This had to happen:
...Fox just issued a press release confirming the long-whispered return of The X-Files — and also confirming the return of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
It's been 13 years since the finale (and a couple of so-so films in between) and now Fox has re-ordered a six-episode X-Files run, with original showrunner Chris Carter.
In the PR release, there's lots of nice talk, like this bit from Carter saying he thinks of the hiatus as a, "...13-year commercial break." And as for what's in store, lots more weirdness as Carter seems pretty giddy about the state of scifi television today, "The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories."
Hell. Yes.
In a previous life before the political blogging here, I did fanfiction and alt.tv.x-files postings as I followed this show I got hooked on back in the early 1990s. I've mentioned before I was into the conspiracy stuff, UFOs and Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot and ghosts and here was this show that delved into all of that and I pretty much geeked out.
This was around the time that Star Trek was getting into a rut, where Babylon 5 was an acquired taste, and Dr. Who had faded away (with only a badly written but well-acted TV movie with Paul McGann as The Eighth Doctor as a hoped-for reboot), and there wasn't much else good science fiction on television. There wasn't much more in the way of mind-bending fun/scary sci-fi, and The X-Files covered the need.
It helped that the show was anchored by two fun actors - Duchovny and Anderson - and had heaping helpfuls of a recently realized trope called Relationshipping (or 'Shipping for short). The concept had been around for ages, as a literary trope (SEE Ivanhoe, Little Women, Jane Austen), but rarely seen on television the way they did it on this show. They didn't create UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension), they merely demonstrated how brilliant a story-telling device it could be in the right hands.Fans tuned in less for the scary monsters and tuned in to watch Moose and Squirrel shamelessly flirt with each other over an autopsy. It got to where nearly every other show aims for it, intentionally or not (West Wing was a good example: the show started off with the open intent of having Josh flirt with Mandy, but when it proved Josh interacted better with Donna the dynamic of the show - Will They Or Won't They? - revolved around that).
From that, my massive output of writing during the 1990s revolved around what I called Senseless 'Shipper Surveys, an episode recap done in a humorous vein around how much that episode involved the 'Shipping and how silly Mulder got while St. Scully lorded over all. I had a major section of a personal website (ye olde wittylibrarian.com site) devoted to it (the other half was to following the Tampa Bay Bucs).
The website is gone - I got to the point I couldn't afford to pay the domain rights - but I've got those old surveys on file somewhere. I am sorely tempted to waste a lot of my time re-posting them online.
Just how many blogs should I be running at one time? I may need to grab another Blogger address...
UPDATE: new blog address for the Surveys, folks! http://xfilesshipper.blogspot.com/
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