Boxwatch: The Return of Fox and Dana

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17424488

The original run of The X-Files was not quite the appointment viewing that Law & Order was. When I did watch it, I thrilled to the case-of-the-week but quickly tired of the overall story arc — especially once I realised how that was progressed:

1. a witness reluctantly testifies to Mulder with potentially earth-shattering information;
2. Mulder leaps to the conclusion that this witness is The Key to the mystery or conspiracy he is trying to unravel;
3. the witness disappears or dies;
4. the witness’s uncorroborated testimony has a sliver of information that leads to another witness;
5. repeat from 1. above.

The above recipe worked a treat for the show but my viewing began to slip as I tried with less and less success to block out the conspiracy blah-blah and enjoy the case-of-the-week. The last I saw of The X-Files was the feature film Fight the Future which was two hours of conspiracy gibberish, made slightly passable by the gravitas of Martin Landau and Armin Mueller-Stahl and feature-budget SFX.

So… Mulder and Scully are together again, and the truth is still out there. As an audience member, I’m like, Yeah, nah. As a writer, it’s disappointing to see it hasn’t refreshed its find-witness-leap-to-conclusion-lose-witness recipe — I mean, after nine goddamned seasons and two feature films, don’tchathink the heroes would’ve learned to protect their witnesses better by now? And, shockingly, it suffers from say-my-name-ism — following is an exchange verbatim:

Really? Haven’t they been reading my blog?