The X-Files

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Justin Gustainis

When The X-Files premiered on the Fox network in the fall of 1993, no one predicted the degree of success that the show would eventually enjoy. After all, dramas in the fantasy and science fiction genres had not done well on TV for a decade (the Star Trek spin-offs excepted). But there was considerable interest in UFO phenomena in America, as evidenced by news accounts of alleged alien abductions, speculations about "crop circles," and sightings of supposed alien spacecraft streaking across the skies. For some Americans, belief in UFO visitations dovetailed with their mistrust of the U.S. government, which has consistently denied any knowledge of alien encounters. Thus when the show premiered, tales of visitors from space and government conspiracies to cover up those visits might find a ready audience--and The X-Files did. It finished its first season with respectable ratings, and the second season began with an even larger audience. The show was clearly a hit, one of the few Fox programs to compete successfully with the major networks. Soon there were Golden Globe awards for the show, then Emmy awards, a successful full-length film released in the summer of 1998, and talk of a second film to follow.

The show's premise is that the FBI occasionally encounters cases that seem inexplicable in terms of science and logic---which are, in short, paranormal. Such investigations, designated "X-files," are referred to the show's two protagonists: Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Mulder tends readily to accept paranormal explanations for the cases that he and his partner investigate--partly due to the fact that he believes that his sister Samantha, who disappeared when they were children, was a victim of alien abduction. Scully, who earned a medical degree before joining the FBI, is usually a skeptic, positing rational explanations for phenomena that appear to defy reason. The two agents are supervised by FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). In the show's early years, Skinner tended to be suspicious, and sometimes hostile, toward Mulder and Scully. By the fourth season, however, he appeared to have become their ally.

From the beginning, the show has had a recurring theme involving alien visitation, alien abductions, and the efforts of certain powerful groups to conceal or deny these sinister activities. The show's writers and producers refer to this story arc as "the mythology," although some fans call it "the conspiracy." The character most closely identified with the effort to cover up the alien presence is known only as "Cigarette Smoking Man" (William Davis), a ruthless covert operator who has cold-bloodedly ordered the deaths of several people who came too close to the truth - including Mulder's father. When asked by an associate why he did not have the troublesome Fox Mulder killed, the CSM replied, in effect, "Alive, Mulder is merely a nuisance; dead, he's a martyr."

But the mythology is not the sum total of the series. In a typical season of The X-Files, about half the episodes deal with the ongoing struggle over the aliens, while the other shows find agents Mulder and Scully investigating other sorts of paranormal phenomena. Over the course of several seasons, the agents have dealt with zombies, werewolves, ghosts, vampires, demons, and witches, not to mention astral projection, precognition, reincarnation, and the transmigration of souls. A few of their cases have had no paranormal aspects at all, involving instead relatively mundane subjects such as serial murder, psychological obsession, and genetic mutation.

In some of their cases involving the mythology, Mulder and Scully receive assistance from a group called "The Lone Gunmen"--an ironic reference to the Warren Commission's much-disbelieved conclusion that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a "lone gunman." These three men, identified only by their last names of Byers (Bruce Harwood), Langly (Dean Haglund) and Frohike (Tom Braidwood) are self-styled "conspiracy freaks" who once told Mulder that they help him because "You're more paranoid than we are."

Chris Carter is the series' creator, producer, and principal writer. After some time spent writing for Surfing magazine, Carter married a television writer and soon began to turn out scripts of his own. He wrote for several TV series, which gave him the contacts that allowed him to sell The X-Files to the Fox network. Carter says that his idea for the show is derived from his memories of a short-lived TV series (lasting only the 1974-75 season) called Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The show was, in turn, based on two successful made-for-TV movies: The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. The premise for the movies and the series was the same: hard-bitten newspaper reporter Karl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), while covering the story of one or more bizarre crimes, comes to the conclusion that some supernatural creature is involved. Kolchak then researches the phenomenon (vampire, werewolf, witch, or whatever), learns how to kill the creature, and does so.