‘The X-Files’ Returns: Will Scully Still Be Catholic?

Last updated on: January 23, 2016 at 9:26 pm by Kate O'Hare

‘The X-Files’ Returns: Will Scully Still Be Catholic? 2016-01-23T21:26:13-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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I’m not going to keep you in suspense.

Yes, Dr. Dana Scully is still Catholic, little gold cross and all.

As the beloved Fox series “The X-Files” begins its six-episode reboot on Sunday, Jan. 24, Dr. Scully is working at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital in Washington, D.C. Over the course of the first three episodes, we learn she’s helping surgeons correct a malformation in children. A nun even shows up in episode two. She’s not doing anything nefarious, but she does have a creepy line that shows that, hard as they try, TV producers just don’t get us.

Strangely, the episode two storyline echoes the premiere storyline in another Fox series, “Houdini and Doyle,” premiering later this spring — which also has Catholic themes, both covert and overt — but that’s a tale for another time.

Anyway, back to “The X-Files.” I’ll say it right up front — the first episode is dreadful, with stilted performances, leaden dialogue and a creaky twist on the show’s signature alien-conspiracy storyline. The bright spot, other than Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson) together again, is “Community” star Joel McHale as a right-wing talk-show host who’s a combination of Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly … but may be on to something.

But of the three episodes I’ve previewed, the first is the weakest, and it’s well worth hanging around. Episode two feels like vintage “X-Files,” and episode three is another trip into the mind of writer Darin Morgan, who was responsible for the original show’s weirdest, funniest and downright oddest episodes. Fans of “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” will not be disappointed.

While, at the respective ages of 55 and 47, Duchovny and Anderson are no longer fresh-faced newcomers, neither has lost any appeal — nor any of their chemistry.

But now is a different time than the early ’90s, when the show premiered. It was a period of relative peace and prosperity — although the dark forces of Islamist terror grew and struck, just not hard enough to jar us out of complacency — and we had the luxury of thinking about things like alien visitations.

In 2016, terror is at our doorstep, many struggle to make ends meet in a thoroughly disrupted economy, and both traditional ways of life and the social contract seem to be breaking down all around us. In an age when we aren’t even sure what male and female are anymore, worrying about aliens seems to be a frivolity.

“The X-Files” was always about the tug of war between creator Chris Carter’s skepticism and his willingness to believe, and a peek into what kept him up at night.

At the recent Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena, California, I got to ask him about rethinking “X” for the age of ISIS and Snowden.

He said:

The ’90s were great. It was till, for me, a sort of residual paranoia that came out of my young adulthood, out of Watergate and such. But we’re living in a time now when there’s a tremendous amount of distrust of authority, government, even the media. So, this is a really interesting time to tell “X-Files” stories.

Conspiracy sites are chock-a-block with the most outrageous stuff, but some of it is actually quite plausible, and I think that’s what you find in the mythology episodes here. I’ve cherry-picked through some of the things that are frightening to me — the prospect of them are frightening.

Even if one of them comes true, it will be a bad thing for America and beyond. So, this is a really interesting time to be shining lights into the darkness.

Well, we know that the Truth is out there, but it may not be the one the world is expecting.

Images: Courtesy Fox

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