This brought back memories; a friend and I were obsessed with The X-Files back in the day! Hard to believe it’s been thirty years though.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
The X-Files was created by Chris Carter, who was a fan of the 1970s horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, featuring a wire service reporter (Darren McGavin) investigating mysterious crimes with a supernatural or science fiction element.
Other cited influences included The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Twin Peaks (in which Duchovny played a transgender DEA agent), and Jonathan Demme’s 1988 Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs.
As the characters developed over subsequent seasons, we saw them internalize that tension, with Mulder sometimes getting discouraged and questioning his longing to believe and Scully being forced to confront how her science sometimes conflicted with her devout Catholic faith.
They each had deep personal journeys as well; both lost family members, for instance, and Mulder’s obsession with alien abductions was fueled by the disappearance of his sister Samantha when he was a kid.
And while Carter was adamant early on that this would be a purely platonic relationship—à la Emma Peel and John Steed in The Avengers British TV series—that changed as the friendship between Mulder and Scully deepened, with increasingly romantic overtones.
The X-Files quickly blossomed from a cult series into a bona fide pop culture phenomenon throughout its first seven seasons, racking up a lot of Emmy and Golden Globe awards.
Saved 71% of original text.
I was just a kid, absolutely obsessed with X-Files, when they wheeled in Robert Patrick and a lot of the changes, but having watched the entire series again several times, the last just a couple of years ago, it honestly didn’t seem as bad. Sure Duchovny and Anderson kind of were the driving force behind the series, but I think they managed to deal with all of that quite well.
As much fun the “monster of the week” type episodes were early on, the further the show went on they seemed to deal with st least some kind of story arc. I think Patrick & Co were fairly good in that regard honestly. I hated the change bscl in the day, but I really enjoyed even the later seasons later on.
I actually just finished re-watching Season 1.
I miss the days of silly mysteries, cryptids and conspiracies. It’s nice to be able to revisit those times with a dose of X-Files.
