer the series was on the air, the more Mulder and Scully’s role in the mythology seemed increasingly redundant.  The idea of them exposing, much less stopping this massive government conspiracy seems increasingly impossible even by the time the series was half-over. An overarching question of the series was, if Mulder was so dangerous, why didn’t the Syndicate just kill him? We never got a good answer, but maybe underlying it was they barely considered him a real threat.

Say what you will about Lost’s issues with the mythology: when they ended a storyline, they ended it and when a character died, they stayed dead. We would see them through flashbacks and certain characters (such as Hurley) would see them after they died, but they knew they were ghosts. When John Locke resurrected in the middle of Season 5, Ben told Sun he was terrified because in all his years on the island, he’d never seen anything like that: “Dead is dead,” he told her. “You don’t get to come back from that.” Even Richard, who had an advisory position to Jacob and himself didn’t age, said he’d never seen anything like this before. And indeed, Locke was still dead – he was in that form due to the writers plan for the final season.

The closest parallel between The X-Files mythology and Lost’s comes with the struggle between Mulder and the Smoking Man. They are seen as the forces of good and evil – much like Jacob and the Man In Black. There is a familial connection which we learn about in Season 2 in which Bill Mulder (Peter Donat) is revealed to be a colleague of Smoking Man and was involved with the conspiracy that may have led to his daughter’s abduction. Since the driving force of the series is the search for Samantha Mulder, this is the clearest link we’ve had that this quest for the truth may involve skeletons in the Mulder family closet.

We get the clearest link to that in Talitha Cumi, the Season 3 finale when CSM has a meeting with Teena Mulder. Like with his father there’s a shared history but by the insinuation of CSM, it is implied that he might very well actually be Fox’s father which would explain why he’s protecting him against the Syndicate’s better interest.

The problem was the show was willing to stick with this idea for long. This became clear in Season 5 when we met Cassandra Spender (Veronica Cartwright) and her son Jeffrey (Chris Owens). Cassandra was a multiple abductee but Jeffrey believed she was deluded and didn’t want Mulder anywhere near here. In the middle of that episode we learned not only that CSM was alive but that he was Jeffrey’s father, something he acknowledged.

By Season Six Jeffrey Spender is in charge of The X-Files but is there primarily at the service of CSM. When his mother is returned to him in the midst of a series of fiery deaths, she asks to see Mulder, not him. The Smoking Man – or GCB Spender as his name seems to be – tries to keep Mulder away but Jeffrey begins to buck from what he has learned.

By this point the mythology was so messy trying to put the pieces together was impossible. And if the writers had been willing to make this whole galactic struggle centered around the Mulders and the Spenders,  they’re might have been a human element to it. But when they did Carter said very clear Fox was Bill Mulder’s son, and Jeffrey was the Cancer man. Davis’s  character even said as much – just before he shot Jeffrey. And then not one season later, it became canon that CSM was Mulder’s father.

Then just to make a bad matter worse, in the final episodes, it turned out Jeffrey hadn’t been killed but experimented on by his father and the syndicate for years. He came back to the FBI, heavily scarred and mutilated but the DNA match said he was Mulder. Scully knew he was Jeffrey Spender. To be clear, not even half-brothers have the same DNA (something Lost fans know) but Carter was just doing this because the series was nearly over and he didn’t care what happened.

So for Carter to admonish the writers of Lost about what happens if you stumble really was hypocrisy. Whatever failures can be linked to the ending of Lost, it was more because by the final season it was increasingly clear that either all of the questions fans had were not going to be answered or that some of the answers they got were not satisfying as the ones in their minds. Much of this is clearly more of the problems of mythology series in general where the final reveal can never truly be as impressive as the buildup to it.

That is not the problem of The X-Files and that’s true going into the final season of that show. By the time the series was cancelled in February of 2002, it was well past its prime creatively. Even the most devoted fans had thrown in the towel that the mythology was ever going to make sense and in many cases the fact of its existence without David Duchovny (he left the show for good after Season 8 ended) was considered offensive. The monsters of the week had lost any creativity that they once had (with few exceptions). Things actually got worse after the cancellation: as in the final weeks, the writers killed off The Lone Gunmen one of the few supporting characters that had lasted the entire run of the series in a manner so anti-climactic it seemed like the writers were checking a box. The next episode William, the magical mystery baby who seemed to be the new Christ-child was injected with a serum by Spender and became ‘normal’ – so Scully naturally gave him up for adoption. This wrapped up a horrible two-season storyline in a way so unsatisfying it actually makes the resolution of Ben-Widmore’s conflict seem like a Shakespearean masterclass of plotting by comparison. (And just so you knew, when the series was revived sixteen years later, William came back. I guess now that he was an adult they knew what to do with him.)

By the time the series finale aired in May of 2002, perhaps the only reason fans were tuning in – and I include myself – was because David Duchovny was coming back. We wanted to see how the Mulder-Scully reunion would play out and how the series would conclude that relationship more than anything else. As we shall see Carter completely ruined that for us to.

In the last article in this series, I will describe my personal experience watching ‘The Truth’, it’s importance to series TV if not when it comes to its quality and what the showrunners of Lost might have taken away from it when it comes to the failures of that episode – and why it’s clear Lost’s is superior.