The X Files - The Complete Season 11

We were barely into the 21st century when "The X Files" ended its initial nine-season run. Fourteen years later the show came back for a "short stack" season of six episodes that played like the tired remnants of somebody's idea notebook. But then a curious thing happened: The 2016 elections thrust the world into social and political territory in which facts and reason are not just ignored, but openly reviled. What's terrifying in real life can be enriching for fiction, and thus when the show returned earlier this year for a 10-episode second revival season – the eleventh overall – the question burned: Is the The Truth still out there, in a post-truth world?

For Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) strange crimes and paranormal happenings will always be of interest, and with a larger episode count to work with (and Season 10 having served as a warm-up), creator Chris Carter and his band of usual suspects forged a whole new season of monster and mythology stories that, at its peak, feels like a return to the good old days.

Familiar tropes litter the three Blu-ray discs of "The X Files: The Complete Season 11." In one small town, a string of murders seems to be connected by an ongoing game of hangman; in another, Mulder suspects that witchcraft has opened the doors to hell, allowing murderous demons to assume the shapes of characters from kids' TV shows (including one fearsome Peewee Herman-alike named "Mr. Chuckleteeth"). Darren Morgan, author of some of the show's most popular installments, returns with what can only be characterized as a perfect series ending (even though it plays in mid-season); Mulder and Scully's boss, Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) is at the center of one middling episode, and a cannibal cult pursuing eternal youth anchors a yarn that meshes "Sunset Boulevard" with classic horror elements.

And then there are the episodes devoted to the show's new mythology. It used to be an ongoing yarn about aliens conspiring with human collaborators in a sprawling, multi-layered plot that touched upon everything from impending colonization to killer plagues to sinister living black oil. After an abortive attempt in Season 10 to re-start the old mythology from a different angle, Season 11 opts to pick up a long-unresolved thread: The fate of Scully and Mulder's son William, given up for adoption long ago. This is uneasily married to hazy new plot in which Earth's elites evidently plan to flee to outer space and leave the warming planet to succumb to political chaos and ecological destruction. This facile and underdeveloped idea provides the framework for one of the season's more action-packed and fun adventures, "This," in which our heroes go on the run from Russian hit men while using Mulder's phone to contact a long-dead friend. (Talk about your "extreme possibilities."")

As with Season 10, Carter bookends this new clutch of episodes with a pair of mythology hours, but sadly these are by far the season's weakest and worst efforts. "My Struggle III" resolves Season 10's chilling cliffhanger in a cheap, even offensive, way; the finale, "My Struggle IV," is more promising but remains incoherent and disjointed. No wonder viewers left in droves after the very first Season 11 episode, and no wonder Season 12 – if there ever is a Season 12, which seems unlikely – will not feature Anderson, who vows she's done with her iconic character.

Add in the fact that while the show caught a second wind here, there are still signs of creative exhaustion. The episode "Familiar" is a viral replay of the seventh season show "Chimera," and much of the season is plagued by a too-often used device: Mulder and Scully distrusting their boss, Skinner, despite all he's done to help and protect them. Still, there's enough fresh energy here - much of it drawn from contemporary concerns - to power a handful of truly exceptional episodes, like the one whose title, written in a computer language, translates to "Followers." Yes, Mulder and Scully face off with artificial intelligence once more, but this time the conceit works wonderfully in an irony-rich, mostly silent hour of top-flight "X Files" entertainment.

All in all, Season Eleven remains a far cry from the show's glory years, but there are enough decent, and even excellent, episodes here to merit a purchase of this probable final chapter in the "X Files" saga.

The three-disc Blu-ray season set includes all 10 episodes plus a healthy raft of features. Some of the extras seem tacked on for the sake of political correctness: There's a bit about how green the series' production was, and "The Scully Effect" is a deep dive into how Anderson's character and portrayal inspired a generation of women to enter the science and technology fields - which is interesting, actually, but then the featurette goes into a major spasm of self-congratulations for the show's having involved female writers and directors.

Other extras include audio commentaries on two episodes (the Skinner-centric "Kitten" and season-finale "My Struggle IV"); Anderson and Duchovny interviewing each other, prepared questions in hand, on the Fox lot (even here their chemistry is palpable); and two highly detailed, absorbing mini-documentaries. "Solve for X: Construction Season 11" looks at these new episodes one by one, spending considerably more time on some than on others (Darren Morgan's "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" gets, and deserves, a lengthy examination), while "Implanted Memories: 25 Years of 'The X Files' " serves as a series overview, with commentary from the show's writers and producers (Carter, Frank Spotnitz, and even the late Kim Manners, who weighs in via archival footage), as well as the stars and some of the other people who have worked on the series. A gag reel rounds out the extras.

Even if you left Season 11 with mixed feelings, this set is worth it - partly for the special features, which are funny and insightful and respectful of the series as a whole. The poor episodes don't improve with repeat viewings (or even with an audio commentary), but the good ones hold up well, and Morgan's "Forehead Sweat" does what Carter's last struggle couldn't accomplish: It feels like the clever and affectionate farewell the show needed, long at last, to receive.

We might have stopped believing that "the truth is out there" a long time ago, but the old magic is still in here on these three Blu-rays.

"The X Files: The Complete Season 11"
Blu-ray
$19.99