Xfile returns3/5/2023 “My Struggle” does nothing to clear things up, and it does even less to revitalize Mulder’s ardor for his work. Chris Carter long ago lost the thread of his “mytharc” for The X-Files, which was initially about a planned alien colonization but morphed into five other related things. I don’t know what to say about “My Struggle” (perhaps a reference to the Hitler manifesto of the same name, or the Norwegian autobiographical opus by Karl Ove Knausgaard, although the episode does little to point at either), because I barely understood what happened in it. Since there hasn’t been a consistent season of The X-Files since the 1990s, it’s probably the best anyone could hope for. Conspiracy theories are embarrassingly mainstream at this point (think of the egg-avatar Twitter accounts ranting about lizard people or contrails or heaven knows what), and Mulder’s passion for discerning the truth from the lie is apparently sapped. But his fervor for the planet’s weird and wacky mysteries-the very quality that made him Mulder-seems to have waned. In the first episode, “My Struggle,” written and directed by the show’s creator Chris Carter, Mulder buddies up to a far-right-wing, Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorist played by Joel McHale, mourning the current coolness of his relationship with Scully. That dynamic, happily, remains in the show’s new incarnation, but things are different for the semi-retired FBI duo. Mulder was the constant, while Scully was the person who drew all of the drama and crackling wit out of him. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) balanced him out as the level-headed skeptic, but her characterization and growth over nine years was the show. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was an obsessive in an old-fashioned way fans could understand-charming and laconic, but with a basement full of weird secrets and passion projects, most having to do with alien abductions. Early stories in The X-Files traded on every whispered secret and half-baked theory about the government, every spooky urban legend, every mythic creature given half a page in the encyclopedia. The biggest shift concerns the nature of conspiracy-theorizing itself, which in the Internet age has evolved from a demanding hobby for only the most devoted paranoiacs to something far more widespread, accessible, and pervasive. It’s not ideal, given the brevity of this installment, but since there hasn’t been a consistent season of The X-Files since the 1990s, it’s probably the best anyone could hope for. But don’t be discouraged by the utter incoherence of the first hour: The spirit of the show is still here, waiting to be drawn out, and each installment is better than the last. It’s little wonder then that things start out slow, especially given all the setup the show needs to do justifying its own existence. The Search for America’s Atlantis Ross Andersen
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