The news that "The X-Files" will be coming back for an 11th albeit limited season will come as welcome news to the fans of the long-running show about two FBI agents pursuing occult cases and a world-wide conspiracy concerning UFOs and alien invasion. The limited 10th season ended last year with Special Agent Mulder dying and an alien spacecraft hovering over our heroes, including his longtime partner in both investigation and love, Special Agent Scully. If any cliffhanger cried out to be resolved, that one was it.
“The X-Files” started in that golden age between the Cold War and the War on Terror when the pop culture had to dig deep to find things for audiences to be paranoid about.
The show hit about the Vast UFO Conspiracy, the idea that aliens have been visiting the Earth for decades and that the government has been covering it up for its nefarious purposes. Oddly, “The X-Files” depicted a pair of government agents investigating the alleged conspiracy.
The show featured a lot of colorful characters, included Deep Throat, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Well-Manicured Man, and, of course, the Lone Gunmen. The latter were a trio of guys who ran an underground newspaper (“The X-Files” started before the widespread use of the Internet) that tried to get the truth that was out there to a disbelieving public. They had their own spinoff show for a while before they were killed off in a heroic manner.
One wonders what relevance “The X-Files” has in the modern age when people can be afraid of real life threats such as terrorists, Russian hackers, and people of different political parties one can imagine pursuing evil ends. Aliens and the government officials and rich guys who enable them. If they haven’t taken over or destroyed the world by now, maybe they never will.
Maybe aliens, if they are paying Earth regular visits, have quite another purpose in mind.
Still, as to yet another revival of the series, one can only reply with, “Why not?” Maybe the aliens are going to take Mulder and Scully into space, revealing to them the truth that they have been chasing after for two and a half decades.
Of course “The X-Files” has already told us who killed JFK (it was the Cigarette Smoking man, who also dispatched Martin Luther King.) We also have a pretty good idea about what happened at Roswell. The question arises, are there no more worlds to conquer where Conspiracy theories go? It might be fun to find out.
