"The X-Files" Is Still Out There

*Whistle*

Somehow, despite my interest in UFO phenomena, and the fact that my eighth grade class voted me
"best conspiracy theorist" (and "most likely to create a time machine"), I hadn't watched a single episode of The X-Files before the recent premiere of its miniseries revival a few weeks ago.

Out of curiosity about the show, and about whether properties revived after a long absence can appeal to anyone other than their fans, I decided to check out Season 10 of The X-Files. The first episode interested a conspiracy buff like me, but it seemed too defined by what came before: both limited by it, and so obsessed with somehow outdoing the show's past that it could not leave that shadow. As I wrote about the premiere at the time:

In nearly all revivals, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for a show to measure itself by anything other than what came before, as the new X Files shows. Familiar touchstones—the theme song, the appearance of familiar characters, Mulder’s famous “I Want To Believe” UFO poster—are all here. But the show also tries to outdo itself. Whereas the original show’s grand conspiracy was a prospective alien invasion (or so says Wikipedia), this revival, to justify itself, must raise the stakes and promise something new. Thus does Mulder learn—or come to believe—that “all these years we’ve been misled,” and that the conspiracy he sought to uncover is “not an alien conspiracy . . . It’s a conspiracy of men” who threaten a “Final Takeover” in which the ruling elite turns society against the masses to oppress them.

The episodes after the premiere seemed to abandon this overarching "Final Takeover" mythology. But the show returned to it in the season finale, which realized all of the worst fears of Mulder, the "believer": Not only are all the conspiracies true, but the force behind them wants to execute his scheme to the detriment of mankind.

The problem with all of this is that, if The X-Files ever had any sort of tension or dynamic between the skeptic Scully and the believer Mulder, that has vanished because the show now takes Mulder's side. He was right all along; Scully was just getting in the way.

As a result, the show now embodies the Gnostic tendencies of the conspiracy theories from which it draws, which make for a harmful worldview. As I wrote earlier this week:

...Gnosticism, named from the Greek word for “knowledge,” was an early competitor to (and heresy from) Christianity. A multifaceted worldview, its essence was that physical reality is an illusion, a trap created by the evil demiurge, the god of the material world. Only escaping the physical via the inner, spiritual life of the true god of the spirit offered salvation. God and the demiurge were locked in eternal combat. And, naturally, only Gnostics knew how to win. “My Struggle, Part II” fits perfectly into the Gnostic worldview: the Cigarette Smoking Man as the demiurge, hoping refashion the world in his image “instead of God’s,” and controlling culture and society to suppress the truth; Mulder and Scully as holders of the secret knowledge by which the good prevails.
But this is not a healthy worldview. It’s unprovable, relying, as it does, on secret knowledge. As Scully—again, apparently the skeptical one—states in the finale: “The science we were taught takes us but a distance toward the truth.” It demands leaps of faith without actual religion. It sets up a difficult dilemma: find the truth and end the search thereof (which The X-Files does not intend to do), or allow it to remain perpetually hidden. Unhappiness results either way. And it produces inevitable, unending dissatisfaction with reality. If reason and our senses deceive us, and truth is always in tension with what we perceive, then nothing is certain. The truth, as The X-Files says, is out there, but always beyond reach....

 While I find conspiracy theories entertaining, then, they're also unhealthy to the mind. I will probably still go back and watch old episodes of The X-Files (and watch the inevitable new ones), mostly for a project I am working on that someday I hope everyone will get to experience. But I'll continue to resist the siren song of the Gnosticism.

Unless I'm abducted by aliens, of course.