After nine seasons and two movies, it looks like The X-Files will be back for six more episodes in summer 2016. But where will the series pick up? Where are Mulder and Scully? And what could the show deal with?
In theory, it would pick up sometime after the show’s series finale, The Truth. The X-Files being The X-Files, this “finale” has a ton of loose ends: Reyes and Doggett, the agents who take over for Mulder and Scully, are last seen running away from heavily armed black helicopters. The Cigarette-Smoking Man is supposedly dead, but we don’t see the body. Mulder is on the run from a military tribunal. And we’re given an exact day and year for the arrival of aliens to colonize the Earth: Dec. 22, 2012, coincidentally the end of the Mayan calendar. And all of this was supposed to be wrapped up in a movie.
Which, in theory, is 2008’s The X-Files: I Want To Believe. Despite the title, it’s got nothing to do with alien invasions and in fact, despite aliens supposedly invading in four years, Mulder’s mostly hanging out and reading newspapers while Scully works as a doctor. About the only plot point the movie does address is Mulder on the run; he gets amnesty for helping to find some head-chopping weirdos. Otherwise, there’s nothing.
It seems that the much discussed third film, which would wrap up all these plot points, has turned into these six episodes. However, there are a few points to consider: The most obvious is, well, the whole Mayan Calendar nonsense has had its day and currently sits in the pop cultural dumpster next to Rebecca Black singing about Friday and VH1 reality shows waiting for its five-year retrospective. The second is that in general, the show has to deal with the fact that what were outlandish, paranoid ideas at the time are now more or less accepted problems we’re discussing publicly.
That said, the aliens are still invading, and it seems likely that the show will finally wrap that up. You know, just in time for a reboot.