(This is the first of three posts on The X Files. So prepared for the follower loss with these, I love this show)

Sometimes, I think The X Files deserves more credit than it gets. I often wonder why it doesn’t have a more Star Trek type following (I mean it does still have fans and “philes” who kick around the dark recesses of the internet, but I’m yet to find the MMO video game, the next generation TV series and the expanded universe spin off novel series). It was a landmark not just in science fiction, but in terms of narrative dramatic television. It rounded off Twin Peaks weirder corners, focused more on the mystery while retaining a relationship with the leads (the mytharc episodes reminding you, why you care about these characters) and set the blue print that many shows follow today - the stand alone/mytharc episode structure. A sort of mix between anthology and serial. It also showed that you could make a show that appeal to almost all genre fans; romance aficionados loved the sexual tension between the leads, horror fans liked the scares and gore of the stand alones and science fiction fan-boys loved the complex mytharc with it’s abduction and alien invasion storylines. In terms of fandom, the show set the blue print for the future of fans everywhere. The X Files updated the jargon for the first time since Star Trek many years before, adding “shipper” and a few other terms to the fandom jargon we all know and argue about today. In many ways, it’s the X Files fault you have those vicious canon/non canon wars on Forums, way into the early hours.

If you’ve never seen the show, look away now. This post isn’t for you. This post is probably in all honesty, going to grab the attention of ten people, and be read by less than half that, This is going to delve into some deep canon. I swear, this is going to have footnotes (it’s not, but if I was writing in a format that allowed them to be implemented easily, I would put them in).

The most obvious theme in The X Files, when we remove David Duchovny’s inability to actually cry, is that of belief. It deals with this theme in two ways. One is the most obvious, namely Mulder’s belief in the paranormal and Scully’s lack of belief in it. Mulder is portrayed and maverick and unorthodox. Scully is rational and scientific. She channels his Sherlock Holmes streak of ingenuity into more official channels, and bases his abstract theories in reality. There are numerous occasions where Mulder suggests something outlandish and abstract and Scully’s ever sharp Occam’s Razor forces him to cut it down slightly, into a more rational (albeit still fantastic) explanation. The second way these themes are explored is in an interesting and subtle reversal of the roles: It’s never explicitly stated, but Mulder’s rejection of all Scully’s religious based theories and the incredulity as he does so, seems to point towards atheistic beliefs (or lack their of, as that is what Atheism truly entales). Scully on the other hand, with all her rationality, always wears her gold cross around her neck, first as a totem of family and strength, then finally as a symbol of her Catholic faith. Even when she’s less religious, the hints to her beliefs and upbringings scattered like toys from an upturned toy chest within the narrative (beginning with Season One’s Beyond The Sea).

The second way, was so subtle as to be under appreciated by the casual viewer and indeed, the casual reviewer. The Skeptic/Believer was so subtly reflected back on itself, that it was easy to miss, and was therefore never really commented on in any form (except of course in the wonderful book “The Philosophy Of The X Files” which is worth owning, if for nothing else, for the quote where Richard Dawkins expresses his hatred for The X Files and compares atheists to black people).

The I Want To poster that hangs in Mulder’s office from the start to finish, is the shows stained glass window. Rather than a picture of a saint, or angels, Mulder has a UFO hovering above trees. The Impact white text reads “I Want To Believe” and that’s all there is to it.. It’s so simple, it even looks cheap, and when Mulder admits in Chinga that he got it from a headshop “down on M Street” (Which I always took to be a reference to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, but it turns out to be an actual place), it makes perfect sense. It’s cheap and trashy, and shows the disdain that his belief system is held in. It’s the same belief system that trashy people who buy bongs in headshops share. It’s not the sort of thing an oxford educated FBI agent should go in for. The poster serves a secondary purpose, providing us with Mulder’s mantra, his raison d’etre, and puts the dots at the ends of all the ambiguous endings. Mulder doesn’t really care about putting Flukemen and liver eating mutants behind bars or into cages - if he achieves it, Good, but that’s a secondary goal. What he wants, what he needs is to know these things are out there. To know that there’s a man who can eat livers and live for hundreds of years, to know that planetary alignments can make two girls turn murderous, because to Mulder, if those things exist.. then everything else might. It’s as if he’s filled his vacuum of faith, with the paranormal. He even compares his search for the truth with God at one point (in Gethsemane, season four).Scully on the other hand seems constantly on the cusp of belief for the first few seasons. It’s often pointed out by television critics doing retrospectives who believe themselves the very height of wit, that Scully should believe because she sees aliens and monsters every week. She does believe - but not in that. Watching the show back, it’s clear that the more Scully sees, the more the Catholicism of her upbringing shines through. It’s as if, now the science she has studied all her adult life has failed her, she slowly returns to her faith. Now she can’t make sense of the world anymore, now she realizes that the human method of putting things in nicely labelled boxes, with smaller boxes inside (like Russian dolls all the way down to atomic level) has failed, God is all she has left. The final push comes, when she finds she has cancer. Doctors can do nothing for her, except basically wait for her to die. Haggard, panda eyes and sunken cheeks, she tearfully breaks down to her mother and in doing so, reaffirms her Catholic faith to her mother. This leads to an interesting path for the series, which is Scully finding a role for her faith in, not only her life, but modern life in general. It’s demonstrated her faith is unshakeable (even in Season 7’s the sixth extinction, where she finds Biblical texts on a crashed alien craft, she doesn’t seem to see it as anything that disproves her faith), and that it’s her ultimate fail safe, the core to her existence. A long time ago, whilst watching the episode All Souls (season 5), I decided that Scully’s faith served as a black box for her. It kept her together, and when confronted with something she doesn’t understand, it kicks in a makes sense of everything, recording it for future reference. As the show goes on, her Black Box stores a wealth of information, and that’s why she becomes more catholic, becomes more of a believer in everything by the shows end, because that’s how all this fantastical information has been store and processed - as religious phenomena. It’s a theory I’m not sure I agree with anymore, but worth noting none the less.

Scully seems to find Mulder’s faith vacuum perplexing, and tries to unravel the mysteries behind him by attaching meaning to the pointless trinkets and debris of his life. In Tempus Fugit/Max, she attaches such meaning to a medallion commemorating the Apollo 11 flight that Mulder gives her, she almost makes it a secular rosary for Mulder’s cause. A symbol of his intent, making it almost tragic when Mulder cuts down her poetic musings with “I just thought it was a really cool keychain” (The fact she later gave this keychain to John Jay Doggett in season 8, has given DanaDoggett license to be incredibly annoying ever since). She takes to viewing his cause as a quest and crusade for his belief. She gives it a religious meaning, and adopts it as her own. Almost as a kind of penance and pilgrimage rolled into one, something she must do, has to do, to make up for all of the bad things that have occured ini her life.

Mulder’s actual faith, appears to be agnostic, despite his incredulous view of religion. He’s seen in a church at the end of Conduit, and makes a view religious jumps of his own, without Scully’s input, pointing to at least some religion in his life at some point. My personal belief is that he had faith up til the disappearance of his sister, where both he and his family lost it, in the subsequent futile search and divorce that followed in the aftermath. He replaced his faith in religion with faith in the paranormal, in alien abduction. It’s probably worth noting that while Duchovny described Mulder as jewish, he has Christmas decorations in his mothers basement (Paper Hearts, Season 4). Then again, he also appears to have been married in Three of A Kind, so lets just assume that there’s several Mulder’s knocking around who all share one consciousness, but different memories. It’s a good enough for me.

The X Files, was the most popular show of it’s time, and it was insanely well thought out, intelligent, and wonderfully acted. If you think about the fact that this show contained so many themes of such depth and power, and compare that with the poorly acted autotune of Glee, and wonder what happened to popular entertainment.