I’ve been lax in updating this sucker because these last few months have been some of the most oppressively busy I’ve had in a long time.
Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten into the habit of having The X-Files on in the background while I’m working at home. It’s a strange flavor of comfort food. I’m not nostalgic about the show per se, since I saw so little of it during its original 1993–2002 run. My parents watched it together every week when its first three or four seasons were airing, and I caught maybe three with them before the “The Host” scared me out of sleeping afterwards and made me skittish about approaching anything connected to a sewer line. As far as I was concerned, X-Files night became “don’t linger the in living room” night. Sometimes I’d pop in, ask my parents what the episode was about, and make myself scarce when the soundtrack grew ominous.
But a couple of years can make a difference. I sat down with my parents and viewed the infamous season-four episode “Home” during its first and only airing on October 11, 1996 and didn’t have trouble sleeping that night—but that’s the last episode I remember seeing on television. In 1998 I joined a friend for a screening of the shockingly underwhelming X-Files: Fight the Future, and I suspect it dissuaded me from exploring the TV series any further.
2015 was the year I finally became an X-Files fan, or something like one. For whatever reason, I had a whim to revisit the show and see what I’d missed out on by retreating upstairs when I heard those familiar echoing tones and whistles from the living room. Turns out, I’d missed out on a lot—more than my callow sensibilities had been capable of appreciating during the years of its run.
Darren Mooney of the M0vie Blog situates The X-Files at the vanguard of the sea change that came over American television dramas in the 1990s. To borrow from my long-gone days of amateur video game criticism, the series was like Final Fantasy VII or Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain in that it represented an intermediary or liminal phase of a genre. Although it was was too inconsistent, too by-the-seat-of-its-pants, and too beholden to the exigencies of network television production to reach the peaks attained by shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, or Breaking Bad, The X-Files nevertheless moved the needle towards a more sophisticated standard of TV drama—while being experimental and wonderfully strange in ways that later products of the Golden Age of Television knew better than to attempt.
The X-Files’ cinematic approach to making a television show was remarkable for its time, but what made it a perfect storm was the combination of high-quality production and the timeliness of its voice and themes. Not quite two years before its first episode aired, the Soviet Union formally dissolved, leaving the United States the world’s sole political and economic hegemon. Bereft of any serious geopolitical threats or economic rivals (though Japan had given us a scare), America could no longer look out over its borders to find a menacing Other in its own weight class. The X-Files speaks to the United States’ anxious turn inwards as it rummages through the haunted attic of the fin-de-millénaire American consciousness and makes television drama out of serial-killer fascination, the satanic panic, fears of shadowy government cabals, post-Jonestown and post-Waco unease about cults, ESP and new-age spiritualism, and most famously, the lore of alien abductions, UFO sightings, and sinister men in black.
It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that The X-Files was two TV shows that happened to share the same title, cast and crew, and time slot. More often than not, it was an episodic drama/horror/procedural in which the protagonists investigate a case involving the supernatural, the fantastic, and the freakish, and close the file on the matter before the credits roll. And sometimes The X-Files was a science-fiction thriller serial in which the protagonists seek to unravel a dark conspiracy involving extraterrestrial intruders and a coterie of untouchable spooks willing to resort to extortion, kidnapping, and murder to keep their grand project secret.
Nowadays when some content mill turns out a “20 Best X-Files Episodes” listicle, relatively few representatives of the “aliens & the conspiracy” arc make the grade. Although the ongoing storyline about the Syndicate and the Project exhilarated and intrigued viewers in the early seasons, by season five (of nine) its juice was clearly depleted.1 The standalone outings somewhat dismissively dubbed as “Monster of the Week” episodes (in contradistinction to the ongoing “Mythology” episodes) ultimately became The X-Files’ most enduring legacy and best argument for a rewatch. Many of the greatest Monster of the Week episodes were those in which series creator Chris Carter allowed his writers and directors to do some truly daring and weird stuff with the dramatic resources at their disposal.
Many fans reserve especial praise for writer Darin Morgan, who specialized in crafting one-offs that were dense, daring, and funny. Though there are only four X-Files scripts to his name, all are indispensable to any selective viewing of the series. The best of these—season three’s “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’”—was also Morgan’s final episode and definitive statement about the series.
The plot focuses on author Jose Chung interviewing people entangled in an incident that FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated in Klass County, Washington. On the night in question, a teenaged couple was possibly abducted by aliens. Or maybe they were captured by the Air Force, and maybe one of them had her memories altered through hypnosis. Or, possibly, the teenagers’ outlandish stories are manifestations of sexual trauma and guilt from a date rape. Elsewhere, two pilots stationed at a nearby Air Force base turned up dead a few days after possibly disguising themselves as aliens and flying around in a top-secret, cutting-edge aircraft and maybe kidnapping the teenagers in question. Maybe one of the UFO pilots spilled his guts to Mulder at a local diner before he was dragged back to the Air Force base and executed in a staged fighter jet crash—or maybe Mulder sat at the diner by himself and ate an entire sweet potato pie while pelting the owner with questions about UFOs. Possibly the alien-disguised pilots who maybe abducted the teenagers were confronted by an actual alien(?) named “Lord Kinbote,” and maybe the eccentric electrician who possibly witnessed the encounter was threatened by a pair of bizarre men in black who maybe visited Scully in her hotel room later on and hypnotized her into forgetting about them. Maybe. Possibly. Maybe.
When an exasperated Chung asks Mulder point-blank what really happened to teenagers on the night in question, all Mulder can say is “how the hell should I know?”
Although The X-Files followed after The Twilight Zone in becoming flexible enough to do wacky or outright comedic Monster of the Week outings, it held the Mythology sacred. While “Jose Chung” doesn’t involve any of the Mythology’s particulars, it contains all of its basic elements—alien abductions, traumatized abductees, baleful men in black, military cover-ups, extraterrestrial(?) tech, and so on—and slaps them together into a whole that’s not only unintelligible, but fairly ridiculous. X-Files protagonist Agent Mulder comes out of it looking especially unreliable and unreasonable—“a ticking time-bomb of insanity,” in Chung’s final verdict. 2
“Jose Chung” undoubtedly deserves the high esteem in which X-Files fans hold it—which is pretty astonishing in light of how gleefully it undermines the very spirit of the show. Can you imagine the runner of a modern prestige drama like Squid Games or Severance allowing one of their writers to do a one-off episode designed to take the piss out of the whole premise?
Instead of paraphrasing Mooney of the M0vie Blog on the topic, I’ll just give him a block quote:
Morgan has always seemed more sympathetic to Scully than to Mulder, so positioning Chung close to her seems almost like an endorsement. Crucially, both Chung and Scully spend Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” ruminating on the idea that “the truth” may not be an objectively verifiable fact. When Scully asks whether Chung is attempting to verify the truth, the author responds, “Oh, God, no. How can I possibly do that?” He clarifies, “Truth is as subjective as reality.”
This is a pretty earth-shattering concept for a show like The X-Files, and it is telling that Mulder spends much of the episodes on the sidelines – appearing primarily in flashbacks or briefly towards the end of the story. Mulder is a character who has devoted his entire life to “the truth” as a singular monolithic concept. Morgan sees Mulder as being unable to have the conversation at the heart of Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”, one which suggests truth is not absolute and universal…
…Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” represents the most fundamental of Morgan’s criticisms of The X-Files. Not only does the episode reach all the way back to The Pilot, it also extends into the opening credits. “The Truth is Out There,” the show’s opening credits promise. Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” simply replies that the truth is subjective, and deeply personal. There is no universal truth that makes it all magically better. Mulder’s quest is likely to be doomed because it presupposes a single unifying truth, which the episode suggests does not exist.
“Jose Chung’s” overarching message is profoundly antithetical to the spirit of The X-Files, which holds The Truth to be something that’s not only out there, something that’s not only objective, but the holy grail Mulder must acquire and give unto the people at the end of his hero’s journey in the Mythology.
As it turned out, The Truth which Mulder sought was rather contrived and silly. Perhaps Carter would have been better advised to take Chung’s perspective on the matter.
The memory of the disappointed sighs that greeted the X-Files’ finale (titled “The Truth”) in 2002 wasn’t enough to dissuade Carter from reviving the show in the mid-2010s and bringing David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back on board to reprise their iconic roles. Season ten aired in early 2016, and wasn’t especially well-received—to put it mildly. The six-episode batch’s only excuse for existing is “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” written and directed by none other than Darin Morgan.
The episode begins with Mulder digging back into the X-Files after his fifteen-year absence and bemoaning all the unsolved mysteries in his archive that have been explained away by new scientific research or revealed as hoaxes. “I’m a middle-aged man,” he sighs to Scully. “I thought it’d be great to get back to work. But is this really how I want to spend the rest of my days? Chasing after monsters?”
“Notice they didn't get a picture of it,” he grumbles when Scully takes him to investigate a possible crime scene where witnesses reported seeing a strange creature. “Which is odd, because everybody always has a camera on them these days.” Later on, Mulder makes himself the butt of an extended joke as he struggles to operate his smartphone’s camera during a critical moment.
How the times have changed. The early seasons depict a young Mulder making and taking calls on a cellular phone at a time when a fairly large proportion of Americans still felt that owning one seemed rather unnecessary and self-important. In fact, he was what we’d now call an early adopter: a “flashback to 1989” episode from season five has him casually taking a call in the field on a phone the size of a clothes iron.3 Two and a half decades later, Mulder isn’t able to adapt to (and indeed embrace) a new consumer-tech paradigm as comfortably as he did before.
As much as “Were-Monster” draws attention to the effects of time’s passage on the most celebrated and sexy paranormal investigator hero of the 1990s, the arc of the episode is basically about how the disenchanted, world-weary, middle-aged Mulder rediscovers his zest for wonder and mystery. Even though it’s a fantastic piece of television and a bona fide X-Files classic, I don’t want to dwell on “Were-Monster” here. What I really want to talk about is “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” Morgan’s contribution to season eleven.
Yes, somehow or other the revival got a second season, which aired in early 2018. Its apologists’ praise seldom exceeds “oh, it’s not that bad, it’s better than season 10 anyway, but definitely skip the Mythology episodes.” Once again, only Morgan’s contribution is truly essential viewing.4
Whereas “Were-Monster” was a purebred Monster of the Week episode (and very much aware of itself as an X-Files Monster of the Week episode), “Forehead Sweat” addresses the stuff of the X-Files’ Mythology (aliens, gigantic cover-ups, all-powerful masterminds operating with impunity, etc.) in such a way that it’s all downright farcical. A stranger with a sweaty forehead calls Mulder to meet him in the FBI office’s parking garage using the “tape on the window” signal from seasons two and three. The man believes his name is Reggie, and claims to have uncovered the conspiracy to end all conspiracies: They have acquired the means to alter people’s memories on a mass scale.
“They are why you don’t remember,” he whispers to Mulder. “Why aren’t people getting probed by aliens anymore?5 You used to know, but They made you forget—so that you wouldn’t remember me.” They have been getting to Reggie too, erasing and modifying his recollection of his past—only They hadn’t anticipated the sight of a UFO-themed postage stamp from Grenada jogging Reggie’s memory.
Over the course of “Forehead Sweat,” it is revealed that Reggie was the FBI agent who originally founded the X-Files and accompanied Mulder and Scully on their adventures throughout the 1990s. (But he actually didn’t. Almost certainly not. Probably not.)
I’ve seen a few fan comments about “Jose Chung” that criticize Morgan for going a step too far and being a touch too flippant in deconstructing The X-Files as it existed during its third season. But “Jose Chung” is a good-natured jab to the shoulder compared to the relentless hammering of the X-Files’ revival in “Forehead Sweat.” One hardly needs to read between the lines to understand its overarching message: that bringing back The X-Files was a frigging stupid idea to begin with.
In any blueprint of an X-Files revival, Mulder’s position was bound to be a little awkward. The narrative breezily insists that we needn’t consider or talk about why the FBI would give Mulder his old job back after fifteen years when (1) he’s right on the edge of the mandatory retirement age for special agents and (2) as far as anyone knows, he’s still considered a disgrace to the bureau and a fugitive who’d been found guilty of murdering a military officer and sentenced to death. It’s simple: we couldn’t have a proper X-Files revival where Mulder’s hiding in a cabin somewhere and keeping himself busy by gluing newspaper clippings to the walls and connecting them with thumbtacks and yarn, could we? I mean, I guess we could—there probably wasn’t anything stopping Carter from doing a soft reboot in which Mulder and Scully provide guidance and assistance to a pair of Millennial agents assigned to the reopened X-Files—but that’s not what anyone who got excited about a brand new season of The X-Files really desired.
“Forehead Sweat” is about the nostalgia the X-Files revival had no choice but to evoke and rely on—about the river one can never step in twice, and the futility of recapturing one’s youth. Morgan sensibly ignores the Mythology episodes of seasons ten and eleven because, well, most X-Files fans wish they could have ignored them. On the one hand, it was sensible of Carter not to return to the Black Oil and Alien Super Soldier plots of latter-day X-Files or pretend it was possible to manufacture a redux of the dynamics that hooked viewers during the early seasons (i.e., Scully, these men in the elusive secret organization think they can get away with this well we can’t let let them Scully we must seek out The Truth they’re trying to conceal from everyone and expose them Scully why won’t you believe Scully). On the other hand, what he chose to do instead was sort of reminiscent of how Joe Dante approached the sequel to Gremlins—except Carter doesn’t have one ironic bone in his body.
At any rate, “Forehead Sweat” exists to remind viewers of the X-Files revival that, no, seriously, there’s no version of a renewed Mythology arc that will give you what you really want. You want the new X-Files to be like the old X-Files, and you also want it to speak to the zeitgeist with the same preternaturally sharp clarity that it did two decades ago. That’s like imagining you can go to a Mighty Mighty Bosstones concert today and feel in your heart of hearts that it’s really now and you yourself are truly a Rude Boy.
After going relatively easy on Mulder in “Were-Monster,” Morgan stops just short of sticking a clown nose on him in “Forehead Sweat.” In one scene, a couple of young FBI agents show up looking for Reggie, and make no secret of their disappointment when Mulder asks them what they’re up to.6 After all, the Mulder of the 1990s would have already figured it all out, wouldn’t he?
“But I guess that's how things go,” one of them sighs derisively. “You start out a rebel, but then you get fat. And the next thing you know, you’re deep state. It’s sad.”
“Do you know who I am?” Mulder shouts at their backs after gathering his wits. “I’m Fox Mulder! I was fighting the power and breaking conspiracies before you saw your first chemtrail, you punks! I’m Fox freaking Mulder, you punks!”
This is very much what the X-Files revival would have liked to shout at the critics whose season ten reviews included the phrase “showing its age.” But like the fifty-something Mulder, the revival was burdened by the legacy of its early years. There was no way it could meet the hopes (which have a funny tendency to transmute into expectations) of fans who cherished their memories of discussing “Paper Clip” and “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” in homeroom, by the office water cooler, or on internet message boards.
“Forehead Sweat” doesn’t let the fan community off the hook. Reggie is legibly written as the X-Files superfan par excellence, and I’m damn near convinced that Morgan modelled the character’s flashback to his scarring experience in Grenada on an inept piece of fanfic he once glanced at. It’s very hard not to read Reggie as someone’s Mary Sue OC: inserting himself directly into the center of the series’ mythos, he claims responsibility for hanging the famous “I Want to Believe” poster in Mulder’s office, delivers a “maybe the real X-Files were the friends we made along the way” speech in his rendition of the series finale, and writes himself as Scully’s secret love interest.
Morgan made a brilliantly deliberate continuity error in shooting the flashbacks: 1980s and 1990s Reggie look exactly the same as 2018 Reggie. It would have been a simple thing to smear some dye onto the white hairs in Brian Huskey’s beard and slap a wig on his bald pate for the scenes where he’s digitally inserted into 1990s X-Files footage alongside a thirty-something Duchovny and a twenty-something Anderson—but the episode already made the point that this isn’t the nature of fan nostalgia. In Mulder’s retelling of his first experience watching The Twilight Zone, we see Duchovny’s fifty-something mug digitally imposed over the shoulders of a child actor jumping up from the couch during the Big Twist. That’s just how memories of memories of memories work: in my own recollections of feeling absolutely and almost spiritually electrified as I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, it’s not really fourteen-year-old me looking at the screen out of fourteen-year-old me’s eyes.
What Mulder, Scully, and Reggie all have in common throughout “Forehead Sweat” is a yearning for simpler, sun-shinier times. At the core of Reggie’s delusions is a desire to retreat to a perspective in which America lived up to its ideals. Scully speaks wistfully about an obscure gelatin brand her mother used to make, remembering it tasting like family vacations, Fourth of July fireworks, God, love, etc. In his first scene, Mulder bemoans recent political developments in the United States: “it seems this past year all I’ve done is watch the news and worry that the country’s gone insane.” Never mind all the horrifying shit he dug up in the 1990s; compared to the MAGA ascendency, those years when clandestine government-affiliated organizations kidnapped and murdered American citizens to keep the lid on their experiments with alien viruses were the Good Old Days.
Interestingly, the commentary on the late 2010s’ fears of a post-truth world isn’t as provocative or insightful as one might expect from Morgan.7 An episode of a popular network TV show about the search for The Truth coming down on the side of “what even is truth?” was an audacious thing in 1996—but by 2018, it was clear to all and sundry that truth was no longer what it used to be (or, perhaps, what we once believed it to be). Morgan evidently didn’t have much to add to the conversation after the digital revolution and its unforeseen consequences thrust the rest of the world into the frame he espoused in “Jose Chung.”
I’m not going to guess at Morgan’s personal politics, but perhaps he experienced some combination of buyer’s remorse and cognitive dissonance while composing the script to “Forehead Sweat.” It was one thing when academics, artists, authors, and other generally left-leaning or left-coded intellectuals were adopting the postmodern line on Grand Narratives, or going so far as to declare that the notions of objectivity and universal truth were so many insidious tools of Power and Empire. The more honest of them must have broken into a cold sweat in 2017 when Kellyanne Conway went on television and uttered that line about “alternative facts” with such an invidiously straight face. They hadn’t anticipated What Is Truth? technology falling into the hands of the chuds and being weaponized against them.
Reggie might be a delusional nutcase, but They is real—and he invites Mulder to have a chat with him. For a moment their conversation is vaguely reminiscent of Scully and Chung’s brief discussion about the subjective nature of truth, but here it’s less about recognizing and accepting a fundamental fact of the human condition than a statement of grim resignation to the post-truth era and its problems.
The mise-en-scène of Dr. They (a goofy little proxy for season-one Cigarette Smoking Man or perhaps the mysterious Conrad Strughold of Fight the Future) pacing about a Vancouver totally Washington, DC sculpture garden on a gray afternoon and sighing about “kids today” to a fifty-something and rather tired-looking David Duchovny underscores the reality of time’s passing The X-Files by. Dr. They’s cartoonishness does surprisingly little to mitigate the severity with which he casts judgement on Mulder and the series’ anachronistic revival. Their time, as he says, had indubitably passed: “we’re now living in a post-cover-up, post-conspiracy age.”
During the show’s original run, Mulder’s mission in the Mythology was clear: I must find The Truth. I must expose The Truth. I must uncover evidence of the conspiracy and the aliens and tell the world. Carter never felt a need to ask the question: to what end? It was self-explanatory. When people know the truth, there will be action, because there must be action. It’ll be just like Watergate.8 The Syndicate and its toadies will be rooted out and held to account, and humanity will wake from its dangerous slumber and muster all its courage and ingenuity to make a stand against the alien colonists. The X-Files’ writers never really contemplated the possibility that if Mulder sat down at a congressional hearing televised on CSPAN or approached a Guardian journalist with detailed, irrefutable material evidence of the Syndicate’s schemes, the gray-haired machinators might just shrug it off, confident that nothing of any consequence to them would follow. Definitely not: look again at the season three episode “Apocrypha,” watch the scene where the Well-Manicured Man chews out the Cigarette Smoking Man about a botched assassination—“they have a waitress who has given a description of the shooter; they released a composite of his face to the press”—and notice the revulsion and urgency with which the WMM enunciates the word press.
Carter and his writers had either witnessed Nixon’s resignation or had grown up in its long aftermath.9 Notwithstanding the manifest post-truthiness of the Iran-Contra affair, in the 1990s a sizable proportion of the American public still trusted that the principled, dogged pursuit and exposure of The Truth could bring well-positioned criminals to justice, no matter how high they stood on society’s totem pole or how deeply enmeshed they were in protective networks of mutual interest. But we’ve grown more pessimistic since then. If Bush’s getting away with launching an unnecessary and catastrophic war based on phony “WMD” claims and Wall Street’s getting away with tanking the global economy hadn’t already made doubters of us, Trump’s apparent imperviousness to every exposure, every scandal, and every investigation had seriously called the efficacy of public watchdogs into question by the late 2010s. Without anyone noticing, publicly pointing to concrete evidence of improprieties and crimes committed by eminent figures in powerful institutions or elite cliques increasingly ceased to be enough.10
Rewatching “Forehead Sweat” and listening to Dr. They’s spiel about “phony fake news” in 2025, I find myself prone to some nostalgia about the patent simplicity of the problem’s diagnosis in 2018. Online disinformation and filter bubbles! That’s the vector for all of this nonsense. That’s why our politics have become so fucked up recently. That’s how Trump got elected and why his supporters are so fanatically loyal to him. All we need to do is combat dishonest actors spreading falsehoods on social media, educate the public about reliable news sources, and shame the hell out Trump’s base for being so gullible and depraved—and then everything will go back to normal!
The public response to the Trump administration’s ghoulish treatment of Kilmar Armando Garcia suggests the problem runs deeper than the mere proliferation of “fake news.” I’m old enough to remember when the Elián González affair sent shockwaves across the nation. Everyone had seen the photograph of a federal agent pointing a rifle at a child. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone had an opinion. It was a big deal. Twenty-five years later, the Trump administration deports Kilmar Armando Garcia to El Salvador and has him thrown into a maximum security prison as the result of a clerical error that it brazenly refuses to rectify—and the event, appalling as it is, somehow seems less there as a social reality than did the Elián González scandal, doesn’t it?
It’s all so much content now. Everything. Facts, fictions, commentary, conjecture, entertainment, gossip—all the same shit, all coursing through millions and millions of individually personalized zones. When one’s feeds deliver them, multiple times per day, a discontinuous sequence of information fragments in which RFK’s statement about autism follows a Spongebob meme follows civil war in Sudan follows nepo babies follows rising grape prices follows The Last of Us reactions follows Korean beauty trends follows a cozy four-panel comic about birds follows the usual suspects getting upset about HBO casting a black actor to play Snape in Harry Potter follows announcement of a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war follows FBI agents raiding the homes of pro-Palestinian activists follows Jojo Siwa reidentifying from “lesbian” to “bisexual” follows bird flu appearing in dairy cows follows Conclave memes in response to Pope Francis’s death follows alarming signs of climate change follows 5 lifechanging kitchen hacks follows Kilmar Armando Garcia in a Salvadoran prison follows hazardous SkinnyTok trends follows the FBI arresting a Wisconsin judge follows arts & crafts influencer’s baby taking its first steps follows Harvey Weinstein’s trial follows a Wojak meme follows Pete Buttigieg’s unemployment beard—the question of how much of it is “real” or “reliable” is almost beside the point. We can no longer arrange all this content into a hierarchy of significance observed by society at large. When I was a tot, the newspapers’ front pages and the top-of-the-hour reports on the TV networks’ nightly news programs performed this service on the public’s behalf. Now it’s nominally up to the individual to decide for themselves which events and conversations should matter and which shouldn’t—or, rather, it’s up to the networked hives of second-order observers to determine what information is or ought to be “trending” at a given hour.
That’s not to say that giving a relatively small cadre of journalists, editors, and producers (mostly employed by for-profit organizations) license to determine what issues the public should be aware of and prioritize was ever a perfect system. And it’s not to say that we’re no longer ever on the same page concerning anything like a national conversation—the political fallout of the Trump-Biden debate, the failed assassination attempt against Trump, and the successful assassination attempt against Brian Thompson infiltrated pretty much everyone’s filter bubbles last year—but it takes a lot for any event or piece of reportage to bubble up to the top of the sewage and inspire a sense of importunity for more than a few days or weeks before getting flushed from our collective consciousness like Moo Deng memes, because for most of us it typically is like Moo Deng memes. It’s content.
I can imagine a contemporary scenario where a whistleblowing Mulder approaches a journalist with the Washington Post or Semafor with the mysterious alien device from the episode “Max” and credible evidence suggesting that the crash of Flight 549 didn’t play out quite like the military and FAA reported. The story could gain some traction. It might trend for a couple of weeks. It’d be discussed with a combination of an open mind and a healthy skepticism on All Things Considered, Sixty Minutes, The Tucker Carlson Show, The Joe Rogan Experience—wherever. For a moment, we’re all convinced this is something very important, something we ought to care about and post about and make and share content about.
A week and a half later, some renowned celebrity dies, some lunatic shoots up a parade or high school, Kanye West or Elon Musk make some kind of unhinged spectacle of themselves, some hurricane kills some number of people in Florida, some popular male artist is publicly accused of sexual assault, some member of the British royalty falls off a horse, some female pop star has a meltdown, some Trump administration official says something idiotic or announces plans to strip mine Yellowstone Park, some cultural flashpoint sparking an online melee between partisans of woke and anti-woke gets everyone rubbernecking, and everyone starts talking about how everyone’s talking about some totally unexpected mega-hit series on Netflix or Hulu. We’re moved on. The “military covers up evidence of an unidentified third aircraft and possible UFO involved in the tragic crash of Flight 549” scandal drops out of the general conversation, and then Agent Mulder turns up dead in his car four months later and the police rule it a suicide. That’s that. Nobody except for terminally online nerds in a handful of scattered internet subcultures takes much notice, and none of them have any reason to expect that the matter will be investigated further, or to kid themselves that the authorities might be pressured into taking a closer look in light of the suspicious circumstances.
But this is all fiction, of course.
In the early seasons, the X-Files’ narrative had to paper over the question as to why the Syndicate didn’t just have Mulder killed. It was too risky, they decided. Mulder’s work had earned him a lot of admirers; if they were to smell something fishy about his death, they might be motivated to turn his solitary quest into an organized crusade and give the men behind the curtain an even more severe headache. I think that was easier to believe thirty years ago, too.
“Forehead Sweat” is both an X-Files nostalgia bomb and a caution that nostalgia isn’t to be trusted. The Twilight Zone episode Mulder believes he remembers so clearly was actually from a knock-off series that sank into obscurity; Scully’s favorite gelatin may have been taken off the market because it was loaded with carcinogens; the X-Files’ Mythology was even more convoluted and graceless than you probably remember; the United States had a lot of fucking problems in the 1990s, some of which have since metastasized into its most insoluble difficulties today. But it’s comforting to think there was a span of years when the fiction of an indefatigable and unflinchingly principled Agent Mulder frightening the Powerful Old Men who sat at the nexus of power and withheld The Truth from the world could seem to communicate the spirit of our time.
In short, it was a case of the amorphous mystery being a hell of a lot more interesting and more effectively handled than the protracted drip-feed of revelations that gradually converted an indefinite lurking menace into an eminently catalogable menagerie of Alien Colonists, Alien Bounty Hunters, Alien Rebels, Alien Super-Soldiers, Alien-Human Hybrids, and so on.
Another clever move: the Chung we see dealing with Mulder toward the end of the episode speaks and behaves very differently from the charming, affable Chung we see interviewing Scully. And while this is understandable—Mulder barges in uninvited while Chung is at work and takes a confrontational tone; the irritated Chung responds in kind—the direction of the scene emphasizes the variance in the agents’ experiences with the author. Probably if Mulder and Scully shared their opinions of him, it would sound as if they were describing two different people.
The episode was “Unusual Suspects,” and the scriptwriter was Vince Gilligan—best known today as the creator of Breaking Bad. Gilligan’s contributions to The X-Files are well worth one’s attention, but perhaps the most significant of them is season six’s “Drive,” guest-starring one Bryan “Walter White” Cranston.
The episode “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” does have its share of admirers. I can’t find it now, but I remember one review suggesting it be viewed as a window into what a more effective X-Files revival might have looked like—basically, less like The X-Files and more like Black Mirror.
When The X-Files first started airing, bizarre accounts of UFO sightings and alien encounters already belonged to an active strain of Americana. A good Boston Globe article from 2016 examines the rise and fall of alien abduction myths, observing that (1) after 9/11, a convulsing zeitgeist left Little Green Men stories behind (2) the true believers in UFOs and alien abductions never really went away, but have since quarantined themselves in hermetic internet spaces, and the mainstream media (such as it exists today) isn’t as willing to platform them as Oprah once was. Probably the decline of the X-Files as a pop-cultural force had some role in depriving abduction myths of the mystique they radiated in decades prior.
Casting POC actors as the fresh new faces of the FBI was a wonderfully cheeky move. The X-Files was a very white show.
(1) Then again—as Reggie tells it, it was the arrival of Alien Donald Trump during his last case with Mulder and Scully that finally necessitated the closing of the X-Files. Embedding such a subtle statement in such a boisterously unsubtle scene was a clever move.
(2) To Morgan’s credit, the phrase “post-truth” doesn’t occur once in “Forehead Sweat.” Unlike the ultra-earnest Chris Carter, Morgan knows better than to have characters just blurt out his scripts’ Big Themes by their names.
Not for nothing did Mulder’s informant in the first season go by the sobriquet “Deep Throat.”
Somehow, the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation seemed more relevant in the early 1990s than the Iraq War now seems in the 2020s. Imagine that. I’m reminded of Christopher Lasch calling a disinterest in the past one of the defining characteristics of the culture of narcissism.
“Cancel culture” and Me Too are the exceptions that prove the rule.
I love this. In a weird coincidence, I find myself watching most of this show for the first time. But I had good friends of mine who talked about it all the time.
I think Humbug is the best episode, though perhaps because it's so self contained. Morgan had Mulder as an obsessive urban legends nerd who ignores reality decades ahead of the curve, apparently.