ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY The Ultimate Guide to The X-Files: 25 Years Inside Every Season & Film

By The Editors of Entertainment Weekly       

The truth is out there. Do you believe?

Twenty-five years ago, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully introduced us to a world shrouded in secrecy and wrapped in paranoia. The X-Files chronicled their experiences with the paranormal. What began as a cult hit that blended urban legend, supernatural horror, B-movie science fiction, and shadowy government conspiracy became a pop sensation that changed how television was written. The charisma and chemistry of actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, one a crusader for the truth no matter how strange, the other grounded in scientific skepticism, brought viewers back week after week, eager to plunge deeper into the unknown.


Now, on the occasion of The X-Files' 11th season, Entertainment Weekly takes you behind the curtain into the show's universe with an all-new Collector's Edition, The Ultimate Guide to The X-Files. This must-have dossier includes an oral history of the show, coverage of every season and both movies, dozens of photographs, a primer to the mythology of The X-Files, and in-depth interviews with David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, show creator Chris Carter, and writers of the show. Whether you are a long-time fan or new to the series, The Ultimate Guide to The X-Files will become a definitive and highly entertaining resource that will keep you on the hunt for the truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Entertainment Weekly
• Release date: Jan 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547841417

Book preview

Introduction

The Legacy of The X-Files

It was the cult hit that brought the very idea of ‘the cult hit’ into the mainstream. The show’s influence lives on in today’s television hits By Darren Franich

Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny and Chris Carter behind the scenes in 1995.

In 1993 The X-Files took the pop-culture fringe into prime time. It absorbed a galaxy of offbeat influences—B-movie horror, trippy pulp sci-fi, urban legend, Atomic Age paranoia, post-Watergate paranoia—and refracted them through the lens of the procedural. Scully was so familiar a small-screen archetype that she was a doctor and a cop. And Mulder was the sardonic guide welcoming us to worlds unlike anything television had ever seen.

The central cult-mainstream dissonance was key. The spookiest agent in the FBI was played by a 6-ft.-tall Ivy Leaguer with a killer chin. His levelheaded, methodical partner—a character that would seem to encourage crusty-old-lifer typecasting—was brought to life by a young actress discovered playing a college student on FOX’s short-lived coed drama Class of ’96. Mulder is a conspiracy nut raging against the system—and yet he is the system, an FBI agent with a bottomless expense account. Scully is a scientist and a Christian, skeptic and believer—and no matter what monstrosity she witnesses this week, she will always be the first person to doubt Mulder’s musings next week.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson sold the paradox. Their sparkling chemistry led fans to coin the term shipping, an essential part of the she-and-him detective genre that followed in their wake: Bones, Castle and Sleepy Hollow. From the actors’ rock-solid foundation, the writers built endless experiments—most famously the large-scale alien- cover-up arc that launched so many season-finale cliff-hangers. (To be a kid who loved The X-Files was to be the only kid who wanted summer to just end already.) Today every TV show has a mythology—there’s a wiki for NCIS—and the Binge Era has made serialization an essential part of the TV writers’ toolkit.

But lately it’s also become common to praise The X-Files for the precise opposite of serialization. While the mythology had some written-on-the-fly excesses, the stand-alone episodes look more than ever like shining examples of TV artistry. Mr. Robot’s single-take thriller Pretty Little Liars’ black-and-white Old Hollywood adventure, the flashback origin-of-the- villain stories that popped up on Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes? The X-Files got there first, with Triangle, The Post-Modern Prometheus and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man. The breadth of material produced by The X-Files launched careers that would go on to define television, like Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan, Homeland’s Howard Gordon, ace TV director Michelle MacLaren.

The revival X-Files season debuted with 16.19 million viewers, huge 1996 numbers in 2016’s splintered media landscape. Mulder’s spooky fascinations have become central tenets of entertainment. There’s a clear line from The X-Files to Lost to Stranger Things—and another from The X-Files to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight. The reboots of Doctor Who and Westworld bear recognizable marks of Chris Carter DNA—and the series-long conspiracy prepared audiences for the ongoing narratives of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. The show’s legacy is still growing, like a tantalizing truth spreading further out there.

Scully and Mulder in 2017.

The show made a long-standing mark. . . . It was that initial strain of yeast in a lot of other bread

—David Duchovny

Darren Franich is Entertainment Weekly’s television critic

SEASON ELEVEN

Nothing but the Truth

Unstoppable agents Mulder and Scully get ready for another round of incredibly out-there cases and complex conspiracies—and just maybe a little romance along the way By Joy Press

Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) in the season premiere.

Fox Mulder leaned over Dana Scully’s bedside, their faces hovering inches apart as they talked softly about their son William, given up for adoption so many years ago when he was an infant. The moment was a profound, personal one for the FBI agents who have investigated unexplained phenomena for the better part of three decades—one certain to move fans of The X-Files who have longed to see the partners’ off-camera love affair writ large onscreen. But this wasn’t a romantic clinch. It was a matter of life and death.

At the outset of the series’ anticipated 11th season, which debuted just two days after the new year, a severely weakened Scully lay in a hospital room, explaining to her longtime partner that she had become a conduit for visions of how humanity will be destroyed by an alien plague. And where were these visions originating? William—now a very special teenager glimpsed only in brief, violent flashes—seems to be using his very special powers to psychically communicate with his mother.

The fact that the agents were together at all might have come as a surprise given the apocalyptic events of last season’s finale: Scully was trapped on a gridlocked bridge, while Mulder, infected by a fatal virus, refused to cut a deal with the sinister Cigarette Smoking Man to save his own life from a coming plague destined to depopulate the planet (only the chosen elite who’d been inoculated with alien DNA, like CSM and Scully, would survive). The episode turned out to be prophecy rather than reality, but Scully is now convinced that William’s blood will provide them with an antidote for the contagion. Meanwhile, Mulder only has eyes for Scully, telling a group of shadowy conspirators, Only one person can save us—and I think you know her too.

At this point in the life of Chris Carter’s beloved series, you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who don’t know Mulder and Scully. The X-Files carved out a niche for smart science fiction and paranormal paranoia back in the 1990s, when there was little else like it on television, and its impact on the medium and popular culture at large is difficult to overstate. With 62 Emmy nominations and 16 wins, the acclaimed series became a launching pad for a number of top showrunners and, of course, rocketed Duchovny and Anderson to worldwide stardom.

All of which made rebooting the legendary series 14 years after it left the small screen (and eight years after its last movie sequel) a risky proposition. The show’s writers were daunted by the challenge of reanimating Mulder and Scully in a culture where conspiracy theories play a central role and where the TV landscape is crammed with high-end science-fiction shows like Black Mirror, Mr. Robot and Westworld. As