THE X-FILES IS COMING BACK TO TELEVISION.
This is, literally, a dream come true.
The first time I saw The X-Files was sometime in the summer of 1995, between 6th and 7th grade. My good friend Liska — who is now on her way to becoming a famous screenwriter in Hollywood, no doubt thanks to her early good taste in zeitgeisty television shows and also elementary school friends — had been pestering me to watch it: "You gotta see this show."
The first episode I remember seeing was an early first-season episode called "Shadows" (because yes, I know the names of all the episodes). Today it's critically unremarkable, but I remember watching David Duchovny's Mulder walk into a dark office — like an Office Space-type office — and as the music began to crescendo, office supplies rose up off the desk and bookshelves and started to swirl around in the air. We're talking staplers, legal pads, etc. Because the office was haunted, get it? By the spirit of the former boss who was protecting his young employee! ...obviously.
I was hooked. I already loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Unsolved Mysteries (Robert Stack!) and Rescue 911. The X-Files was like an amalgamation of all three, only with an added ingredient I never knew I wanted in my TV programs: Angst.
Angst was at the center of all truly great X-Files episodes. An episode could be cool or scary or gross but if it didn't have angst, it wasn't spectacular to me. And there was a lot of angst to go around on The X-Files: Mulder's long-lost sister (abducted by aliens, of course. or the government. or Mulder's shitty-ass father). Scully's abduction (by aliens, of course. or the government. or Mulder's shitty-ass "father").
There was a lot of angst going around in my own life, too. I didn't have a long-lost sister or a mysterious microchip in my neck or a nefarious government conspiracy shadowing my every move, but I did have deep feelings of sadness and meaninglessness I couldn't explain. (Today, we call those feelings "adolescence," but back then I just knew life felt sad and pointless sometimes and I didn't know why.) Mulder, in his own weird way, is a perfect mirror for a depressed adolescent: He doesn't fit in. His life careens between being utterly consequential to the fate of the known universe and being completely pointless. He's socially awkward and can't quite nail it down with the girl of his dreams. And also, he's obsessed with porn.
I was 12 when I fell into The X-Files; up until then all my favorite TV shows had been Full House or Saved by the Bell or — when I started to get all sophisticated — Friends. But adolescence is a dark time, and dark times call for dark shows: creepy shape-shifting murderers and monsters, rage-inducing parasites, psychotic cloned identical twins. (And that was only the first season. Also by "dark" I mean literally dark, like sometimes I had to sit really close to my small white television and squint just to see whether Mulder and Scully were entering a closet or an aircraft hangar.)
The X-Files was the first time I found myself immersed in a full-fledged pop culture obsession. So naturally, my parents were against it. Which in turn only made me more obsessed. Here was this thing, this intricate, beautiful, twisted thing, and my parents just didn't get it. Because they were parents. Who just didn't understand. It was the first time — other than the daily fights I had with my mother about whether or not my room was acceptably tidy (spoiler alert: it wasn't) — that I felt a widening gulf between me and my parents, a sense that I was growing somehow beyond them and the world we all inhabited together.
My memories of The X-Files are inextricably linked with two things: junior high school and the Internet, both of which had recently pirouetted into my existence. It was on the Internet that I tracked upcoming writers and directors for episodes (because they all had their own styles, and I knew them all), first learned terms like "spoiler" and "shipper," connected with other fans — some of whom I still keep in touch with to this day — and started reading fanfic.
"Fanfic" is short for "fan fiction," and it's exactly what it sounds like: fictional stories written about fictional universes by real-life superfans. Nowadays fanfic seems to be all about Twilight (did you know 50 Shades of Grey originated as Twilight fanfiction?) and Harry Potter (Draco Malfoy and Harry hook up!), but back in the heady days of The X-Files in the '90s, fanfic was truly something to behold. There was awful fanfic out there — Mulder marries Scully, Scully's mom marries Skinner, everyone's kids are named "Fox" and "Dana" — but there was great fanfic out there too, and I devoured it all. Sometimes fanfic was released in serial format and I was more eagerly waiting for the next installment than the next episode of the show itself. Fanfic was at its hedonistic peak during the long summer hiatuses (hiatusi?), particularly when the show had ended in a cliffhanger and you could imagine how it went a thousand different ways. How had Mulder escaped the burning boxcar in the desert? Was he faking his death or so despondent with guilt over Scully's terminal cancer that he really had committed suicide? What the F was up with those bees? Sometimes, particularly as the mythology of the show became bloated with complications, fanfic resolutions were better than the show itself. There was one particularly well-known fanfic called "Oklahoma." The Moby-Dick of fanfics, it featured a lot of poetry by T.S. Eliot, who quickly became my favorite poet.
Did I write fanfic myself? Hell yes I did. I liked to write fanfic that explored what Mulder and/or Scully were really thinking during an episode (because who would understand the inner thoughts of an FBI agent investigating the paranormal better than a 13-year-old Jewish girl from Queens?), or else what really happened after an episode (usually: Mulder made a broody confession to Scully and she cheered him up, but not in that way).
In the '90s, there was a heated division between fans who wanted to see Mulder and Scully romantically linked — these people were called "shippers," short for "relationshippers" — and fans who didn't want that to happen; these people were called "rational human beings who understood that this would ruin the fabric of the show itself."
No, actually they were called "NoRomos," which is short for "no romance," which, since that's basically how I felt about my own adolescent life, is the camp I was in. When all my friends were starting to act on crushes and date first boyfriends, I felt an aversion to coupledom I couldn't really explain. In seventh grade, Louis Miller threw a heart-shaped card at me in the Starbucks of our local Barnes & Noble (a cherished afterschool hangout) that he had constructed in French class; "Je t'aime!" it said. My response was the emotional equivalent of clamping my hands over my ears and chanting "La la la, I can't hear you!" I had had somewhat of a tumultuous transition from elementary school to junior high school and I was just beginning to become independent myself; it's no surprise I saw all too well the dangers of becoming too dependent on another, of becoming too inextricably linked with someone else's emotions. (Is it any wonder my favorite type of X-Files case was the kind where Scully would have occasion to say "Mulder, you're getting too close to this case!"?)
David Duchovny and I both outgrew The X-Files around the same time, but the show always stayed with me. Like a blankie, I went back to it for comfort in times of transition: During my senior year in college, I'd stay up late after working on grad school applications to watch one episode before bed; in graduate school, I even started writing fanfic again, kind of like Stephen King coming out of retirement to write more mature pieces. (Note: I did not publish this fanfic under my real name. Thank goodness.)
The X-Files was probably the single most defining factor of my adolescence. I was so embarrassed by my earliest attempts at fanfiction that I've long since deleted all traces of them, but now I deeply wish I'd saved them. You know how people when they're reminiscing will say, "It was a simpler time"? My time as an X-Files superfan was the opposite of that for me: a more complicated time, a time that was sometimes dark and sometimes full of possibility, a time when I couldn't quite visualize who I was or who I wanted to be. (Besides Scully, of course. A smart, brave, loyal professional woman with a smoldering hot and deeply disturbed partner, of course we all wanted to be Scully.)
If you think about it, The X-Files is a lot like adolescence: You start out thinking it's going to be a little hokey, NBD, and then you end up in its thrall, captivated, occasionally hugely let down. A lot of people behave strangely, and no one gets out unscathed (I, for instance, spent a lot of nights crying in the shower, and Mulder, well, died and came back to life).
In some ways the show's return to television is like getting to return to that murky, undeveloped time in my life, that time when you're allowed to be obsessed with a television show because adolescence is all about obsession: with fitting in, with standing out, with narrowing the gulf between who you are and who you wish you were.
It's been 20 years, and I still can't wait to see what will happen.
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