I just finished watching the new X-Files episodes, and I'm left with some mixed feelings.
SPOILER! (select to read)I'll happily admit that I don't remember the last few seasons of the original show all that well, but it's hard to forget that it ended with a threat of alien genocide that apparently never happened, whoever Adam Baldwin worked for working really hard to kill the protagonists and Smoking Man a fugitive from them as well. The new series seems to retcon all of that so that Mulder and Scully can be free to take their old jobs back while Smokey is secretly running the world again. I mean, that's an effort to bring back something of the feel of the early days of the old series when it was actually good, and I don't blame them for that, but it's a bit confusing. But on top of that they seem to be rewriting the conspiracy mythos so that it was all humans all along with no aliens involved after the initial ship crash. That's...problematic, because even though I don't remember the original series all that well, there were definitely blatant ****ing aliens wandering around for nine years, sewing their faces shut, setting each other on fire, making hybrids and killing air force test pilots who dressed up in Grey costumes. Saying "LOL not really" means...what? None of that ever happened? It was all a show purely to distract Mulder from the real-this-time-we-promise conspiracy? Nah, screw that. It just reeks of creators who are a bit ashamed of the oh-so-90s alien invasion plot and desperately wanted to modernize it into a more generic "government is bad" conspiracy instead. With all of that going on, the episodes that deal with the "myth arc" wind up a mess. Bad plotting and Mulder blindly accepting everything that Knockoff Alex Jones has to say (I mean, even moreso than he usually would) make them even worse, and drive those episodes into downright awful territory. They felt like the random ravings of a 4chan conspiracy nut, not the believable in their own universe plots that made X-Files so popular.
So I was really ready to hate this after the first episode, but the "problem" (if you want to call it that) is that only two of the six episodes were really plot-heavy. The other four were more-or-less self-contained, and each of them were great. The trash golem episode would have been at home in any season of the original. The were-monster might well have been the funniest thing this show has ever produced (yes, even funnier than the classic ep that had Alex Trebek and Jesse Ventura as men in black). The terrorism episode managed to be topical without being preachy. And the episode with the genetically-engineered kids really hit me hard (as did the subplot of Scully's regret over giving up their kid), probably due to being a new parent myself. The local sci-fi network did a "best of" run of episodes from the first series before the new one started, and IMO none of these four would be out of place in that company.
When they sat down and tried to bang out standalone one-hour stories, they hit them all out of the park. But when they tried to add to the old series' big meta-plot, the results were just dire. So I'm not sure how I feel about the effort as a whole. I did enjoy it, but at the same time it could have been a lot better if they'd just played to their strengths.
All of which sounds exactly like what I remember from the original series, actually, so I really shouldn't be surprised.
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