Someone or Something, Scully

Sorry, I'm going to talk about The X-Files

Aug 11, 2023

Good Friends is a free weekly newsletter. If you want to support this publication and get access to additional top secret content, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

If anything in Good Friends resonates with you, please feel free to screenshot and share on social media, forward it to someone who might benefit, or tell a friend!
Thank you for being here!

When I was a kid in the 90s, it only took hearing the first three notes of The X-Files theme to have me running upstairs to my room. I had never sat through an episode, but in my mind it was a nonstop-nightmare inducing hour of television. I was the sort of kid that deeply consumed the media I watched, often to my emotional detriment. A childhood viewing of the 1956 Moby Dick movie left me with such an irrational fear of deep sea creatures that I could no longer take a bath without worrying a shark would swim up the drain. To this day, whenever my ears are submerged below the water line I swear I am vulnerable to a deep sea attack.

All this is to say, a show about aliens, cryptids and things that go bump in the night, would have left me unable to sleep for a decade. So it was against all odds that in the autumn of 2021, I consumed almost nothing but X-Files for months. I loved it so much I created a database of each episode and ranked them on a five star rating system. I was singularly consumed by my mission to make all of my friends watch it (it didn’t work). I can’t explain what I love about it, and it’s a hard show to pitch an uninitiated viewer on, because it is technically, a really dumb show. Listen, I love it, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you that this is high art. It’s pure genre fiction and I love it. It’s got camp, it’s got scares, it’s got Gillian Anderson, what more could you want? However, that’s not what keeps me coming back. I keep coming back for this idiot:

“I was hoping you could help me solve the mystery of the horny beast.”

Fox Mulder is inarguably a mediocre FBI agent, a maladapted adult man and a perpetual bachelor. Until season 6 it is implied he doesn’t even own a bed and is only ever seen sleeping on the couch. His nickname is Spooky Mulder and the show-runners would like you to believe that he’s sort of a nerd amongst the alpha men of the FBI, but the problem is that David Duchovny is physically incapable of being anything other than impossibly charming and cool. He loves baseball, he’s addicted to sunflower seeds and most of all he wholeheartedly believes in the existence of extraterrestrial life.

I got a tattoo of hands palming a playing card last year and the artist asked if I was into card tricks. “No, I just like magic,” I responded, which sounded less cool than I hoped.

“Oh,” they said, “like close up magic?"

”No, just like magic. Abstractly”

Just magic. Abstractly. Like, the existence of magic. The idea of magic. Magic as a feeling. The more I explain this, the more embarrassed I become. Here’s what I mean though, I like the kind of magic that occurs when we all clap to bring Tinkerbell back to life. We’re not labouring under the delusion that our collective clapping creates enough fairy dust to reincarnate Tinkerbell, but when the crowd starts clapping, we certainly create something.

When Mulder shows up on a case and Scully gives her perfectly reasonable and scientific explanation for what has occurred, and Mulder looks at all that and says something like:

He’s choosing to believe. Sure, he’s also probably clinically insane, but you have to give the man credit for sticking to his belief that the simplest answer is not always the right answer. I like The X-Files because I want to believe (sorry) in mysteries. I’m not that interested in explanation. I don’t want to know how the trick was done. Let me live in a world where big foot exists in some corner of the woods we’ve never explored.

Despite how it sounds, Mulder and Scully aren’t the opposites of each other. Scully is the skeptic, but she’s also a woman of faith. There’s a part of her that wants Mulder to be right about everything. Mulder is obsessed with finding the truth, but Scully is a woman of science and she knows better than anyone that there are somethings we just don’t know. Something happens when the two of them collide that creates this space where anything is possible. Maybe it isn’t always an X-File, but we just keep showing up wondering if maybe the next one will be. So let’s all enjoy a little bit of mystery, a little bit of magic and six seasons of The X-Files (don’t bother with the rest).