The X-Files awkwardly stumbled into the 21st century with its seventh season but with its underrated eighth season marches confidently into this new era. The series had been growing tired and uninspired and, with the departure of star David Duchovny, the show would have to reset and reinvent itself to avoid falling apart completely. The new beginning demanded great effort and the writers and producers rose to the challenge. Season 8 is wisely treated like a first season of a show. I’ve discussed how many different series finales The X-Files has felt like it’s had, but the season 8 premiere, Within, is a second pilot for the new millennium. The quality of the premiere shocked me. The episode is a confident, assured television drama more than a sci-fi show, mostly set in FBI offices and dealing with genuine character conflict. It’s great. The Sopranos changed television and this season feels like an effort to catch up and find where The X-Files fits in the new landscape.
Season 8 is the first of the LA seasons of The X-Files that feels like it has a cinematographer. It looks fantastic. The show embraces darkness once again, with great use of light and shadow rather than looking like an over-lit Californian soap opera. There are even scenes set at night again! It’s not just the visual palette recapturing the dark feel of the early seasons but the tone, too. While there are a bunch of new directors added to the show’s ranks, the familiar writers have chosen to take the show seriously again. There are horror episodes and more genuine drama than just the goofy comedy of the last couple of seasons. I would have liked a little more variety in tone but I’ll take it. The season’s first half offers some entertaining back-to-basics monster-of-the-week stories while the second is dominated by a revamped mythology plot.
The challenge of making a Mulder-less season (or two-thirds of a season) was the kick the show needed to get out of the stupor it had fallen into. The eighth season does begin to feel more familiar as it progresses and everyone tires back into their old positions, but it is still elevated by the more intense character drama. Alone is a standard plot we’ve seen a bunch of times before but how it handles the cast, the positions it puts the characters in, feels fresh. The hunt for Mulder, abducted by aliens in last season’s finale, drives much of the action and drama, and I do prefer the season’s first half where new character Doggett is a lead protagonist. The last few episodes see Mulder return and the show has to juggle three main cast members. Despite the traumatic events, Mulder is still the lighter, funnier character of the last few seasons, although Duchovny seems refreshed from his time away. Season 8 doesn’t compare to what The X-Files was at its peak (seasons 2 through 5) but it’s the closest it’s come since.
Best Character: Scully
I was expecting Doggett to be the star of season 8, and in terms of screentime he probably is, but the absence of Mulder proved to be the catalyst for Scully to truly come into her own. I think this is the most fascinating season for her character. After seven years playing second fiddle, she embraces a more dominant personality. She’s written outwardly as more confident and forthright, taking charge of the x-files and throwing water in Doggett’s face during their first meeting. Scully is now the believer and the radical character shift just about makes sense: she wants to believe to explain Mulder’s disappearance and that she can still find him. Fox Mulder is her Samantha Mulder. But it would be reductive to say she becomes like Mulder. She still has her own reasoning and MO, and struggles with her belief system. The battle between scepticism and belief is less an external one between two people (although Doggett is presented as a sceptic) it’s an internal one within Scully.
Gillian Anderson is brilliant at conveying this, while also grieving for Mulder and dealing with the character’s unexplained pregnancy, which brings many mixed emotions. But there are some missteps, with the writing rather than the performance. The Scully of the season’s first half is far better than the Scully of the second, often stuck in a hospital bed like so many episodes of seasons past. She sees a UFO, clear as day, in one episode but this massive event is never touched on and seems to make little impact. Once Mulder re-enters the picture, Scully loses a lot of her agency. It’s her body and baby yet Mulder is the one dealing with so much of the storyline, bumping her back into a supporting character position in what should be her most prominent storyline.
Introducing a new lead character in the eighth season is an awfully hard feat to pull off but I think the series does a fantastic job. I can only assume John Doggett is named as such because the writers decided his defining adjective would be ‘dogged’, which is how his name is pronounced by most characters. Portrayed by the always-great-but-often-typecast Robert Patrick, Doggett is a good agent given the x-files assignment as a way to discredit him and ensure he doesn’t rise the FBI ranks. He’s a tough guy, sure, but much more, too. He’s a researcher, always digging up old files. He’s a classic New York good cop, which makes his interactions with police officers he encounters on cases feel very different than Mulder and Scully. It’s a great setup for drama: what would happen if a regular cop was suddenly dropped into the dark and strange paranormal world of The X-Files.
Adding fresh blood to the show makes the sceptical outlook far more engaging because, after everything they’ve seen together, Mulder and Scully getting into arguments about whether the supernatural exists now feels silly. It’s refreshing to drop Doggett into crazy situations. His reactions are great, not so much scepticism but surprise, and his ability to adapt is great. I like how the show consciously makes him very different to Mulder. His relationship with Scully is initially much more frosty, making for a fun dynamic, and Doggett is more empathetic towards victims, particularly children, than Mulder ever was. Although the one element that doesn’t really work is the storyline surrounding the murder of his son. It’s kept to a minimum, being relevant to two episodes, as if even the writers understand it’s a cliché. Doggett’s son is too similar to Mulder’s own driving force, his sister, although, interestingly, the son’s death is the catalyst for Doggett to deny rather than believe.
Unpopular Opinion: Season 8 Has The Best Opening Credits
The original opening credits of The X-Files are iconic but by the year 2000 had become incredibly dated. The show was entering the 2000s with a very nineties opening. Despite the music and collection of images being instantly recognisable, a change was needed because it felt old, and not yet in a charming nostalgic way. The credits felt out of place by season 7 but, as with so much of the show, the shake-up of season 8 forced the creatives to make the change. Perhaps controversially, I think it’s a change for the better. An improvement. Enough of the original is kept to avoid it feeling like a complete overhaul. The music is the same and a lot of the imagery remains. That imagery still doesn’t make much sense but it’s effective: the shadowy figure walking, the screaming man, headlines on the screen, and the mirrored image of a germinating seed, which I had to Google to find out what it was.
Of course, we finally get a new image of Scully which actually resembles her rather than that image from season 1, 8 years and several hundred hair styles ago, and Doggett obviously gets a credit, replacing Mulder. Then rather than just generic supernatural images like the old credits, the final few seconds of the sequence reveal specific plot elements. A foetus representing Scully’s child being eclipsed by a planet, which I admit I don’t know what it means but it brings to mind mythology and cosmic forces. There’s a great shot of Mulder falling backwards into darkness, which can be a metaphorical fall into the unknown, with his absence being a key plot point, but perhaps literal too considering an alien in Mulder’s form falls off a cliff in the premiere. And then it ends with a high definition close-up of an eye, reminiscent of Blade Runner, which is never a bad thing to be compared to.
Best Guest Star: Joe Morton as Martin Wells in Redrum (S8E6)
Redrum might be the greatest showcase for a guest actor in the history of the show. Scully and Doggett take a backseat for a brilliant episode more akin to The Twilight Zone than The X-Files. Joe Morton plays Martin, a lawyer in prison for the murder of his wife who every day wakes up the morning before the previous day, heading towards the crime itself. It’s a puzzle of an episode, easy to become confusing (as I’m sure my brief synopsis did) but it’s all grounded by Morton’s performance. Across the 45-minutes he has to play close to every emotional state possible and bring the viewer along with him. Bafflement and confusion at his situation, frustration when trying to explain what’s happening, jubilation at getting an opportunity to change the past, fear and ultimately resolve during the confrontation itself. As Martin’s feelings change, so too do those of the viewer. We begin completely rooting for him, then wonder if perhaps he’s not as innocent as he proclaims, and then are left deeply conflicted about the man, revealed to be more complex than we imagined. The episode demands so much of its central performer and Morton delivers perhaps the finest guest performance of the entire series.
Most Irritating Episode: Medusa (S8E12)
Medusa is basically a 45-minute phone call between Scully and Doggett where most of the dialogue is them shouting each other’s names. They are constantly calling one another “Agent Scully” and “Agent Doggett.” I know Mulder and Scully would say each other’s name a lot but this is next level interminable. Once I noticed it, it ruined the episode. I appreciate that Scully and Doggett are more formal with each other, always using “agent” at the start of their names to contrast with how familiar Mulder and Scully had gotten, but it’s half the dialogue in the episode. Every sentence begins with it.
The plot itself stretches credulity, even for The X-Files. Multiple dead bodies have been found in a subway tunnel, an infection is spreading, and four people are investigating on the track and yet there’s an unbelievable ticking clock of the trains having to starting running at 4pm, enforced by a character who’s basically the mayor from Jaws. It hurts the otherwise fun setup of the episode. It has a classic action thriller feel with a fun team of guest actors but half of them leave the expedition and disappear from the episode at the midway point. The conflict never truly comes to a head either: all the evidence points to some human conspiracy but it ends up being the work of a microscopic jellyfish instead.
Underrated Episode: Empedocles (S8E17)
The plot of Empedocles, the actual case itself, isn’t very good. An evil force possesses people, passed around like a contagion, and it might be what killed Doggett’s son. The idea of evil as some external force, a repeated idea in Chris Carter’s work, is far less interesting to me than when evil is born internally from character and decisions. But it’s the main cast that make the episode as strong as it is. There may still be some lame stories in this revived eighth season but there’s always interesting character work. This episode is juggling four different protagonists and somehow makes it work.
Reyes and Mulder spend time together and despite both being believers they have very different outlooks on how that belief fits into FBI investigations: she is trying to convince others what she believes while Mulder is bemused by this, no longer caring to try. I’ve written before how I think Mulder and Scully should have a platonic relationship but Mulder and Reyes have great chemistry and I can’t help but wonder what a fascinating ‘what if?’ that relationship could have been. At this point in the season the show should really be exploring Mulder’s trauma from his abduction but in a dark season he’s the lightest character. That’s a missed opportunity overall but in this episode the change in tone works: he’s funny. Even though I’m a Doggett fan it reminded me of what the show’s been missing.
While Reyes echoes Mulder in a unique way, Doggett here is a very different sceptic than Scully. He’s angrier than she ever was, a forceful denier because it’s personal for him. He can’t admit there’s more out there because then there would have been more he could have done to save his son. Scully tries to help him through these feelings from a hospital bed. The old guard of the x-files act like mentors in Empedocles and there are fascinating combinations of the four characters pairing up, bouncing off each other, and feeling very different from one another. I remember season 9 being pretty bad but this set up episode for it, negotiating Doggett and Reyes into the new leads of the show, is surprisingly good.
Worst Name in History: Knowle Rohrer
Noel is not the name I would choose for a big, threatening alien super solider. It hardly causes people to quake with fear, even if the writers choose to spell it in a funky way. Then, to make matters even sillier, Knowle’s surname is revealed to be Rohrer. What in the ‘Rural Juror’ kind of name is Knowle Rohrer? It’s unpronounceable. It’s the worst name I’ve ever heard. Although the name is probably the most interesting thing about the character. I don’t know why super soldiers are a special thing in this show when all the aliens we’ve seen can shape shift and are essentially invincible. With no more government conspiracy, the aliens have decided to do their Earth-based work themselves. Alien infiltrators on Earth may be a generic sci-fi story but it’s probably the best way to escalate the mythology at this point in the show. The series is desperate to remind us that the invasion is still happening, even if never actually feels like it. Aside from the name, I dislike Rohrer because of his connection to John Doggett. Doggett should be completely new to this conspiracy, suddenly thrown into a secret world, but we find out his friend Knowle has been an alien since before he was assigned to the x-files.
Best Monster: The Slug from Roadrunners (S8E4)
Disgusting. That’s the best word for whatever the hell this thing is. A big slug worm parasite thing that crawls inside a human host, like an evil Trill from Star Trek, and a cult that proclaims it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ. On one hand, it’s just really icky body horror; a creature moving under the skin is always effective, with this being a like an expansion on the worms from season 1’s Ice. But this monster works on so many more levels. It’s probably the closest the series comes to Lovecraftian horror, and also the works of Edgar Allan Poe, namely The Conqueror Worm. It’s fascinating to see Scully, a catholic, having to deal with a cult bastardising her beliefs. And the fantasy horror is mixed with very visceral realistic violence, like bashing in skulls with a ballpeen hammer, which makes for a very effective combination.
The worm is the perfect monster for this episode. Scully is isolated and vulnerable without Mulder and finds herself alone in the desert having to deal with this slug that acts like an evil counterpart to the baby she’s carrying. I get the sense writer Vince Gilligan heard Chris Carter’s plans for Scully’s Christ child and put his own twisted version in this episode as either foreshadowing or just straight up mocking the idea. This is Scully’s fear, her worst case pregnancy: carrying a monster, complete with a horrifying birth scene.
The ‘What the Hell Did I Just Watch?’ Award: Badlaa (S8E10)
Many fans hate this episode. They see it as the show’s nadir. And it’s true, it’s bad. Badlaa is offensive in more ways than one: racist, tasteless, and very messily told. However, I can’t help but enjoy it. It was a memorable episode from my first watch through of the series and upon revisit I found it entertaining in a ‘I can’t believe they actually made this’ way. It’s an episode featuring a little magical Indian man that can climb up anuses. He can also can turn invisible and appear as other people so if he can do that then why does he settle on the arse thing? I have no idea because from the powers to the motive the episode makes no sense whatsoever. But it has Doggett and Scully stare up a fat man’s bumhole after he poops out a man, and then said man climbs out of another person like a chestburster from Alien. It’s total nonsense but, come on, it’s great fun.
Badlaa does have some genuinely good elements, too. Actor Deep Roy is trying his best to make his villainous character menacing and there are some disturbing moments, especially with the trolley he pushes himself around on emitting a creepy squeak whenever he’s near. Two kids, a bully and his victim, having to team up is a fun idea and we get to see Mulder’s contact Charles Burks again for the last of his six appearances on the show. But the episodes biggest strength is that it’s a decent Scully episode. She is trying to think like Mulder and struggling with it. She goes as far as to shoot a kid who is actually the bad guy in disguise because that’s what Mulder would do. She wants to believe but still can’t quite manage it.
Worst Mythology Episode: Deadalive (S8E15)
The mythology episodes of season 8 are on a much stronger foundation than the last few seasons, mainly because they feel purposeful and focus on character rather than whatever the serialised plot is supposed to be at this point. But there are still a couple of weak instalments. Per Manum comes close to taking this spot because the plot is incomprehensible, but at least it offers some interesting development around Scully fearing her child will be an alien. Deadalive is ultimately the worst of the season because it feels like a mythology episode of old in all the worst ways, casting aside the show’s reinventions. Mulder has been returned and lies near-dead in hospital stricken with the alien virus, which now behaves totally differently for some reason, and the others have to debate whether to give him the vaccine. How many times have we seen this story? It’s the same tired plot of half the mythology episodes and it’s what the writers fall back on for Mulder’s grand return? It’s very disappointing and any episode after season 2 set mostly in a hospital is guaranteed to be bad.
We all know Mulder will survive so it feels like a waste of time, as if the episode itself is in a state of deadalive. The story would be worth it if it examined characters’ reactions to his death but no, after the funeral in the opening scene the episode skips forward three months to them discovering Mulder is still alive. At least show us how these characters grieve. It should be a Scully episode, exploring her reaction to thinking Mulder is dead after so long searching for him, but instead Deadalive focuses more on Skinner and Doggett. They do much of the investigating while Scully sits at Mulder’s bedside. As much as I like Doggett, this isn’t the episode to have a subplot about whether he’s going to keep his job. And Krycek is back doing things for no discernible reason, offering a vaccine if Skinner kills Scully’s unborn child. The vaccine is destroyed but it turns out that the plot device for the whole episode has been meaningless all along because Mulder can be resurrected anyway, like Jesus. It’s an episode that misunderstands what needs to be its dramatic core.
Best Mythology Episode: Existence (S8E21)
For eight seasons now the show’s mythology has expanded with questions and questions growing out of those questions until it resembles some unwieldy, inscrutable tangle that has delayed its endgame to a point where we no longer care to see it. Existence might not offer answers, although the mythology is now more comprehensible than it’s been in a long time, but it does offer a sense of resolution. It wraps up the season’s arcs quite successfully. Scully’s pregnancy and Doggett’s place in the x-files comes to a head in a thrilling episode that feels like a real step forward, if not an end. Krycek, a once engaging character left adrift too long, is killed by Skinner and it feels good that the writers are clearing pieces off the board. The episode also has some callbacks to the past, with Mulder remembering his father’s death and Reyes reminding Scully of her sister Melissa. Somehow, after all the twists, turns, and plot holes, Existence finds a way to feel like a conclusion in a largely gratifying way.
There are still silly and confusing plot developments concerning alien super soldiers and Scully’s baby being some immaculate conception messiah, complete with some of the most unsubtle religious motifs ever put on television but the human drama really works. There’s also a palpable sense of danger. The FBI building, a bastion of security in the show, is infiltrated and no one feels safe. Skinner is seriously injured and for the first time in a long time a scene in a hospital is effective. The X-Files rarely does straight-up action sequences but the car chase is great. The music and editing is intense in a new way for the series. And then Existence ends in an interesting place. Doggett and Reyes are the new x-files, which could have been the end of my interest in the show, this is Mulder and Scully’s series, but the season did the impossible and made me excited for future possibilities with the new characters. Meanwhile Mulder and Scully have a healthy baby boy and can move forward together, as happy an ending as they can get. I don’t like them as a romantic couple but as an ending for the characters I’ll allow it; it’s pretty much all the writers can do at this point.
Worst Standalone Episode: Salvage (S8E9)
Season 8 pledged to take The X-Files ‘back-to-basics’ but Salvage maybe takes it too far. A man slowly turning into metal is killing people. That’s it. It’s an episode that plays like the realisation of people’s fears of what the show would become this season. That without Mulder the series would fail. There’s no interplay or chemistry with Scully and Doggett, with clunky dialogue and poor characterisation all round. It’s not a Doggett problem because Scully doesn’t sound like Scully, even taking the side of a megacorporation over innocent people being hurt but them. Thankfully this episode isn’t the norm. If it came earlier in the season’s run then it could have severely hurt people’s relationship with this new era of the show. As it stands, Salvage is an aberration. An episode that feels less like The X-Files and more like a bad superhero show, featuring a mutated superhuman hunting down his creators, like a c-tier Batman villain.
Salvage is far too silly to be treated as seriously as it is. Season 8 tried to move away from the goofiness that had dominated the previous two seasons but the dark tone doesn’t work here. Metal man Ray is growing stubble made of iron filings, eats tinfoil, and there’s a dramatic act break featuring him crushing a sandwich! There’s an attempt at some sort of commentary surrounding Gulf War Syndrome, a metaphor about how veterans are dumped when they return home, just like in a salvage yard, but the episode is too unsure of how to portray Ray to make a coherent point. Is he a sympathetic man we follow throughout the episode or a mysterious killer seen fleetingly as he murders? The episode tries both and it doesn’t work. By the end I got the sense that the only reason Salvage existed was to make a lame inside joke: Robert Patrick as Doggett proclaiming that metal men were something “that only happens in the movies.”
Best Standalone Episode: Via Negativa (S8E7)
I not only judge episodes this season on how successful they are as X-Files episodes but also specifically on how successful they are as season 8 X-Files episodes, a different metric entirely, and Via Negativa is the perfect season 8 episode. It nails the tone and style the series is trying to capture at this point in its run. The episode is incredibly dark and violent and scary. It throws Doggett into the deep end and watches him almost drown. Via Negativa feels like his true initiation into the x-files, his first personal case. While Scully is away, Doggett works with the wider cast of Skinner and the Lone Gunmen on a case that begins as a gritty murder investigation, the kind of crime he’s used to, but soon shifts into something weird, dark, and twisted. Doggett enters a world of mind-altering drugs, third eyes, second sight, and the ability to kill in dreams. It threatens to get silly but the perfect execution makes it all work.
Dream sequences can be my favourite or least favourite scenes in media, either hackneyed filler or artful and insightful. Via Negativa uses them to great effect and gives the episode a unique feel, which is rare for a show eight seasons in. The final 15 minutes are fantastic as Doggett is haunted and hunted in his dreams, with scenes blending into each other, moody and bold lighting choices, and even some backwards talk and imagery that feels like Twin Peaks. Doggett reaches out to Skinner, uttering “I’m not sure I’m awake.” Patrick is so good in that moment, which ranks among the best in the series. Too often in his career Robert Patrick is presented as nothing but the tough guy, the Terminator, but he’s excellent at vulnerability. His performance here echoes my favourite role of his in The Sopranos, where he’s cast completely against type. Via Negativa is a proper welcome to the bizarre, scary world of The X Files for Doggett; a case which not only breaks his belief but comes close to breaking his mind.
Five Worst Season 8 Episodes:
5. Medusa (S8E12)
4. Badlaa (S8E10)
3. Surekill (S8E8)
2. Deadalive (S8E15)
1. Salvage (S8E9)
Five Best Season 8 Episodes:
5. Existence (S8E21)
4. The Gift (S8E11)
3. Roadrunners (S8E4)
2. Redrum (S8E6)
1. Via Negativa (S8E7)
Season 8 felt like both a satisfying ending and intriguing new beginning. But, if what I remember from my first watch through of the series is correct, its legacy as an ending is much stronger than the new era of the show it ushers in. I like Doggett and Reyes but recall season nine, the end of the original run, being bad and by far the weakest instalment. But before I get there I’m going to take a brief diversion. Next time I’ll be examining the best and the worst of spin-off show The Lone Gunmen, which aired its brief 13-episode run between the eighth and ninth seasons of The X-Files.
