Trust no one.

April 21, 2017 11:52 AM

‘The X-Files’ Will Return [The New York Times] “The truth is out there, and soon, new episodes of “The X-Files” will be, too. Fox announced late on Thursday that 10 more episodes of the show, about two F.B.I. agents who gravitate toward the unexplained, would air in the 2017-18 television season. Production is set to begin this summer. Fox did not announce details of the show’s plot but said that its two stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who play the agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, would appear.”
posted by Fizz (62 comments total)

I hope we get two Darin Morgan eps this season
posted by blakewest at 11:58 AM on April 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

I hope we get two Darin Morgan eps this season

And no Chris Carter episodes. After last season, I just can't get excited about this.
posted by charred husk at 12:00 PM on April 21, 2017 [15 favorites]

The difference between a 6-episode "mini-series" and a 10-episode "season" seems vanishingly small.
posted by rikschell at 12:01 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Trust No Fox.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:05 PM on April 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I noted in the FanFare thread which recapped the whole "season 10" that "dammit, I know I'm probably going to end up watching this anyway". Even though I'm going to want to throw things at the set when we get the Chris Carter self-important episode and everything.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:06 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Even if there's only one Darin Morgan episode, it will have been worth it. My wife and I have spent the last year calling out "Dagooooo!"
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:09 PM on April 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

Fox did not announce details of the show’s plot but said that its two stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who play the agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, would appear.”

Hmm. So expect a ratio of 70% Einstein & Miller, 30% Muller and Scully?
posted by AndrewInDC at 12:12 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

The damned Mulder-Scully chemistry is just too frigging compelling. I fear this is going to draw me in even though I was incredibly annoyed at Season 10's overarching conspiracy plot.

This experience is helping me sympathise a bit more with my partner, who remains a dedicated Walking Dead watcher even though she hates the Negan plotline, Glenn shenanigans, and overall misery-porn aspect of it.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:12 PM on April 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

Ahh, I like the mini-series. The fox-news-is-really-right plot was too rushed and forced but the 4 monster-of-the-week in between were just what I was looking for in an x-files show.

I also like how the passage of time made Mulder and Scully (or rather the writers) just have no chill at all when it came to the paranormal. No more tip-toeing around "well the ancient patagonians believed... and the mayans believed..." Now everyone just agrees it was probably werewolves.
posted by muddgirl at 12:15 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Everything I read about the last season indicated that it was very bad and very stuck in the 90s in some less than stellar ways. Now, if this meant finally adapting "Crampton" with the proper talent/budget it deserves, then...

...I'd still lean toward, "Please, don't. Let me just keep my foggy memories." We'll always have Jose Chung's, I guess.
posted by byanyothername at 12:21 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

The fox-news-is-really-right plot

I read it more as an "Infowars is really right plot" and couldn't suspend disbelief enough to not find that supremely gross.

The Darin Morgan episode (which was originally written for the failed Kolchak reboot, so it kinda doesn't count) was fab though. Rhys Darby makes me so happy.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 12:28 PM on April 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

I'm really quite looking forward to the good episode of the bunch.
posted by supercres at 12:34 PM on April 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

which was originally written for the failed Kolchak reboot

Woah, I had no idea that was the case but it explains why it was so different then the other episodes. We could barely get through the miniseries and only the dim hope that we'd get another episode like it kept us going. Less conspiracy and pensive looks and more fun makes for better TV in our house.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:35 PM on April 21, 2017

I enjoyed the revival in exactly the same way I enjoyed the original run -- with joy and exasperation. I expect I will enjoy this new series in the same way. X-Files has always been a pulp book series, and always will be.
posted by hippybear at 12:35 PM on April 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Cool, looking forward to more weird nineties racism and funny jokes about how trans people are basically shape-shifting lizard monsters!
posted by ITheCosmos at 12:40 PM on April 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

Tbh I didn't even fully enjoy the Darin Morgan episode last year. It was fun and cute but I couldn't buy into the silliness of it, and the trans hooker addict jokes were pretty questionable. I was holding out hopes for it, and it was much better than the first two, but once it was gone and hadn't filled me with joy I cut out on the rest of the season. Unfortunately I can't say even he'd bring me back again, although Vince Gilligan might.
posted by yellowbinder at 12:42 PM on April 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

No thanks.
posted by codacorolla at 1:00 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

I thinking I am even less exited to see a bunch of info Wars bullshit this time.
posted by Artw at 1:06 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Heh.

Maybe they've picked up some of the criticisms directed at the 6 episodes, and with whatshisname and whatshername might feel free to start fresh-er with less baggage from 9 seasons behind... but I wouldn't hope on it.
What I do hope is that they finally film what exactly Mulder was doing when he through he was tripping, because the ridiculousness of that scene was the only thing that got stuck in my mind in the last season.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:08 PM on April 21, 2017

That Morgan episode seems pretty tonally different from what I've seen of the Kolchak series also - though I didn't watch Mitch of that show as it was, we, not good.

And yeah, some quite questionable bits.
posted by Artw at 1:09 PM on April 21, 2017

Yeah, now that we have an Infowars president X-Files is a lot less fun and a lot more scary.

I was seriously religious about XF during the original series, but I didn't even watch the last episode of the last miniseries. I'm not​ sure if I can make myself sit through more. Depends who's writing, I guess.
posted by potrzebie at 1:09 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

how do we get 10,000 years into the future for another episode with Rhys Darby?
posted by ovenmitt at 1:22 PM on April 21, 2017

When I saw the announcement yesterday I kinda got my hopes up. And then I remembered how bad the last episode was. And then I remembered baby Mulder and baby Scully. Saying that Anderson and Duchovny "would appear" doesn't exactly fill me with hope. I want to believe...but I've been burned before.
posted by Ber at 1:29 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

What I do hope is that they finally film what exactly Mulder was doing when he through he was tripping, because the ridiculousness of that scene was the only thing that got stuck in my mind in the last season.

I'd COMPLETELY forgotten this until you brought it up here.

I'd like to double down on my "no thanks".
posted by codacorolla at 1:29 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

but the 4 monster-of-the-week in between were just what I was looking for in an x-files show.

They should just produce these, which they could do forever. Drop the conspiracy stuff which got so bloated and up its own ass in the original run and movies that no one gives a shit anymore. Just get them back to the basics of investigating weird shit. And there's been so much new weird shit since the show went off the air, stuff like the Slenderman phenomenon.

I'd love a few episodes a year of Mulder and Scully investigating X-Files. When they get too old, they can pass the torch to new younger agents.
posted by Sangermaine at 2:10 PM on April 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

I'll watch the new season, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
posted by orange swan at 2:11 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Oh no, I had forgotten the X-Babies. Is it basically just going to be them and infowars guy?
posted by Artw at 3:11 PM on April 21, 2017

I lived through the lizard/human hybrid baby in V in the 80s. I can live through anything the current X-Files can throw at me.
posted by hippybear at 3:17 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

They should kill Mulder off, and just have Scully. I dunno, maybe she could move to Europe or something, and chase the weird along with the occasional serial killer. Yeah, she could be all cynical, and jaded. That would be awesome.
posted by valkane at 4:11 PM on April 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

Just film "Crampton" already.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:27 PM on April 21, 2017

The biggest problem Season Ten had was Chris Carter, so the best thing they could do with Season Eleven is to have someone else be the showrunner. Let him be the producer, but other people should guide the writing.

I kind of get what Carter was thinking. The conspiracy myth stuff in the old show got so convoluted it collapsed in on itself, so he wanted to make a fresh start with the weird conspiracies of today. But in practice it didn't work. Treating the old stuff like it never happened was an insult to fans who doggedly (heh) followed it through the years, and treating new conspiracy theories like they're all equally possible gives credence to the unsavory political beliefs that often come attached to those theories. Back in the 90's the people who believed in flying saucers weren't politically motivated, they just had weird, creepy but interesting ideas. (Alien nudists break into my home every night and abduct me!) Everything wasn't polarized like it is now, and it was still possible to find common cultural ground with people you might not agree with politically.

These days the X-Files should stay away from Infowars and look to Internet memes and creepypasta for ideas. People who are haunted by garden gnomes, ghosts that use Facebook, memes that compel people to do elaborate "challenges" and stage cat photos against their will... Just different and more modern ideas.
posted by Kevin Street at 5:09 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Mulder and Scully Investigate SCPs is such a ridiculously obvious premise, so of course we'll get a show about the necessity of buying gold to avoid being stuck with worthless fiat currency instead.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:17 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

An episode about SCP-____-J could be fantastic. Mulder and Scully each sitting on their desk, looking at a rock in a box and doing ym nothing at all.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:35 PM on April 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Really we had our next generation X-Files and it was Fringe and it was pretty great. Hoping something else will fill that slot, but let's face it it won't be this.
posted by Artw at 6:49 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

You know that episode Kaddish, where the Hasidic lady creates a golem of her dead husband, but he is all gross and murdery so she realizes it was a bad idea to try to bring back a dead person? Seems... relevant.
posted by gatorae at 8:25 PM on April 21, 2017 [8 favorites]

I hope it goes back to the way the show used to be before. :)
posted by m14 at 9:23 PM on April 21, 2017

Mulder and Scully travel to a National Park which is under budgetary strain to investigate reports of mysterious stairways, apparently to nowhere, found deep in the woods.
posted by mwhybark at 10:37 PM on April 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Mulder becomes convinced that a set of Italian amateur radio operator recordings he has found on ye intarwebbes are a set of transmissions recording the death at re-entry and the death by suffocation of early 1960s cosmonauts.
posted by mwhybark at 10:41 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Scully is contacted by a man calling himself John Titor, who claims to be a time traveler from the future who visited once previously in the late 1990s.
posted by mwhybark at 10:43 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

A mysterious disease is claiming the lives of an otherwise disparate group of people, who are eventually discovered to be host to a deadly variation of toxoplasmosis gondii which has led them to compulsively bring cats into their homes in such numbers that the cats turn and eat them.
posted by mwhybark at 10:47 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

A famous funk musician celebrated for his use of extraterrestrial imagery and a full-size spaceship concert performance set is discovered to be an actual alien. It is found that Mulder cannot dance, but Scully has the moves.
posted by mwhybark at 10:49 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

An undocumented alien from New Zealand (Jemain Clement) contacts Scully seeking sanctuary from ICE. He is found to be a vampire (crossover episode, backdoor pilot).
posted by mwhybark at 10:53 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Mulder and Scully find evidence that a series of international flights operated by a southeast Asian national carrier and reported as and presumed lost in flight due to catastrophic malfunction or foul play were in fact diverted to Uzbekistan to and repainted to serve as covert operations aircraft for a nebulous global cabal with close ties to both Russia and the President of the United States.
posted by mwhybark at 10:57 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Norman Mailer guest stars in an episode which revisits the hotel set of last season's beloved "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster". Mailer insists that for much of the 1970s the prior owner of the hotel provided him with untrammelled access to the hotel's spy passages and that a murder was committed on the premises. Mulder, fascinated, indulges the old man as Scully attempts to find some sort of criminal statute that will allow her to arrest him.
posted by mwhybark at 11:02 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Mulder squeezes the juice from the bag.
posted by Artw at 11:03 PM on April 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

Mulder, irritated by the proliferation of consumer and business drones in his neighborhood, begins to suspect that a subset of the drones are developing an independent consciousness or "hive mind".
posted by mwhybark at 11:04 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

AND THAT'S TEN

thenk yew thenk yew
posted by mwhybark at 11:05 PM on April 21, 2017

(Thanks Art, I was losing concision)
posted by mwhybark at 11:06 PM on April 21, 2017

Mulder becomes a Pizzagate truther after watching too much YouTube, Scully talks him down.
posted by Artw at 11:07 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Scully at the Science march, mildly irritated that Mulder did not show up.
posted by Artw at 11:11 PM on April 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

Mulder becomes enamored of asmr videos on yt but is then traumatized when he discovers a series of tutorial videos in which the channel host appears to go insane. Scully cannot believe he's spent a week doing nothing but watching yt at the office.
posted by mwhybark at 11:13 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Scully's nephew tells her how much his tuition is. She discovers the inflationary cost spiral exactly matches similar spirals in the cost of housing and healthcare, and expresses her determination to get to the bottom of it. We never hear of this plot again and the episode is not aired a second time.
posted by mwhybark at 11:16 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Scully and Mulder investigate the mysterious haunting of a recreated 18th-century French bakery by a phantasmal cow that liks the bred.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:52 PM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

I have in past threads proposed a couple different X-Files/Doctor Who crossover options. Either would work.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:31 AM on April 22, 2017

The new series should be an in-depth yet sensitive exploration of Skinner's wonderful beard.
posted by dng at 3:42 AM on April 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

If this new season brings back Monster of the Week, that alone will be enough to justify its existence.
posted by dannyboybell at 5:55 AM on April 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

The '90s X-Files Tie-In Novels Scarred Me Forever
posted by Artw at 6:00 AM on April 22, 2017

> These days the X-Files should stay away from Infowars and look to Internet memes and creepypasta for ideas. People who are haunted by garden gnomes, ghosts that use Facebook, memes that compel people to do elaborate "challenges" and stage cat photos against their will... Just different and more modern ideas.

So something like an upbeat Black Mirror? Light Gray Mirror?

> Mulder becomes enamored of asmr videos on yt but is then traumatized when he discovers a series of tutorial videos in which the channel host appears to go insane. Scully cannot believe he's spent a week doing nothing but watching yt at the office.

Clearly the solution to the "why did Mulder spend a week doing nothing but watching yt at the office?" mystery is "the FBI blocked pornhub."
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:47 AM on April 22, 2017 [3 favorites]

Nah, X-Files has never been light. (My imagination just doesn't do dark that easily.) No doubt the stories would be a somber study of society's underbelly, filled with fantasy and science fiction ideas. They've never been constricted to the possible like Black Mirror is.
posted by Kevin Street at 12:09 PM on April 22, 2017

Mulder and Scully investigate a university library whose architect, inexplicably, failed to account for the weight of books. The building is now sinking and something something fracking probably.
posted by Quindar Beep at 8:20 AM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Mulder and Scully investigate why the hell there's going to be four Avatar sequels.
posted by Quindar Beep at 8:21 AM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]

Great scene with that creepy-ass animatronic at the themepark.
posted by Artw at 8:41 AM on April 24, 2017