What we're watching: The X-Files

In a way, I feel robbed. I spent the last 23 years in X-Fileswithout peace, not by choice, of course, but because, over the past two decades, my mother has taught me that Secret materials there was some fake show not worth my time. “This is so stupid,” she told me as I paused on the Fox network for a moment, seriously wondering if we should take a moment to hear what the pretty redhead had to say, after all, she was a doctor. doctor. “You won’t like this,” she assured me, and so I reluctantly changed the channel to her favorite channel - Everyone loves Raymond (That one).

Last year, during one of the many snowstorms that hit New York, I found myself at home with a bottle of wine, Netflix, ten seasons and two feature films about the uncharted territory of The X-Files and no mother to protest my questionable the habit of watching drunkenly. In the first few episodes, I watched Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny awkwardly establish their positions as Mulder and Scully, the FBI's most dynamic duo. To say that I was a little confused would be an understatement. Why is everyone so obsessed with a series whose main antagonist was an old man with a cigarette and various monsters of the week? I mean, I'm not a horror fan, but a man who slithers through pipes stealing human livers and builds a nest out of bile and newspapers isn't exactly my idea of ​​pure, true horror, you know?

However, I persevered, and by the third season of Paperclip, I had thrown myself headlong into the conspiracy theorists' rabbit hole, staying up until two and sometimes three in the morning, scrolling through countless Wikipedias (the Internet's most reliable source of news). . articles, only to discover that almost every episode of The X-Files contains at least a tiny grain of truth. The United States government did offer Nazi scientists an amnesty for their war crimes against the Jewish people in exchange for their scientific intelligence to further advance the American space and missile programs. The truth really was somewhere nearby.

But by the fourth season's cancer arc, I was completely consumed by the fate of Mulder and Scully. It seemed unfair that after everything they'd been through, with both Scully and Mulder losing family members in their undying quest to uncover the truth, as well as their unlikely friendship, that the two would end up like this. Luckily, I waited twenty years after it aired to watch this episode, and I knew full well that there were six more seasons to go in which my beloved Dana Scully didn't die. If I had watched it in real time in the mid-90s, I'm sure a seven-year-old me would have woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, too nervous about Scully's fate to go back to sleep. So in that regard, my mother was right - I was probably too young to watch and fully appreciate the complexities of The X-Files.

It's been 15 years since Mulder and Scully left the bureau, holed up in a filthy motel room - they're the only ones against the world. X-Files wasn't always perfect (should I remind you of the monsters that were Agent Doggett and Reyes, or maybe the weird William as a second storyline), but gosh, it wasn't the best show to ever grace TV. It took me a while to get here, but at 26, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I want to believe with all my heart.