12:03PM, Oct 23, 2008
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have returned to their most famous roles... but whatever happened to the X-Files, and what's the plan for the future they used to fight? Rich Phippen takes a look at the show's past, the movies' present, and the plans for the future...
The cast and crew of most big-time shows will eventually recount tales of how things could easily have been so different.
Jamex Coburn was nearly Hannibal 'The A-Team' Smith, Michael Keaton was nearly Jack in Lost, Jon Favreau (who went on to direct Iron Man) nearly played Chandler in Friends. With the X-Files, it's all about Gillian Anderson. A short, dark blonde actress with an English accent, little about her pleased the executives at Fox.
Fortunately for Anderson, she had buddied up with Duchovny in the corridor before their auditions, and the pair instantly became favourites of producer Chris Carter, who fought tooth and nail to keep her on the show. In the end, all it took was a few bottles of red hair dye.
It was 1993, and the 24-year-old Anderson would soon become one of the most popular women on the planet, as Carter's freak-of-the-week show tapped into a growing, 1950s-style alien fascination.
In its opening season, The X-Files managed half-decent ratings, but survived thanks to critical recognition. Seasons two and three, however, saw the show became a huge international hit, helped somewhat by the improved overall story arc.
While Smith and Murdoch had Col. Decker, Sam Beckett wanted to go home, Lost has a very confusing island - The X-Files had its own government paranoia mythology, or what the producers called the 'mytharc'.
The idea being that Mulder and Scully worked for a government keen on keeping secrets, secrets that would be revealed over the course of the next 4 or 5 seasons. The main being a planned invasion by an alien race, by way of a disease, with the government playing along until they find a cure to fight the aliens with.
And therein lies what ultimately did for The X-Files. While most episodes were stand alone pieces, Carter's original plan was to drop the mytharc in and out of the story, culminating with a cinematically released movie or movies.
Try selling that plan to Fox, who had never seen a show achieve such popularity.
Carter and co. were convinced to keep going, and The X-Files (arguably) jumped the shark in its 6th season - a full three years before it was eventually cancelled. Audiences couldn't take it seriously any longer - the show was no longer fresh and the mytharc was finished - yet dragged out beyond its shelf life.
Further, it didn't help that Duchovny hardly figured in the final seasons, having been replaced by the earnest, if somewhat inferior Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish as Agents Doggett and Reyes.
The final episode - concerning Mulder's appearance in front of a Guantanomo Bay-style kangaroo court that saw the character recite the previous 10 years of storylines - was a sad and sorry way to end it.
But the end was false. The mytharc may have been complete, but Carter's original plan to continue the show on the big screen was still in place, and so a second movie reaches the multiplexes six years after Mulder's last stand.
Unlike 1998's The X-Files: Fight The Future, the all-new flick, The X-Files: I Want To Believe pays little or no attention to the alien invasion story that underpinned the series.
Rather, the heavily guarded plot is more in the vein of classic horror episodes such as Tooms (about a man who could squeeze through a letterbox) or Irresistable (you probably don't want to know).
"We forgot as we grew older and the show became so big that the show got so popular because it was that scary," Duchovny recently told TheDeadbolt.com.
"This movie goes back to the original impetus of The X-Files, which is to scare the pants off people."
Despite the presence of Billy Connolly as a psychic, it may be time to take The X-Files seriously again.
Rich Phippen
