'The X Files' Reboot and LGBTs: Do We Still Want to Believe?

Next month, Fox is bringing back one of its hallmark TV series: "The X Files," which first broadcast on the network in 1993. Fox (and Internet fandom) is treating the return with no little degree of excitement. But with anticipation there comes trepidation, especially if you're gay and remember the show from its inaugural run.

In its heyday, the show had plenty of LGBT viewers who were endlessly intrigued and fascinated with the show, even when its power to dazzle began a precipitous wane. All these years later, the show's return has generated as much skepticism as interest among its mainstream prospective audience; however, what's not so clear is whether LGBT viewers should even care.

The idea of a new clutch of episodes after so many years is interesting in itself. Studios used to revive beloved TV shows by making big-budget movies out of them. Think back to thirty-six years ago and the 1979 release of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." That film - hugely expensive for its time, partly because the production also bore the cost of an aborted TV series - kick-started the small-to-large screen trend, a long-running strategy that allowed studios to make extra hay (and money) out of dormant properties.

At first, the cinematic transitions of old TV shows were pretty faithful to the source material, be it the "Get Smart" comedy "The Nude Bomb" or the successful trio of pictures that emerged from the ashes of the short-lived comedy "Police Squad!" After a time, however, such movie versions began to veer into the farcical - think the big-screen versions of "Charlie's Angels," "Dragnet," and "21 Jump Street," silver screen comedies that improbably fermented from long-retired TV dramas.

That development fit in with a general trend for movies to get bigger, louder, and (some would say) dumber. TV, meantime, underwent a renaissance propelled by a proliferation of cable channels, more and more of which began to generate original content. After decades of second-class status, the small screen's offerings suddenly became edgier, more diverse, and more complex than most of what was showing at the local Cineplex.

It's no surprise, then, that old TV shows - even series that had already made a transition to the movies - might come back home to the small screen. Take "Twin Peaks," for instance, the cult crime drama with supernatural trimmings and a soap-opera glaze that ran for two seasons, gave rise to a feature film prequel, and now is headed for a long-delayed third season (a "mini-series" of either 9 or 18 episodes, depending on whom you believe) on Showtime in 2017.

"Twin Peaks" is only one example of the trend. "Heroes," the drama that created a sensation with it original stable of comic book-ready, super-powered champions and villains (but then wore out its welcome and was canceled after four seasons), has mutated in into "Heroes Reborn," a miniseries broadcast earlier this year on NBC.

That brings us back to "The X Files."

Creator Chris Carter's far-out amalgam of myth and monsters (to say nothing of magical thinking and insane government conspiracy theories) was the 1990s equivalent of "Star Trek," electrifying audiences and pushing the envelope for what a drama constructed around sci-fi and horror themes could accomplish. At its heart were two very different - but equally intelligent and passionate - characters. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was a believer in all sorts of paranormal phenomena: Ghosts, monsters, and - especially - UFOs piloted by "EBEs," extraterrestrial biological entities. His belief was fueled in large part by the childhood disappearance of his younger sister. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), on the other hand, was a skeptic - despite her staunch Catholic faith. (In an inspired twist, her one concession to "extreme possibility" - religion - was also the one area of supernatural possibility that Mulder had no patience for.)

In its early seasons, "The X Files" was smart, fresh, daring, and full of unexpected twists and turns. Together with fellow executive producer and writer Frank Spotnitz, Carter took the most inane chatter from the Internet and spun it into paranoiac televisual gold. What we got was funhouse mirror - a distortion of the most distorted aspects of our culture, but taken seriously and massaged into an engrossing, over-arching storyline, a "mythos" in which aliens had been coming to Earth for millennia and were now in the final stages of invading the planet and enslaving humanity - all with the help of the Earth's governments, by way of a tiny and powerful "cabal" of men and women who knew the score and sought to work both sides for their own benefit.

Like "Star Trek" in the 1960s, the show was originally intended, provisionally at least, to have a five-year run; but whereas the powers that were at NBC did their best to undercut and scuttle "Trek" (the whole business about that show doing poorly in the ratings was pretty much a lie, argues "These Are the Voyages," a new trilogy of in-depth volumes on the Original Series; NBC didn't like working with the autocratic Gene Roddenberry and simply wanted to get rid of him and his show) the suits at Fox did their best to keep "The X Files" going for years beyond the show's sell-by date. Their reasoning seems, from this vantage in time, to have been pecuniary; "The X Files" was a ratings smash at a time when the Big Four networks were seeing audience shares plummet thanks to more and more cable choices. Carter and his crowd dragged the show through a ninth season before calling it quits.

The result of such prolongment was a loss of quality and verve as the show's mythic alien storyline was extended and the lead actors began to itch for other projects. (Original co-star David Duchovny all but bowed out after the seventh season.) The show's other element - its celebrated "monster of the week" episodes, a cavalcade of mutants, psychics, vampires, and other creatures of legend - grew similarly pale and thin, with repetition setting in and increasingly far-fetched ideas being cooked up in the writers' room. When the series was finally put out of its misery in 2002, it was with a two-hour finale that re-capped the alien conspiracy storyline but offered no resolution. If anything, the show's final episode felt like a teaser for a film franchise that never quite materialized.

If that was the idea, it wasn't a bad one, at least not from a marketing perspective. "The X Files" had already enjoyed a theatrical incarnation. The show was still on the air, and just a little past its prime, when the first movie - colloquially known by its informal subtitle "Fight the Future" - reached theaters in the summer of 1998. A decade later, in 2008, a second, long-delayed movie finally hit screens. Titled "I Want to Believe," the film - written and directed by Carter - failed to draw in much of the show's core audience, many of whom had tuned out well before the last televised episodes premiered. The second film did nothing to further the cliff-hanging alien invasion storyline, which posited a date for the end of the world: December 21, 2012. Fans began speculating that a third film would launch in time for that deadline, and tie up all the loose ends from the series.

No such luck. If "The X Files" trades in anything (other than suspicion and unease), it's frustration, forever offering the tantalizing prospect of having an itch scratched - but never actually scratching the itch without finding a way to inflame and intensify it. In a way, "The X Files" is the TV equivalent of a bug bite. No wonder so many "X philes," as hard-core fans dubbed themselves, simply went cold turkey.

That accounts, perhaps, for a friend's response when he heard about the new six-episode "tenth season" that's slated to air next month. He actually groaned in irritation, knowing that he would tune in - and expecting that the same old tease would greet him. Moreover, he suspected, the new episodes would suffer from the waterlogged feeling that plagued the show's latter seasons, when new monsters were scarce and the "mythos" around the alien conspiracy, having been so enlarged, was fast becoming shapeless and sloppy - a far cry from the show's initial sense of taut inventiveness.

Previews for the new episodes suggest that there's more than a little recycling in store. On the one hand, there's a sense of humor already discernable about this return to the franchise -- "We've been given another case, Mulder," Scully tells Mulder over the phone in one clip; "It has a monster in it" - but on the other hand, what's been announced about the storyline for "Season 10" sounds pretty much like how Season 5 started out, with Mulder becoming convinced that the far-out phenomena he and Scully have been investigating for the FBI is all a matter of smoke and mirrors - a diversion used by the powerful to dupe and confuse the masses.

That in itself is less alarming, though, than the prospect of sitting through more of Carter's thinly-veiled homophobia.

For much of its run, "The X Files" - like much of primetime television - studiously avoided the subject of GLBTs. This wasn't just a matter of what network TV as a whole was doing back in the days with "Will & Grace" presented gay men as charming and celibate, while the cable-based "Queer as Folk" took the greater latitude of cable as license to titillate and provoke. When the show finally did depict a gay couple, in the Season 7 episodes "X-COPS" (first aired on Feb 20, 2000), it was in a pretty condescending manner with one man - the femme - sobbing that his butch bf refused to have sex with him. The episode's handling of the subject only looked worse when, a couple of months later, the Gillian Anderson-penned and directed "all things" aired (on April 9, 2000). A guest character who turned out to be a lesbian confided to a romantically confused Scully that she - the lesbian guest character, that is -- was able to find peace and health only once she started to "release shame" about her sexuality. Her words helped Scully sort out her own tangle of feelings for a former lover, a family man almost old enough to be her father.

That's the sort of intelligent message you hope to find on a show that otherwise was so often cutting-edge smart, but it took Anderson - rather than Carter or any of the show's regular writers - to come up with those ideas.

Previously, Carter and co. had addressed homosexuality in their concurrently running crime/horror series "Millennium," in an episode about a pair of male lovers bonded by prison rape. That episode ended as dismally for the gay guest character as any prim and disapproving movie from the height of the Hayes Code.

In 2008, with the second feature film, Carter's contempt for gays was placed front and center. "I Want to Believe" was another crime/horror concoction with supernatural elements. In that film, a pedophile priest helps Mulder and Scully with a missing persons case. The bad guys are a male couple. "Guess who got married in Massachusetts," one character sneers when identifying the perps. (This was, of course, well before marriage equality was widespread in the United States.) This film serves up Carter's anti-gay attitude on a sarcastic silver platter: The pedophile is given much more sympathetic treatment than the two men in a committed relationship.

Some die-hard fans are going to have to tune in to the fresh half-dozen run of "X Files" stories, no matter what the new episodes turn out to be like. (The good news is that the writers and directors who made the show's peak years so thrilling are back.) But many more 'philes may simply decide that they've long since had enough. "The X Files" should have had a definitive ending back in 2002 or, better still, in 1999, following the show's still-tolerable sixth season, before the death spiral of the final three seasons. Even if Carter and company have "evolved" in terms of how they think about GLBTs (and they must have a sense that their viewership includes us), the show's conceits, once so effective, are now creaky and yellowed with age - and, frankly, they've become well worn, not just by the series' own latter seasons but by other TV and movie projects. (Check out the barely-disguised rip-off "The Forgotten," starring Julianne Moore. That would have been a better second "X Files" movie than the actual second "X Files" movie.)

The truth is out there, all right, but it's a mundane truth: This is a story never intended to assume the typical shape of a narrative journey, which consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end. What started as a daring dramatic device - "I know this probably doesn't have the sense of resolution you want," Scully apologized to a guest character in one standout, and gleefully self-conscious, third season episode - eventually became a means to artificially extend the show's run. That's an unfortunate side effect of the "business" side of show business. It also ruined what had been a great, groundbreaking series, and alienated hordes of once-loyal fans.

The gay angle is only part of what in incomplete, somewhat disheveled project the series looks like to the contemporary eye, but it's not insignificant. Now that the world has spun forward and GLBTs are openly full and (very nearly) equal participants in all the hallmark institutions of civilization - marriage and the military among them - we no longer have to grin and bear the slights of show-runners who feel entitled to write homophobia into their product.

There was a time when the combination of the culture at large and sheer dramatic brilliance let Carter and his cohorts get away with ignoring or even insulting us. That time has passed. If there's a greater truth to be discovered in the new episodes, that will be to Carter's credit. But, like Scully, I am not going to be convinced without seeing some good, hard evidence.