The X-Files...back this summer

[JasonPratt]

I'm pretty sure every season featured significantly more Monsters of the Week eps than mytharc eps, which they typically saved for season start, season end, mid season, and maybe an ep or two halfway before and after the mid-season. So like seven or eight eps a season. Roughly 60 eps depending on which ones count or how far. (Example, the second Liverboy episode features some small but important mytharc elements, but it isn't usually counted.)

The mytharc would have been better had (a) Chris Carter had any clear idea where to go with it (much less how to get there); and/or (b) CC had let any good writers interested in that side of things take the reins and work out a proper long-term story for it. (Which some writing teams tried but then CC and Fox Network kept screwing them over on it to extend the series.)

As it is, it's not much short of a miracle that the mytharc ended up being as relatively coherent as it was (although ultimately inconclusive), despite all the misinformation plotlines.

[Nefaro]

I'm pretty sure every season featured significantly more Monsters of the Week eps than mytharc eps, which they typically saved for season start, season end, mid season, and maybe an ep or two halfway before and after the mid-season. So like seven or eight eps a season. Roughly 60 eps depending on which ones count or how far. (Example, the second Liverboy episode features some small but important mytharc elements, but it isn't usually counted.)

The mytharc would have been better had (a) Chris Carter had any clear idea where to go with it (much less how to get there); and/or (b) CC had let any good writers interested in that side of things take the reins and work out a proper long-term story for it. (Which some writing teams tried but then CC and Fox Network kept screwing them over on it to extend the series.)

As it is, it's not much short of a miracle that the mytharc ended up being as relatively coherent as it was (although ultimately inconclusive), despite all the misinformation plotlines.

So.. you also agree that stuff sucked.   ;)

[JasonPratt]

I think parts of the Mytharc were great; and parts were dreadfully terrible, beyond suckage. On the balance and overall I consider it an ambitious failure. It inspired the worst of inanities in similar mytharc series making things up as they go along instead of telling actual damn long-term stories; but it inspired the best of subsequent and better successes along that line, too. (Sometimes in the same product! -- I consider Lost and moreso Battlestar: Galactica to be far superior and on the balance successes, for example, but their fuzzy-ass staggering weaknesses can be traced directly back to the X-Files.)

I blame psychedlic starry-eyed liberal New Age peyote-hooeyness for a lot of the problems, and a fundamental disrespect for truth or for Truth (despite the mantra of the series).

But I also blame logistics. ;) The crew finally accrued enough horsepower at Fox to cash in on moving production to Los Angeles, which made things personally more convenient for them but tripled production costs otherwise, at a time when the lead stars' own costs were steadily increasing. And Duchovny thought he was being shafted in his salary by the producers, and so to mollify him they gave him a lot more control over the series which led directly to increasingly bizarre appropriations of the mytharc for his own interests. Carter and the writing stable had originally intended for the feature film to kick off a greatly expanded mytharc focus in subsequent seasons (taking back the reins from DD's attempts to drive the series off the rails); but those factors combined with CC&Co having revised the story too many times even before the film (which was admittedly trying hard to establish a through-line for clearer development afterward), led to fewer mytharc installments and more comedy episodes -- most of which I fully admit were gold (the main stumbles being fusions of comedy and mytharc, not surprisingly), but by then the series was poking fun at itself too often. CC tried to decisively end the mytharc in Season Six itself, after planning to expand it greatly in the same season after the theatrical film!

But then, since the alien threat had hardly been dealt with, and in fact the key means of dealing with it had been destroyed with nothing provided to replace it, attempts at shifting the mytharc into new phases kept falling flat and it became much harder to justify in-story why any other episodes were happening at all, and Duchovny was still itching to leave, and then... well, we all know what happened.


Did all that stuff suck? No, not to me (or to many fans). Did it eventually suck? Very much so, I agree.

By the time Season 6 came along, and the mytharc had already (before the film) started to implode (largely thanks to DD), the show had broken the fanbase into conflicting shards:

A.) Do you love or hate the Mytharc stories? Well, I used to love them, and I still want to, but... but... sigh... (But some fans had never liked them to begin with, and sure didn't like them now!)

B.) Do you love or hate the Monsters of the Week? Yes, no, sometimes, usually, uh...

C.) Do you love or hate the comedy eps (a new subset of the MoWs)? Some of us did very much, others found them distracting even when they were high quality, and they weren't always high quality, and it was hard not to agree that even when they were they were basically a whole other show that didn't fit the tone of the main show at all.

That's no less than five kinds of fans for the show (all hate wouldn't be a fan at all of course ;) ), polarized with strong reactions pro and con.

Although maybe that should have been the expected result with the creators doing so many creative drugs for story ideas...  >:D

[JasonPratt]

But stepping back from the show once it finished, and trying to get a handle on the mytharc story after the intentional misinformation and rewrites (and rewrites cribbing on appealing to misinformation to paper over difficulties  ), yeah I think the series did eventually accrue a respectably epic main storyline. If that storyline had been in place from the beginning, and the writers had been saying, "Now this is what's really going on, but we're going to make the complex strands hard for the heroes to piece together and do anything about, so that our task is to write how they discover the truth, with some steps backward along the way but overall with ongoing progress and finally like we keep promising The Truth Will Be Revealed...."

I'll add here that I don't like the cosmology and philosophy of the show's background mytharc, but it's a fantasy sci/fi show and I can appreciate and enjoy it for what it is.


So, with some fuzziness still remaining about details after the end of the series (and likely to permanently remain with the new short series or anything they do afterward):

Billions of years ago, the first sentient life on our planet was a virus that lived in a black oil. Whether it developed here, or came to Earth as such from somewhere else, or came to Earth as a more primitive life form and then developed sentience here, isn't clear and probably irrelevant.

Over a very long period of time it managed to leave our planet, apparently after some cataclysm made Earth unfeasible for it to live on anymore. Whether it developed space travel technology and created the ability to generate "Greys", or whether (the theory I go with) a more neutral or benevolent Grey alien race visited Earth and got overtaken, as an infection in the Greys the Oiliens (to give a fan name I like) mostly left Earth, but a few pockets remained in a deranged and/or primitive state. (One such pocket can be seen turning some cavemen into feral Greys, and later modern humans, in the theatrical film.)

The ruthless Oiliens weren't content with being Greys (assimilated or otherwise) and naturally wanted to improve its stock, so it started taking over other alien races. One of the most useful, and the other most important species for the plot, were humanoid shapeshifters, some of whom escaped to Earth (ironically) but most of whom were enslaved by the Oiliens. The virus incorporated their shapeshifting powers into the Grey stock with various levels of success. As a result, some Greys have Oilien overlord possession, others don't but still are enslaved working for the Oiliens, some have shapeshifting powers, some don't.

This wretched invasion from Earth started a war in space, a war led by a more benevolent Godlike alien (or possibly by God! -- though of a more pluralistic kind than, for example, a C. S. Lewis Space Trilogy kind) and his/its spiritual agents. Foreseeing that as the war went against them the Oiliens would eventually retreat to Earth, this God (for want of a better term) flanked them by sending spiritual agents here first to prepare the rational species which had since developed here (i.e. us humans) for the return of the Oiliens. This preparation created all religions in various ways. (Chris Carter was, maybe still is, a huge fan of the idea that all religions were created by alien influence, and this is a big theme in the later seasons.) But some of those agents rebelled, and that's why there are occasional demonic-spiritual problems faced by the FBI Agents on the show, sometimes with thematic echoes of the Oiliens, although those threats aren't the main thing.

The Oiliens have their own rebel problems, too, with a hardcore splinter group of the Shifters, who sear their orifices shut to keep from being infected by the Black Oil (although since they can still shapeshift, and clearly don't need eyes and ears to navigate and even fight, this may be more of a symbolic statement than a practical action). Eventually these renegade Shifters arrive on Earth to screw with the Oilien plans, so they're more important to the plot than the occasional demon.

With the War In Heaven going badly for them, the Oiliens eventually start the retreat back to Earth (as 'God' anticipated). Their main preliminary scouts, mostly Greys, start arriving during our World War 2, and especially afterward. A crash near Roswell, New Mexico, allows the United States to study and assess the situation, which due to obvious levels of threat they choose to share with the most important world governments generally, in order to foster some preliminary cooperation should more arrive in force. At this time the military-industrial complex also starts experimenting on alien tech, not only to level ourselves up to resist increased alien activity if necessary, but also to help the US become the reigning world superpower.

As more Oiliens arrive and begin studying humanity, they can see a serious problem: we've advanced too far. They could easily wipe us out from orbit, not even counting a conventional war, but because we've advanced to WW2 levels of population and tech (not even counting how far we might get by 2012, when enough of the fleet arrives to quickly win that way), they would have to destroy so much of the planet to do so that it would be like arriving back at whatever catastrophe they were fleeing from to begin with. Which naturally wouldn't help them in using the Earth as a retrenchment base to try to reverse the War In Heaven. So as the United States, leading in alien research by now, selects representatives from the State Department and some representatives of other nations, to reach out (originally in cautious optimism) in negotiation with the Greys, the Oiliens decide to use this outreach for a special plan.

Here's the deal (they say). We're coming, and we intend to take the planet, and we're damn well going to do so. But whether we wipe it out in a fiery mess or not, is up to how well you can help us do something else instead. Specifically, we want to find a way to convert your species into being viable hosts for us. That way we can conquer the world without all the mess. We've already started working on this, but things aren't working out smoothly. (This is largely thanks to preliminary flanking interference from God and the angels, but either the Oiliens don't know it or they aren't sharing that info, since that would be silly for them to do.) If you help us, we'll spare you and your families from being taken over when the end comes. If we don't succeed together, well it already sucks to be you but we're going to take the planet.

The negotiation group realizes there is no way they can tell the major governments about this, and so agree to the terms, passing along misinformation to the governments and using their contacts and influence (which the aliens help enhance by various alien tech) to start the Consortium.

The Oiliens naturally don't trust the Consorts (as I like to call them), so anyone joining the Consortium is required to sacrifice a beloved family member who in theory will be returned when the project is done, but who in practice are often used by the aliens in their experiments. The Consorts are meanwhile policed by Shifters, at least some of whom have Oiliens riding along.

The Consorts have several goals, some of which overlap with world governments in general and with the US government in particular.

1.) The most important goal, which must absolutely be protected at all costs, is TO SAVE THE WORLD! The Oiliens, in their desperation, have given them the opening to do this, by developing a vaccine to the virus; but neither can they just develop it, they have to find a way to counterstrike or otherwise protect the planet from the Oiliens just burning the human infection off after all. It would be an ultimate catastrophe if the Oiliens found out, of course, so the Consorts work super-hard to hide this goal. "Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate," isn't only their motto to protect goal #2.

2.) They've got to work on the Oilien project, too. That sometimes means doing their own pseudo-alien abductions and experiments.

3.) Study alien tech, especially for purposes 2 but most especially for purpose 1. Here their goals overlap the military-industrial complex, which they naturally tend to be tied into anyway; but there are people in the mil-indust who know there's alien tech but don't know about goal 2, much less goal 1. So sometimes in the series Scully and Mulder run into plain old military-industrial alien tech experimentation, and all the attendant security problems and abuses thereof. But the Consorts try to keep an eye on that, and not let it run off too far, sometimes shutting it down or appropriating it for themselves, and sometimes even using Moose and Squirrel against the Complex. The Complex stages their own pseudo-alien abductions and experiments, sometimes as tools of the Consorts, sometimes on their own subordinate goals.

4.) Crack down on any possibility of other people figuring out what's going on, so that society can continue to function normally instead of EVERYBODY PANIC! Since alien and pseudo-alien activity can't be entirely hidden, that also includes "obfuscating" and cluttering the data, sending false signals here, there, and yon. Sometimes alien theorists are assisted, sometimes hampered, sometimes excised, sometimes excised not for being right but for being wrong (and so signalling to others investigating that the martyrs were on to something).

5.) Protect themselves, duh, from all angles while operations are going on.

6.) Protect their loved ones and families, where possible.

7.) Oh, and accumulate power for its own sake while they're at it, because why not?

The Consorts are all a bunch of different men and women with different ideas of morality, after all, and their personal interests sometimes run at odds with one another. Or change over time. Or change in one way over time and then back again.


Mulder's father, the Cigarette Smoking Man, was one of the younger original Consorts; so was his apparent father, Bill Mulder. Bill's wife Teresa didn't have any authority or responsibility, she was just married (and had an affair) into the situation. But that meant either Fox or Samantha, Teresa's children, had to be sacrificed to the aliens as a hostage, and Bill decided to let her in on what was going to happen so that she could maybe find a little peace with it. Bill chose Samantha, hoping Fox would have better socio-cultural opportunities later between the two to help "fight the future"; Teresa resented this, partly out of guilt since Fox wasn't actually Bill's son, feeling that if Bill had known he might have preferred to sacrifice Fox instead. (The CSM may not have known he was Fox's father until fairly late in the series; y'know, more or less around the time the writers decided to go that direction. ;) )

As it happened, Samantha wasn't abducted directly by aliens, but by the Complex testing alien tech (since they might as well -- and Bill hoped the trauma would inspire Fox to get involved in the situation) and handed over to the Consorts, where she was put in a foster home but occasionally abducted by aliens and the Complex for testing. Eventually successful hybrid clones were made of her, some of which the few escaping Shifters on Earth were able to rescue and put to work helping search for a vaccine (with tacit help from the Consorts), which is why the Alien Bounty Hunter was killing them off (along with other hybrids) in early seasons. The original Samantha was finally helped to escape, sort of, by "walk-ins", benevolent spirits tasked with saving abused children from having to endure the totality of their horrific fates.

Fox and Samantha were, in fact, two of a large number of humans with what might be called angelic connections in their DNA, provided partly as material in a long-term plan by God to help develop the vaccine. This is why despite never having been abducted and experimented on, Fox's body helped synthesize a partial vaccine when, in a Russian gulag (where independent vaccination experiments were being conducted), he was exposed to a feral or weak captive version of the Black Oil and its virus. (Fox Mulder's crazy intuitive abilities, allowing lots of lazy plot writing, can be explained this way, too.  ::) )

The same goes for Dana Scully (and perhaps her sister Melissa to a lesser extent), but unlike Mulder Dana has a much stronger spiritual connection despite her sceptical scientific stance. This is why, over the series, she's the one who is actually religious (Roman Catholic more or less), while Mulder the often over-credulous 'believer' switches to mocking scepticism when it comes to more traditional religious beliefs.

Ultimately, the radical experimentation done on Scully, plus the nascent virus vaccine in Mulder's head, plus their genetic inheritance, leads (quite literally as part of a plan being guided more-or-less subtly by the God-alien and/or his agents) to Scully bearing a child when she should have been permanently infertile; and why the Oiliens are so scared this child, William, will somehow be able to conquer them. He's saved at first by Jeff Spender (Mulder's half-brother) injecting him with a weak vaccine, which seems to nerf his alien abilities, leading the Oiliens to lose interest in him, but the implication is that eventually he'll be able to control alien technology by a spiritual connection: meaning he'll be able to nuke enemy ships and tech weapons, even if they're in near-Earth space! (There's a scene in one of the last seasons where baby William, crying and in danger, activates alien ship technology to kill everyone around him, but safely lives through it.)

That's a big part of the key to winning: the half of the plan the Consorts could never quite find (i.e. they didn't give a hoot about spiritual research per se).

The Consorts (with help from independent Soviet scientists, via Mulder) do eventually start making weak anti-Oilien vaccines, and those are improving. So while they have no way, yet, to protect from a bombardment or conventional war invasion, their other side of the plan is finally working.

Unfortunately, the other side of the plan requires the Oilien plan to be working just as well or even better! -- although they have a weird balancing act where they can use Mulder and Scully to slightly hamper the Oilien plan, and blame problems on them, yet don't want too much hamperage. And also some Consorts think this idea is dangerously insane, so are more hostile to the Mulder/Scully team. And also, before true breakthroughs start happening (around the time Mulder gets black oil dropped on his face in Russia), many of the Consorts are giving up in despair and deciding, screw it, let's just stick to the main secret plan and save ourselves and our families before we're caught, especially now with the Shifters stepping up their police actions (sometimes thanks to M&S prodding the beehive).

The main secret plan, is to use bees as carriers for a new version of the Black Oil, which can direct the bees to sting all humans on the planet at about the same time, infecting them with the Oil and thus with Oiliens, retro-virusing the humans into human-alien hybrids which are better able to handle possession by the Oiliens (and generally just better at surviving in environments, underwater and vs damage, the hideous amounts of radiation exuded by the Oiliens, etc.)

The super-secret plan is to make a switch with the vaccine, and inoculate everyone instead using the bees! -- maybe also turning all humans into superior Shifter hybrids, since that might help human survival generally and against alien retaliation particularly.

Annnnd then {inhale!} the Shifter rebellion arrives, with their own cruel plan: use captured Oilien tech to call all current semi- and full-hybrids together at "lighthouses" (where they tend to expect to be beamed up into a heavenly spaceship), and zorch them, destroying active research in other raids in other ways as well.

Now the War In Heaven has gotten closer than the Oiliens were expecting so soon. So in a panic, they announce they're throwing out the timetable: they signal the Consorts to get together now and abandon the Earth, and the Oiliens will try the bee thing, and if that doesn't work well they'll just go for the planetary bombardment and do the best they can with whatever's left over.

But then the Rebel Shifters intercept that plan, and zorch most of the Consorts and their families. So much for that plotline. (These late developments happen in "Two Fathers" / "One Son", and the preceding mytharc eps.)

The good news, such as it is, is that the Rebel Shifters are preventing the Oiliens from going with the bee strategy, and the Oiliens are preventing the Rebel Shifters from denying Earth to the "Blacks" by nuking the whole planet -- and by consequence, in a backhanded way the "Reds" are preventing the "Blacks" from doing their own lesser (but still genocidal) global bombardment.

This gives the remaining few Consorts time to work on improving the weak vaccine, and to try to build up their infrastructure again.

The Blacks meanwhile step up their own hybrid shapeshifting experiments, and start producing more "super soldiers" as the plot officially calls them. Much of the final two seasons are about this stalemate while the angels and God (played by Burt Reynolds) put their side of the plan into action by protecting Dana Scully and the son of Mulder and Scully, William, the living weapon who when he grows up can protect the Earth from alien weaponry (whether Red or Black).

And that's where the series ends, more or less, with William in hiding, S&M reunited, and Mulder seeing ghosts of dead allies (and half-allies) trying to help him and Scully escape and survive to fight the future.

[Nefaro]

I swear.  I knew the analytical H-Bomb my comment would set in motion. 

I did it anyway.    ^-^

[JasonPratt]

I enjoyed writing that out a lot more than I had any right to.  >:D

[Nefaro]

I enjoyed writing that out a lot more than I had any right to.  >:D

I knew you needed to release the fury. 

Just needed a trigger.  >:D

[Sir Slash]

A little better tonight. I'll probably stick around for another week. Somebody please take Scully's sedatives away from her.

[besilarius]

Jason, that is as good an explanation as I've heard.  Well done.
But is the Truth in there?  I think it is likely.

[JasonPratt]

Where's that "I HAVE FURY!" meme?

Just finished watching Ep 2 a few minutes ago. Somehow we missed recording Ep 1, but I sincerely doubt I missed anything important even though I know it was supposed to be a Mytharc ep. (I didn't realize it was titled "My Struggle", and I'm sure the Nazi connotation was intentional and ultimately irrelevant. ;) )

Thoughts on Ep 2 (as spoiler-free as possible for anyone watching it later)...

* Written by one of the head writers and developers, James Wong. I was hoping that would be a signal for quality, but I thought the episode was pretty meh and maybe even a back-door pilot for a different show (along the lines of Escape from Witch Mountain).

* Cinematography was good, but not about much of anything to write home about.

* Essentially this ep reflected one of the medical human experiment Monster of the Week eps which vaguely tied into the Mytharc maybe but who knows. In other words, the type of episode I cared almost least for.

* Heavy on the gross body horror factor. Also not something I especially cared for, but some people were fans of that and so should have been happy with that part of it.

* The dialogue ranged from good (in the flashback portions) to dreadfully clunky. After one exchange Mom marveled, "Were they even talking to each other?!" They would speak lines that sounded like semi-random ideas, and both actors would be on the same set, but one of them might as well have been muttering Farsi to herself while the other spoke some other thoughts aloud in Aztec. Was... was that on purpose??? As some kind of misguided salute to how the X-Files 'were'??! Yeah that kind of thing occasionally happened, but it wasn't good! -- much less the kind of writing and acting fans loved the series for!

* Second most-distracting show element: by the end of Season 9 (or Season 8 rather, since 9 added nothing to the plot really), S&M had figured out the plot in a lot of detail (see prior post). They had found the truth, but couldn't do much about it except protect William on one hand and hope the surviving Syndicate members could get a better vaccine (and inoculation method) going while the Blacks and the Reds stalemated each other. I'm going to guess, from bits of Ep 1 reviews I've read, and how that side of the plot was treated tonight, that the writers used the long-since-passed-nothing-deadline of 2012 as an excuse to cast in-story doubt on everything again, and an out-of-story excuse to shuffle the Etch A Sketch and start over from scratch. Things happened, and there were probably aliens involved (maybe? right?) but who knows really.

On one hand that's hugely insulting to the fans; on the other hand, that's typical X-files writing. So... yay, mission accomplished?

* Most distracting show element: the hideous old-age makeup being worn by Anderson and Duchovny, which paralyzes their faces so that they look and sound like they're suffering from lockjaw or botulism (or Botox as my parents snorfed). Scully much worse than Mulder. I felt sorry for the actors having gone so much to pot in Hollywood that they had suffered strokes or damaged their faces somehow trying to look good for the show.

Then the (daydreaming-)flashbacks kicked in, and I was stunned that they had found an actress who could mimic a younger Gillian Anderson so freakishly well.

Then I realized THAT WAS GILLIAN ANDERSON!! That's how she actually looks now, not like the semi-mummified undead creature brought back to hideous life by alien experimentation. (I recalled a video still from an interview she had done in voice acting for the Star Citizen game; yeah, she didn't look old or fake-old there!)

Then I thought, "Holy Jeremiah Smith, someone demanded Anderson should disfigure herself so that she'd look as ruined as Duchovny... that is a crime against God and nature both. Is that not some kind of comment on how Hollywood treats actresses, and more specifically how the producers crapped on Anderson to fete Duchovny during the show's original run...?"

Then the second not-really-a-flashback ended the episode, and... good grief, Duchovny looks fine, too!

Then I realized that the producers had built the look of the show on bad old-age makeup (an occasional trait of the original show by the way) purely so that they could show enough of a visual distinction in those two brief daydreams to indicate a passage of time.

Then I found myself hoping that a major plot element soon would be a youth rejuvenation procedure or magic or alien side-effect thingummy that would allow the actors to not look like they need emergency epipen treatment for an inadvertent exposure to peanuts.

Then I remembered that Duchovny looks more like modern-day than daydreaming Mulder in ads I've seen for Aquarius.

Then I didn't know what the hell to think anymore, except that maybe insane levels of CGI were involved...??

Then I decided I would just look forward to the next episode, which from everything I've seen and heard (including the next-week promo) should be delightful. 

[JasonPratt]

Oh, also... "What's a momomyth?" as imaginary William asks about the monolith in 2001. Mulder's answer works for the movie (sort of), but he's really answering the question "What's a monomyth?"

That was pretty cool, as were all his daydreaming scenes actually.  O:-) (Although the line as written, should have been delivered by a boy several years younger -- probably too young to enjoy most of 2001. But I passed that off as being a daydream factor.)

I can't tell if it's supposed to be important that neither of them included each other in their daydreams...  :'(

[JasonPratt]

Ugh... just so I would have a frame of reference, I read a summary of the first miniseries ep and... as I suspected it's a version of the infamous Kritschgau plot again, foisted into the show by Duchovny because he was tired of playing Mulder's character and wanted him to be more harshly sceptical (like Duchovny in real life). So over two eps Mulder falls prey to a largely-clumsy psy-op which his character would have been normally inured against, especially after all the previous confirmation he's had, and consequently for about a season comes to reject all the alien stuff as a fakeout by the government. It was a terribly conceived and executed plotline, although Carter eventually wrangled it around to some sort of character arc by the end of the season (and the theatrical film), hinging on Mulder's guilt and desperation over Scully's increasingly fatal cancer.

At least this version of the plot acknowledges that yes there were aliens in the series, and so doesn't completely insult the fanbase out of the gate. Only mostly insults. ;)

[SirAndrewD]

Ugh... just so I would have a frame of reference, I read a summary of the first miniseries ep and... as I suspected it's a version of the infamous Kritschgau plot again, foisted into the show by Duchovny because he was tired of playing Mulder's character and wanted him to be more harshly sceptical (like Duchovny in real life). So over two eps Mulder falls prey to a largely-clumsy psy-op which his character would have been normally inured against, especially after all the previous confirmation he's had, and consequently for about a season comes to reject all the alien stuff as a fakeout by the government. It was a terribly conceived and executed plotline, although Carter eventually wrangled it around to some sort of character arc by the end of the season (and the theatrical film), hinging on Mulder's guilt and desperation over Scully's increasingly fatal cancer.

At least this version of the plot acknowledges that yes there were aliens in the series, and so doesn't completely insult the fanbase out of the gate. Only mostly insults. ;)

This is how I am seeing it.  But yeah, I don't like it. 

There were too many times we saw the Syndicate out of Mulder and Scully's POV, and when we did see them they were absolutely believing that the Aliens were real and an invasion/colonization was imminent

I just can't believe that Mulder is so dense to just abandon everything he knew and saw in order to stick to this apparent twist in the story.  It's like Mulder is a kitten who as long as you dangle the right string in front of him, he can't help but lose interest and follow. 

[TacticalWargames]

not impressed so far..even the acting seemed sub par.

Always gets me that Scully after all the things she has seen is still a sceptic..and how Mulder said that had no proof about Aliens..yest he has seen them!!..Odd.

[JasonPratt]

I just can't believe that Mulder is so dense to just abandon everything he knew and saw in order to stick to this apparent twist in the story.  It's like Mulder is a kitten who as long as you dangle the right string in front of him, he can't help but lose interest and follow.

To be fair, that's kind of a consistent characterization from the original series. Except they're doing it wrong. 

I do have high hopes about the upcoming ep this week. Even reviews critical of the first ep (pretty much everyone) and the second one (sane people like myself  >:D ) liked the third one.

And I'm admittedly feeling a pull to get the Blu Seasons, which have been thoroughly remastered unlike the migrainey bad DVD releases.

(I declare migrainey to be a real word. From "grainy" and "migraine".)