But, on the evidence of the politically timely opening episode, I hope the show is still around next year when one of the candidates standing in New Hampshire – or possibly a new anti-politics insurgent – is in the White House and has found out if there really are any X-Files.And exposition is what the new X-Files does best. The truth about its afterlife remains to be seen.
XFILE REVIVAL SERIES
The review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the series a 58% approval rating and offers this critical consensus summary: “Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny’s chemistry remains intact, but, overall, The X-Files revival lacks the creative spark necessary to sustain the initial rush of nostalgia.” US viewing figures showed a sharp drop from 16.2 million for the opener to fewer than nine million for the third.
XFILE REVIVAL TV
(It also helps that Duchovny, in Californication and Aquarius, and Anderson, through TV shows such as The Fall, have recently increased their screen popularity.)īut, although the show’s famous slogan has been updated to “The truth is still out there”, there is already doubt about how long that truth will be around. In an increasingly crowded cultural marketplace, producers take comfort in franchises – whether that’s Dad’s Army, Star Wars or War and Peace – with established name recognition. Other than summing up the political mood in the US, there’s little conspiracy about the main reason the series has been brought back. But the new series specifically positions itself in a new era of governmental paranoia and public scepticism, with lines such as: “Since 9/11, the country has taken a very dangerous turn in a wrong direction.”
XFILE REVIVAL FREE
Nixon was seen speaking on TV in the background during the abduction of Mulder’s sister when he was a child – an event he blamed on aliens and that prompted his career as a truthseeker.īut, while the key internal coordinates were the JFK shooting and Watergate – scenes often take place in underground car parks, the favoured meeting place of the Watergate mole Deep Throat – the show owed much of its impact to the external atmosphere of post-cold war America, as dictatorships fell around the world and elected politicians struggled to find the right words for a free world.Įnding its first run in 2002, The X-Files had little time to reflect on the consequences of 9/11. (This has never been a series for viewers who were 100% sure that John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.) The storyline also contains pointed references to the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Nixon and encouraged among Americans both a distrust of politicians and a greater belief in conspiracy theories. This continues the show’s habit of using the paranormal to reflect the abnormalities of US politics. Now he suspects that the unexplained happenings since the sightings at Roswell air force base in 1947 are part of a vast rightwing conspiracy. Now he suspects that “everything we have been led to believe in is a lie. Most politically topical, though, was Mulder’s sudden loss of faith in his belief (which sustained nine whole seasons) that aliens were trying to take over the US.
And both Trump or Sanders could have echoed Fox Mulder’s claim that “your own government lies as a matter of course, a matter of policy”.
Last night, the opening show of the six-part revival aired in the UK as the fourth part was shown by Fox in the US – on the eve of the 2016 primary votes in New Hampshire.Įven more spookily, one of the key speeches in the opening episode – which suggested that the US had been “keeping secret for 70 years” a form of free energy revealed by extraterrestrial technology – sounded like one of the anti-corporate, anti-Washington speeches that Sanders has become known for on the campaign trail. Both men appeal to voters who believe that “the truth is out there”, rather than in Washington DC. Strikingly, the 2016 revival has coincided with the nearest recent equivalents to those outsider insurgents: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
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