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'The X-Files' Season Finale Was Junk and Nonsense

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 23, 2016 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 23, 2016 |


The good news is that the season 10 finale of The X-Files not only left the door open for another season, but it actually demanded it. The bad news? Nobody wants another season, because — were-monsters aside — this season was nonsensical garbage. The entire mythology arc — wherein we discover the world is coming to an end in episode one and Scully and Mulder go about their business for another four episodes before taking up that whole world-ending issue again — was complete and total bunk that can basically be reduced to two words: Alien DNA.

Did the 10th season answer any of the hundreds of lingering questions we had after nine seasons and two movies? No. Did it completely scrap most of its previous mythology (except for the goddamn William storyline) and reset, only to amass another set of lingering questions? Yes, yes it did. Do we care about the answers to this new set of questions? No, not really.

What will happen next (assuming Fox does renew the series for another season)? That depends, doesn’t it? Chris Carter — who is clearly punishing The X-Files fans for rejecting I Want to Believe — left the door open to bring back the series whether Duchovny and Anderson want to return or not. If either one of them — or both — want to wash their hands of this disaster and leave bad enough alone, the UFO (perhaps with William inside) can take one or both away, and leave their porn parody counterparts, Agents Miller and Einstein, to continue the series without them. But if Duchovny and Anderson want to return, I’m sure there’s a Deus Ex Machina waiting up in that UFO for them.

The whole mythology arc was alien swamp ass. It was incoherent and inconsistent. The science was bunk. Joel McHale was wasted (and terrible), and Walter Skinner got all of five minutes of screentime in all six episodes, while the Lone Gunmen were reduced to a split second appearance in a mushroom dream.

The X-Files revival was an unmitigated disaster.

Honestly, Chris Carter couldn’t have alienated fans of The X-Files more if he’d actively tried to do so. The revival basically duplicated and magnified all of the problems of the original. If there has to be a season 11 — and honestly, I’m not sure how many people would welcome one — Chris Carter needs to sell the rights to the series to Disney and let them gas-leak seasons 7-10 and bring in someone who knows what they’re doing to take over the series, and guess who has an opening in his schedule coming up?

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By the by, Rolling Stone did ask Anderson if she’d be willing to return. Here was her response:

I think we ended it in a way that it could go one way or the other. It all depends. I mean, it’s a nice idea that we could carry on. But I live in London. I’ve got three kids. I have other commitments to other shows. David is doing a TV show for NBC [Aquarius]. There’s a lot of things that aren’t conducive to a long-running or even one more year of a running, multiple-episode TV show in the mix. So there would have to be some pretty extraordinary circumstances.

But maybe. Maybe the success that we’ve had thus far with the six episodes is enough for extraordinary circumstances to present themselves. You never know.

What does she mean by “extraordinary circumstances”? Given the way this season panned out, I’d say a “coherent script” would fall under the category of extraordinary circumstances.