I suspect this new six-hour “X-Files” miniseries is going to remind a lot of people how great “Fringe” was.
The third episode, starring Rhys Darby (the band’s manager from "Flight of the Conchords") and Kumail Nanjiani (Dinesh from “Silicon Valley”) is really silly (when somebody phones Spooky Mulder, his smartphone plays the iconic “X-Files” theme music), but can’t hold a candle to the laugh-out-loud paranormal investigations afforded “Ash Vs Evil Dead.” Anyway, you have to wait till Feb. 1 to see that third installment.
In the meantime, Sunday and Monday offer a pair of episodes that will make you wish Vince Gilligan and Howard Gordon were available to help out this time around. The narrative precision I associate with “Better Call Saul” would be much appreciated here.
If you’re expecting a lot of episode-to-episode continuity between episodes (it is after all only a six-hour revival), forget it. Scully seems to acquire a new love interest in the first episode back, but I didn’t notice a mention of the guy in the next two installments.
The third episode is so thoroughly self-contained, in fact, it wouldn’t feel out of place wedged between two 1997 episodes, Duchovny’s 2016 wrinkles notwithstanding.
It’s funny also that Mulder and Scully suddenly drop whatever was going on in their lives and start carrying guns and FBI badges again. New evidence in Sunday’s episode seems to motivate their returns, but is that evidence so much more compelling than what they encountered in the 1990s? (I’m thinking particularly of that flying saucer in which they were scampering about in Rob Bowman’s terrific 1998 motion picture.)
… The premiere's a disaster on almost every level, other than maybe the obvious pleasure Anderson takes in stepping back into character as Scully. Duchovny seems as bored as he was for most of the later seasons, but it's hard to blame him for not investing in a script this clunky. …
… 2016 may be the worst possible time to attempt a reboot of a series whose point of view was that conspiracy theories are, above all else, fun. ... the show’s mysteries lack the spark they once had. …
... We’ve seen three of the six episodes, and people want the truth first: Are they any good? Not at first, not at all. The first episode is called “My Struggle,” which aptly describes the experience of sitting through it. It lumbers. It plods. The actors chew sawdusty mouthfuls of expository dialogue. …
… The first episode ... collapses into poorly motivated, out-of-nowhere speechifying, accompanied by stock footage of old puzzling phenomena. … Fortunately the other two episodes push the right buttons …
... After a skittery and slightly tedious start, which is heavy on Carter’s need to keep infusing Mulder and Scully’s world with a convoluted master theory, “The X-Files” settles in and starts to relocate some of its creepy vibe and playfulness. …
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says:
... reminds viewers that for all the aliens and conspiracy theories, this was one exposition-heavy, talky TV show. But for fans, it’s still fun to be back in this world …
... The look of the new “X-Files” may be familiar, but as a whole, it feels rote and unintentionally dreary. …
... so strained and disjointed, it almost plays like a parody. … nothing shakes the depressing sense that time has passed the series and the characters by. …
... It’s not very good. … The problem with reopening The X-Files is two-fold. First, the actors, not their characters, don’t seem to have their hearts in it. (That probably wasn’t the intention, but it’s the perceived result.) And, second, Carter’s dialogue is prone to exposition (again, partly the result of only having six episodes to work with) and overheated soliloquies. How that combination sucks the life out of this whole enterprise can’t be underscored enough. …
... Given the “Phantom Menace”-level dialogue in the “X-Files” season premiere, which supplies action, exposition and explosions instead of intelligent meditations on the surveillance state or any other relevant topic, it might be time for Carter to bestow “The X-Files” on some of the men and women who grew up idolizing its finest episodes and arcs. A new corps of writers might know how to come up with something more politically and emotionally resonant than the kinds of stories that, in the new season, often amount to Mulder and Scully Mad Libs. …
After Football. Around 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT Sunday. Fox.
