OPINION: Why I can’t finish The X-Files Miniseries.

“I want to believe… that this was worth it”

Earlier today my Blu-Ray box set of all 9 seasons of the X-Files arrived in the mail. This was cause for celebration, but also reminded me of something. I haven’t finished watching the latest miniseries 'event'. In fact, I’m 3 episodes behind. Why? I was so excited leading up to it and the X-Files is my favorite TV series of all time. How has it managed to lose my interest to the point of actually forgetting it was on air?

The first thing that felt off to me in the introductory episodes, was the look and feel of the show. It felt overly glossy and 'showy', which is counter intuitive to what made it so great back in the day. It was never polished or pristine, it had a very dry and subdued look that gave it an air of realism. Now it just looks like a car commercial. If you took out Mulder and Scully, I would genuinely have a hard time picking it out of a line up of Castle, Bones and The Mentalist. I’m not sure whether Chris Cater thought it would be a good idea to shoot things this way to make it look “modern and hip” or if Fox insisted on it because the style works so well for all their other procedurals.

Either way, it doesn’t exactly ruin the show, but it’s very distracting and hard to get past. The real elephant in the room is the “old characters don’t know how to use new technology” trope, which is inevitable in any old franchise revival. More often than not, this results in the writer of said franchise showing how out of touch they really are (I’m looking at you Scream 4) and just making the audience feel uncomfortable. This X-Files reboot, is no exception. Aside from characters saying things like “the net” and the imitation YouTube website “mindQUAD”, their attempts to find comedy in Mulder and Scully not understanding mobile phones and the internet just makes the writers look a little braindead.

We live in an age of incredible TV shows about technology culture like Black Mirror and Mr. Robot which have no doubt been heavily influenced by the X-Files and have now managed to far outpace it. Chris Cater needs to understand that his audience for this show aren't people who don’t understand technology, it’s the people who use it to excess in their every day lives. The time spent writing those hackneyed camera phone jokes should have been spent coming up with a dark reflection on how camera phones are invading our privacy and changing the idea of what we find socially acceptable.

All of this is coming from someone who likes the entire series, even including season 9 and unabashedly loves the second theatrical film, I Want To Believe. It’s especially sad considering the amazing writers who got their start on the X-Files like Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and Alex Gansa (Homeland) which made me think that maybe this series revival would take a seat alongside these incredible TV series’ it helped create.

Unfortunately it watches like a fan fiction screenplay from the 90’s X-Files forums brought to fruition by a very desperate Chris Carter.