New X-Files Is Both 'Dreadful,' Amazing

After messy start, 3rd episode is 'one of the best': Brian Moylan
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 22, 2016 8:14 AM CST
New X-Files Is Both 'Dreadful,' Amazing
David Duchovny, left, and Gillian Anderson in the "Founder's Mutation" season premiere of "The X-Files."   (Ed Araquel/FOX via AP)

Planning to tune in to the TV reboot of The X-Files this Sunday? Be warned: The first episode is "dreadful," writes Brian Moylan at the Guardian. "It all comes flooding back. Those outfits! That hair! Those cheesy graphics! You remember them fondly without necessarily wanting to go back," he writes. That's a problem, since the last 14 years have transformed TV viewers into impatient bingers. "Episodes can't take their time to unfold anymore," he notes. Mulder and Scully are pulled out of retirement to examine a girl who says she was experimented on by aliens. Soon the X-Files are back in business, with Mulder coming up with a screwball theory about why the world is against him. It involves mention of Edward Snowden and feels like "your uncle trying Snapchat," Moylan says.

The show does get better. The second episode brings a "monster of the week" that wouldn't seem out of place in the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" but "puts Mulder and Scully back in familiar positions," Moylan writes. The third episode, however, sings, and it ranks among The X-Files' best, in Moylan's view. It's "a complete dismantling of the show's entire formula," he writes. The six-episode run on Fox kicks off Sunday at 10pm EST, and those debating on whether to tune in have this from Moylan: "New episodes should create something new, should take a series to a different place or comment on their legacy rather than just muddling around in the past hoping it's enough for some good ratings. So far only one of the first three episodes manages to do that." Read the full piece here. (More television review stories.)

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