The X-Files started out as, essentially, a paranormal version of a police procedural, with most episodes being standalone stories and only a few of them being seriously connected. As a result, it became one of the first truly mainstream shows (not counting cult hits like Star Trek) to produce a large volume of fan fiction, and with the rise of the internet in the '90s, it also became one of the first shows period to have a real fan following online, with the show's creators often giving shout-outs to big-name fans by naming minor characters after them. The chemistry between the two of them was a major factor in the show's rising popularity, as people tuned in to watch the two sexy FBI agents chase down aliens, psychic murderers, and ghosts. It was obvious to everybody watching and writing the show that Mulder and Scully had the hots for one another the phrase "unresolved sexual tension" has even been claimed to have originated in the X-Files fan community. Meanwhile, everybody was wondering when the two were just gonna shut up and do it already. After all, watching them investigate iridium flares refracted off of weather balloons through swamp gas wouldn't be the most exciting television. Exceptions include the cases where the subject matter is religious/spiritual (wherein it's usually Scully, a Catholic, who's the believer and turns out to be correct, and the irreligious Mulder who's the skeptic and turns out to be wrong), and the cases where both of them are wrong and the actual explanation is something way out there. Scully, meanwhile, is a doctor and a skeptic who's been assigned to work with Mulder chiefly to debunk his crazier theories, with it implied that the higher-ups in the FBI sent her to him because he was getting too close to "the truth".Įach episode features the two of them investigating a bizarre case, with Mulder going for the more out-there explanation and Scully looking for a rational one, with Mulder usually being vindicated at the end of the episode. As the poster on the wall of his office (originally illustrated with a photo by UFO fraudster Billy Meier) puts it, he wants to believe. This is due to his unwavering conviction that aliens not only exist, but were responsible for the disappearance of his sister Samantha when she was little, which led him to devote considerable resources to investigating them. Mulder used to be well-regarded as one of the FBI's best profilers, but came to develop a reputation as a crank, nicknamed "Spooky Mulder" by his fellow agents.
The show follows Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a pair of FBI agents who handle "X-files", cases that are seemingly inexplicable by conventional scientific and forensic knowledge. This was even more true during the show's 2016 revival, in which the show integrated many of the newer methods and ideas that conspiracy theorists had picked up in the show's absence. While it likely was not the intention of the writers to do this, the show's run went hand-in-hand with an explosion of interest in ufology, cryptozoology, and the paranormal in general, and as one of the most high-profile purveyors of such ideas, it is difficult to argue that this was coincidental. The writers heavily mined UFO mythology, such as the Majestic 12 and the Roswell crash, for ideas, forming a story that, both as a whole and as the sum of its parts, was largely indistinguishable from many real-life, grand-scale UFO conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, it also arguably played a role in the reawakening of interest in conspiracy theories in the 1990s. It also had a major impact on television storytelling, particularly with the development of story arcs that could span seasons at a time, which had (in American television, at least) previously been largely restricted to soap operas but afterwards came to be the standard for science fiction, fantasy, and mystery programming. The show was a pop culture phenomenon at the height of its success, one that film/TV critic John Kenneth Muir compared to Star Trek and The Twilight Zone in terms of its influence on popular culture, particularly science fiction.
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Created by Chris Carter, it launched the careers of a number of high-profile Hollywood writers, including the creators of the TV shows Angel, Breaking Bad, and Homeland. The X-Files is an American science fiction television show that ran on the Fox network for nine seasons from 1993 to 2002, as well as a six-episode miniseries relaunch in 2016, which despite a mixed reception, led to another five-episode miniseries in January 2018.
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