Jan. 25--The truth, as "The X-Files" used to like to say, is out there.
The crazy, we were reminded Sunday night with the return of the Fox series, is in the show itself.
It took all of one new episode for the beloved extraterrestrial investigation series, the "Twilight Zone" and "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" of its 1990s-into-2000s era, to go careening off the rails.
David Duchovny's FBI agent Fox Mulder, the one who believed in the little green men, by the end of the episode had his faith shifted to a different sort of explanation for Roswell and the points of light in the sky. But he seemed to believe it with even more passion than before -- indeed, with the level of fervor that is usually accompanied by the wearing of aluminum-foil headgear.
Mulder hasn't just been semiretired in his years away -- or making an enjoyably trashy, faux-literary series like "Californication" -- he's been carefully calibrating the antennae in his head to receive Special Messages the rest of us cannot hear.
We heard them Sunday night, loud and clear and, well ... (*raises eyebrows while index finger circles ear*).
And that's a shame, because there are a wealth of opportunities in this six-episode revisitation. As the anticipation and reaction have shown, there is a big wave of nostalgia for the show itself. A lot of us liked it a lot, this weekly pondering of some of the Big Questions, guided by the faith-and-science yin and yang of Mulder and his partner, the medical doctor/FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).
For many people "X-Files" was the excuse to learn how to program a VCR, because it was on Friday nights and you didn't want to stay in, but you also didn't want to miss either a key episode in the explication of its long-term "mythology" or the more immediately enjoyable stand-alone episodes that saw them hunt down a monster of the week.
"VCR," I will pause to explain, stands for "videocassette recorder," a kind of primitive copying device involving tapes, several times the size of an iPad. You've probably seen stacks of these machines on the shelves at the Goodwill. They're what people had to use back when it was still possible to invent YouTube, back when Netflix trafficked in red envelopes rather than Emmy Awards.
"The X-Files," it turned out, not only came at a technological turning point, but it marked one of the last gasps of network television. By its conclusion in 2002 we had cable ascendant and "The Sopranos" taking hold, pointing the way to a new kind of serial storytelling.
Most of those new stories show patience in developing characters and make sure the big moments they experience are earned. "The X-Files" on Sunday tossed a lot of UFO, sci-fi, wing-nut conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo at us, in a barrage that had to be bewildering to series newcomers.
Especially unfortunate was series creator Chris Carter putting most of that in the mouth of Duchovny, an actor whose hallmark has been a sardonic, skeptical companionability. Hearing him spout about big oil, free energy and alien babies in an attempt at a unified field theory of conspiracies -- all of a sudden, in Week One -- just felt wrong.
Wrong for Mulder and wrong for contemporary tastes.
Rather than setting the hook for five more of these (beginning Monday night at 7 p.m. Central), it mostly made you want to revisit the series' first run. You know, when the show's mythology ended up being about a chain-smoking mastermind, aliens replacing humans at the highest levels of government and the wholesale disappearance of honeybees.
Come to think of it, maybe the crazy was always in there.
