I think Gillian Anderson said it best when she was on the Late Show. The end of The X-Files really hasn’t sunk in; and the fact that the series ended for good on May 19 probably won’t hit me until late summer when I start looking forward to new episodes.A lot of online critics (pro and am) have had some rather harsh words for that final two-parter. True, the show did not reveal anything and no ultimate truths were uncovered, despite what we’d been told by the Fox publicty department. But anyone upset over that must not have been paying attention to the other 200 episodes. There are no answers; and even if they might be given, we can never believe them. Chris Carter himself warned of this back in the first season. The underlying theme of the show isn’t “Trust No One” for nothing.
So what did we learn? That the conspiracy Mulder tried to fight has actually grown bigger. That the date is set, Mulder knows it, and now that the aliens have infested our very government he also knows he can do little about it. I like this thinking. I like having an un-happy ending. It fits in well with the general paranoia of the show. The more I think about it, the more I like the final scene, where Mulder admits defeat to himself. To be perfectly blunt (without the silent “H”) he never was that great an investigator when it came to the conspiracy; he just sat around until someone like Kristchgau or Kurtzweil showed up to explain everything. And with that in mind, Carter’s decision to end the series on a note of defeat is actually pretty cool.
So when you put aside the grievances on how Mulder was not revealed as a great messiah (despite having risen from the dead), that (as some would want) Mulder & Scully didn’t “get it on” right there in prime time, and that the fates of Gibson Praise and AD Skinner were given short shrift (a complaint I happen to agree with), what were we left with? A two-parter that in many ways typified the series itself: a well-produced, well-acted, usually well-written piece of television entertainment. I’m happy with it, and once again I am amazed at the fantastic production design work that that team could put out in a weekly television schedule.
Now if they could’ve gotten Darin Morgan to write it… Then we’d really be talking!
