Feels like it was yesterday it came out. It's hard to convey to people who didn't watch it growing up just how special it was.
It landed on TV right as the collective zeitgeist around the governments around the world getting up to shady things ("Echelon's trunk trawler") and the perpetually amusing mythology and conspiracy theories around aliens, ufos, DNA and parascience. Few had BBS/internet/WWW access, so it was much harder to stamp out a lot of the low-level conspiracies that used to float around back then. That helped keep the spirit of X-files alive, somehow. Hm, it's hard to describe.
It's weirdly of its time, and yet it holds up so well -- or at least until it goes off the rails in the later seasons. Still, fantastic cast; great writing, all around; and surprisingly, the special effects and costumes hold up really well, too. The first 4-5 seasons are electrifyingly good because they filmed it in Canada, so it retains this dark, brooding boreal feeling to it.
The amount of gossip around school and between friends whenever a new mythology episode landed was especially fun.
The change in that zeitgeist is also one of the things the creators "credit" with its decline, though Duchovny getting into a lawsuit with Fox and checking out certainly didn't help. After the 9/11 attacks public interest in not trusting the government sharply declined. The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen spin-off, released earlier in 2001, featured a plot where "terrorists" had flown a passenger liner into the WTC but it was really a government inside job to gain support for a new war. That show didn't get renewed.
The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen spin-off, released earlier in 2001, featured a plot where "terrorists" had flown a passenger liner into the WTC but it was really a government inside job to gain support for a new war. That show didn't get renewed.
The idea of terrorists flying planes into buildings was a not entirely uncommon threat scenario and the WTC was a prominent building that had been targeted by bombings before.
The difference on 9/11 was that A) they actually did that, B) they used fully loaded very large airplanes (767s), C) they used two planes for the same attack (four in total but the two hitting the towers were noteworthy by themselves) and D) the buildings actually collapsed.
Remember that at the time airplane hijackings were usually about ransom (either money or releasing political prisoners) and the usual threat scenario were attacks against the airplane itself. Also following 9/11 there was a huge hysteria around the use of "dirty bombs" (conventional bombings using radioactive material to contaminate a civilian population center) which despite its many depictions in TV shows never actually ended up happening (mostly because radioactive material is difficult to acquire and transport in the amounts necessary to perform such an attack whereas the hijackers just needed sharp objects and enough flight training to hit a large building while avoiding hitting anything else).
It'd be an overstatement that this was due to happen but in abstract the scenario wasn't unexpected. The truthers are right about one thing: the scenario was a known possibility. That doesn't mean how it played out is how it was anticipated or that anyone in a position to intervene knew exactly how it would play out once it started.
>>Remember that at the time airplane hijackings were usually about ransom
This standard assumption is a critical point for understanding 9/11.
The well-established procedure was to keep talking with the hijackers, get the plane on the ground at an airport, and negotiate to get the hostages out, etc. Airplane hijacking was also remarkably common, and despite this, there were no real efforts to take measures like reinforcing aircraft cockpit doors.
That set of assumptions is completely incompatible with assuming that hijackers are on a suicide mission.
So the suicide mission succeeded in the first three airplanes, but withing an hour or so, when passengers on the 4th hijacked plane had heard about the other planes being crashed into buildings, they realized that they were all already dead, so attacked the hijackers, and the plane crashed into a field in PA. Fighter jets were also scrambled so quickly that they had no time to load ammunition/armaments, and the mission was to take down the plane (but it went down first); this would also have been almost surely suicidal for the unarmed fighters, having to make contact in midair.
So, as a side-effect, in a single morning, the entire set of assumptions underlying hijacking was eliminated, and hijacking was also essentially eliminated. Any potential hijacker would be treated with the assumption that they were on a suicide mission, and had essentially zero chance of survival, let alone achieving their goal (money or release of prisoners). I don't recall hearing of a single hijacking since then (although a few instances of pilot suicide taking the passengers with them).
This is a very interesting take, thanks for raising it! And also super interesting detail about the fighters not having time for weapons loadout. I did not know either of those things...A lot of good people died that day.
How would the unarmed fighters even have taken down the airliner?
I'm not sure what part of the passenger jet they'd crash into, but ramming head on into the cockpit might give you the the best success rate if you have enough time to get into position.
There were interviews with or voice recordings of the two fighter pilots discussing who would hit the cockpit and who would hit the tail, should it have come to that.
No, I agree: there was definite precedent, but to land those 4 specifics: time, type, place, and even consequence/motive is insane. People sometimes say "The Simpson's" predicted X (erm, not the social network can't believe have to say that now, heh), but the time's I've looked into it it's been a bit of a stretch (they may have some hits tho). But this just nails it. And the weird things is: it's a conspiracy-focused spin-off of a conspiracy focused show. It's just so weird. What are the odds, man? So fucking low. Anyway...
I do remember that flap about dirty bombs. It was pretty scary for a while. Thankfully it never eventuated. It's weird how Byzantine the "successful" attack scenario ended up being, versus the techno-sophistication of our imagined ones. Sad and a tragedy nonetheless.
Maybe there was an attempt but it was thwarted in one of those stories that will never make the news because it's all classified.
About a decade before that I was at a friend's house. The guy was a little bit weird so he subscribed to magazines for people to keep track of airline security and ant-terrorism monitoring and whatever.
I looked through his magazines. I remember one magazine recommended that security forces should be on the lookout for terrorists using passenger planes as essentially human guided missiles. Went way into details of how much explosive power fuel would have etc.
I suppose it wasn't especially prescient, more like obvious for any expert in the field.
I love how the "guy was weird so he subscribed to security magazines" like it's an expected correlate with weirdness, haha. Sorry if the humour does not transmit in text, it just seems funny to me.
I guess you're referring to these magazines not being especially prescient, but rather a standard analysis and I'd agree. But on the off chance you meant the Lone Gunmen spin-off, I mean...1) same year, 2) same location, 3) same type of attack, 4) same backstory or consequence...I'd say that's pretty fucking prescient. To land a broad-strokes analysis is not specific; but this is highly specific! It's just wow.
>I love how the "guy was weird so he subscribed to security magazines"
well he was weird and he subscribed to a lot of funny things that would normally be boring things for specific employments that he was not employed as. He basically wasn't employed as anything.
For example he also subscribed to in depth geopolitical analysis journals whose target demographic was evidently people in diplomatic corps - which he was not.
I don't know - do you like to be referred to as the Emperor, and claim to be Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Maria the former Emperor of Austria who has been dead for a while?
Because then you qualify in my book as a little weird, but I guess our mileage may vary.
not the whole name, that was genealogical, just basically The Emperor was the preferred name.
on edit: he was a cool enough guy and certainly I myself am prone to non-normative behavior but as I said he was weird, and one thing that you would notice he had a bunch of stuff he didn't really have reasons for having, so you put it down to his weirdness as potential cause, because when someone has a big flag "weird" everything out of the ordinary about them gathers beneath that flag.
IIRC terrorists using planes to attack buildings is a common threat scenario for infrastructure projects like nuclear power plants. However usually this refers to small civilian planes like Czesna. Not large passenger airliners like a Boeing 767. Let alone two of them.
> IIRC terrorists using planes to attack buildings is a common threat scenario for infrastructure projects like nuclear power plants. However usually this refers to small civilian planes like Czesna. Not large passenger airliners like a Boeing 767.
Honestly, that doesn't make any sense to me and I'm doubtful. I work at a company that had a data center (built pre-2001) 10 or 20 miles from an airport. It was built like a literal bunk because (IIRC) their threat model included "jet airliner crashes into datacenter" (no terrorism required).
It looks like they were testing/modeling that scenario with nuclear power plants way back in 1988:
> The 19 experts, many of them retired, work or worked at universities or companies that build or operate reactors. In an article on Friday in the journal Science, they dismiss fears voiced by opponents of nuclear power that the nation's reactors are vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
> "We read that airplanes can fly through the reinforced, steel-lined 1.5-meter-thick concrete walls surrounding a nuclear reactor," the article says, "and inevitably cause a meltdown resulting in 'tens of thousands of deaths' and 'make a huge area uninhabitable for centuries,' to quote some recent stories." But, they add, "no airplane regardless of size, can fly through such a wall."
> The article says the scenario "was actually tested in 1988 by mounting an unmanned plane on rails and 'flying' it at 215 meters per second (about 480 m.p.h.) into a test wall." The engines penetrated only about two inches and the fuselage even less, according to the article.
Something with two engines at 480 mph is a jet, definitely not a Cessna-type general aviation plane.
I believe that shielding is for the reactor itself, and while the rest of the buildings are hardened, they aren't that hardened.
I wonder if targeting the control building, or the transformers/electrical shit that connects to the grid with a jetliner would be more effective. Or maybe a shipyard with 'nuclear vessels'.
> However usually this refers to small civilian planes like Czesna. Not large passenger airliners like a Boeing 767.
That is a really odd thing to say on the context of security. If people did indeed have this rationale, I would be surprised at the obvious and absurd display of incompetence.
A vulnerability is a vulnerability, and you expect the attacker to decide how much impact he will try to cause (with a bias into "a lot"). The part about 3 planes is reasonable (something at this level of organization should raise an alert somewhere).
I mean, speaking of conspiracies, I've watched the spin-off show and it's... not that good. Turns out, you need good writing and Mulder/Scully to keep those three interesting. It most assuredly got cancelled because it wasn't that good :-)
I'd say X-Files largely survived because of the dynamic of the characters. A lot of the episodes were not very good except for the interplay between the two. But in the absence of good writing you definitely needed Mulder and Scully and the spin-off didn't have them.
If anyone is interested the whole series can be watched on Youtube for free. Altogether it is not that great, nevertheless I find the meta story about the pilot fascinating (a show about conspiracy theories "predicts" the 9/11 attack).
You can watch it as two shows (like a lot of shows from the 26 episode season era), one being the story arc episodes and two being the monster-of-the week style episodes.
Yeah, back in the nineties, as a teenager, I would consider it harmless entertainment. While watching the new seasons or revisiting the old episodes, knowing that there are people who actually believe even crazier things gives me a very uneasy feeling...
Yes, how terrible that large numbers of people can not only believe "harmful" things but also freely share their ideas with others. It behooves society to stop both of these things from being too easy, no?
What's more harmful? That basic freedom to believe whatever you please and share it with like-minded people without imposing on others against their will, or having legal authority to impose against such voluntary sharing for supposedly lofty ideals of fighting harmful thinking? (However you want to define harmful)
I'd argue that the cause of that is that they've been proven right very publicly because the ability to actually cover things up has been degraded. I think that gives people the "tip of the iceberg" mentality.
The real issues is they get to talk to each other now. Years ago the nut job in my village was pretty harmless because everybody knew him for what he was. Now he can talk to thousands or millions of people just like himself.
It was also around the time star trek was really finding it's stride so between x files and ST, space related/adventure content on TV was really really good.
There was a whole run of decent sci-fi TV back then: Quantum Leap, Sliders, Babylon 5 all aired in that period. Some of them I watched as a kid, others I didn't, but I see all of them referenced occasionally. Then the late 90's hit and the zeitgeist changed. Time marches on.
To me, only real similarity between The X-Files and Twin Peaks was the PNW environments and certain moments of surreality and smirking, almost breaking the third wall. Somehow, I barely even remember that they were both FBI agents as main characters.
As far as the conspiracy and end-times-horror zeitgeist, I think Millenium with Lance Henriksen had a lot more overlap with The X-Files.
> As far as the conspiracy and end-times-horror zeitgeist, I think Millenium with Lance Henriksen had a lot more overlap with The X-Files.
Millennium is more than overlap -- it's an extension of The X-Files: same series creator (Chris Carter), same group of writers (Glen Morgan, James Wong, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, among others), same shooting locations (PNW), same writer deconstructing the show from within (Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan's brother, who also appeared in TXF in the Flukeman suit). Millennium even got a stealth finale/reverse spin-off that explicitly links the two together -- S07E04 of The X-Files ("Millennium") has Lance Henriksen's Frank Black teaming up with Mulder & Scully.
Many series were filmed in Canada at the time (still now?), I think it was around Vancouver. Humid forests everwhere... But they are indeed great for X-files.
Anyway, I think the earlier seasons were better in that they were more varied before the show really became all about aliens conspiracies with the odd non-alien episode here and there.
I remember watching the filming of an episode at the Steveston docks while having dinner at a nearby restaurant.
Can't find the episode name but it was a rainy rainy night (what else). I think the set was the interior of a small fishing boat.
X-Files filming happened all over Vancouver for years. People didn't pay excessive amount of attention to the actors and guest stars when they were at hotels, restaurants etc. Unlike some cities.
I lived in a large shared house during the early seasons and every single one of us ran to the TV together when it was on, from young politicians, hair dressers, DJs, developers .. We all loved it.
I was a kid when it came out and watched part of an episode when I was home alone and was so scared lol.
I'm a big scifi nerd, but didn't get a chance to start watching until I was an adult. It's such a great show and a lot of fun. It's also held up much better to time than most in that genre.
I wish I had grown up with it. I recently started trying to watch it for the first time and it's, well, difficult. Things seem to drag a lot and Mulder and Scully seem to really not think about the implications of a lot of the details they're exposed to.
If you look up an X-Files episode guide, you should find something that helps you get through the muck. I found it on red several years ago and I have it on my share drive but it's offline at the moment. It ranked each episode as part of the story arc, generic monster of the week episode (MotW), or "not story arc but particularly good".
I use that to get through five seasons of X-Files and really enjoyed it. I did the same thing with deep space nine.
We had a viewing party for the premiere. To be honest, we were more looking forward to Bruce Campbell’s “Adventures of Brisco County, Jr”, which premiered just before the “X-Files” (and is now sadly forgotten).
The “X-Files” hooked us right from the start. The only show that even came close to that first episode was “Lost” many years later. Most first season episodes were strong, with some downright classics, and the show was captivating from the beginning. Helps that the two leads were well cast and the writing was way better than the typical genre series.
(Two of the X-Files writers went off to showrun the criminally underrated “Space: Above and Beyond”, too. Without the success of X-Files, we wouldn’t have gotten that.)
> Bruce Campbell’s “Adventures of Brisco County, Jr”, which premiered just before the “X-Files” (and is now sadly forgotten).
Not forgotten by me. Some of my favorite childhood memories are ordering pizza and watching Brisco County, Jr. and X-Files on Friday nights for the season Brisco ran.
I was always disappointed that Brisco County, Jr. didn't get a second season. But it did get kind of weird when it veered off of old west stuff and into aliens/supernatural stuff.
I loved Brisco County Jr! And then after it vanished, the theme song ended up being used all the time for the Olympics on NBC. Maybe it still is, not sure. Regardless, each time it played all I could think of was Brisco.
Season 2 of Millennium ranks up there with my favourite television ever. Season 1 was mostly "Serial killer of the week" episodes, and Season 3 was clearly the studio trying to make TV as they understood it, and ruining everything. Season 2, though, was quirky, dark, passionate, eerie, theological, and funny.
Watching all the "mythology arc" X-Files episodes in a row and skipping all of the "monster of the week" episode makes it look like a modern TV show. Very enjoyable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_of_The_X-Files
The main thing I'm getting out of this conversation is that X-Files had an awful lot of really good writers. Those three episodes you listed had three different writers.
You somehow neglected to mention Home, which had two other writers.
Two, actually; he also wrote "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" in the eleventh season (second revival season). D. Morgan also wrote "Jose Chung's Final Repose" in Millennium, to cap off Charles Nelson Reilly's character.
I've heard that Gillian Anderson has met numerous women who studied science and medicine because of Scully.
Relevant:
* TIL that James Doohan (Scotty on 'Star Trek') received an honorary doctorate from the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The university gave him the degree after half of its students said in a survey that his character had inspired them to choose engineering as a career. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6onyh6/til_th...>
* TIL that Leonard Nimoy met many fans who became scientists because of Spock's example, and talked to the 'Star Trek' actor as if he were a fellow researcher. Nimoy always nodded and told them, "Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction." <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6o8egb/til_th...>
I dunno man while the revival was not great I feel like the X-Files might be only second to Game of Thrones on my list of shows that did not end on high notes. It went about 3-4 seasons too long.
“Rm9sbG93ZXJz” almost precisely presaged the entire plot of all of the Black Mirror episodes combined, and was great fun (particularly the near-total lack of dialog). I thought the “My Struggle” bookends in Season 10 were quite good, but then Season 11 retconned the whole plot away.
Both of the Darin Morgan-penned episodes were good (The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat, despite some on-the-nose politics, excellently recontextualizes a show about about conspiracies in the age of social media; namely that "the truth" doesn't matter at all).
The characters weren't consistent with the previous seasons. No vulnerability from Scully and no cerebral aspects to Mulder; he doesn't really work as a pure action hero.
I grew up watching the X-Files and it was magical. A decade later, it was also fun to later follow along with the show with Kumail Nanjiani's The X-Files Files podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/6QqxMrErkQpEfq67zXL6Gr) which with a brand new medium for the show (the show was of course pre-podcast, pre-reddit)
with the exception of a few duds ("Space", "Fearful Symmetry"...), the first three or four seasons absolutely hold up as extremely compelling entertainment.
I haven't seen all of the later seasons but "X-COPS" (the COPS crossover/deconstruction) is one of my all-time favorites—still fun to watch on Halloween.
If they ever have another season or another movie, they MUST finally either start the alien invasion or debunk the whole notion of one. One way or another, they have to finish what they started.
In Search of...[0] was the introductory conspiracy show for baby boomers.
The X Files was GenX's turn at the Art Bell wheel[1].
Stranger Things[2] is built on these foundations for the younger generation sprinkled generously with nostalgia of those eras of conspiracy television.
BluRay versions are beautiful. Producers had the foresight to film it in Super 35, even though their TV broadcasts didn't support none of widescreen/high res at the time. Early seasons have a slight crop so real fans will have both versions :)
X-Files is terrible, the overarching plot had no end, and it made believing in conspiracy theories mainstream. You want to know why half the planet have gone insane? X Files.
Previous conspiracies over high power pedophiles and mass surveillance turning out to be true lead people to question which other "conspiracy theories" are true and are just about to be proven true.
The group of people that dismissed those theories in the past lost their credibility and conspiracy theorist who gained credibility filled the gap.
It is relevant because it clearly makes some conspiracies unrealistic. Just because some conspiracies were proven true (NSA) doesn't mean others must be true too, or that some people suddenly gain credibility for their conspiracies.
Of course not but it does lead to people re-examining their priors. It leads people to ask "what other conspiracies that I've been dismissing might be true?"
> or that some people suddenly gain credibility for their conspiracies
That's obviously untrue. When people are right, they gain credibility and the things they say hold more weight. When people are wrong the opposite happens. How else could credibility work? People don't go around examining everything starting from first principles, the look to people they trust and they decide who to trust by how often they are correct, aka, credibility.
Conspiracy theories aren't more prevalent because the X-Files, they're more prevalent because trust in institutions is, deservedly, at an all time low.
It landed on TV right as the collective zeitgeist around the governments around the world getting up to shady things ("Echelon's trunk trawler") and the perpetually amusing mythology and conspiracy theories around aliens, ufos, DNA and parascience. Few had BBS/internet/WWW access, so it was much harder to stamp out a lot of the low-level conspiracies that used to float around back then. That helped keep the spirit of X-files alive, somehow. Hm, it's hard to describe.
It's weirdly of its time, and yet it holds up so well -- or at least until it goes off the rails in the later seasons. Still, fantastic cast; great writing, all around; and surprisingly, the special effects and costumes hold up really well, too. The first 4-5 seasons are electrifyingly good because they filmed it in Canada, so it retains this dark, brooding boreal feeling to it.
The amount of gossip around school and between friends whenever a new mythology episode landed was especially fun.