[FRENCH] Podcast suite et fin (pour l’instant !) avec, parce qu’il le faut, la saison 9 de #TheXFiles — mais il faut avouer que je suis bien d’accord avec les participants, il y a bien peu de choses à sauver de cette saison. Je me demanderai toujours qu’est-ce qui se serait passé s’ils avaient fait une cassure nette avec le duo Mulder-Scully et consacré cette saison qu’à la nouvelle génération : est-ce que ça aurait plus réussi ou est-ce que ça aurait était pas plus mémorable que ce qu’on a eu ?
Author Archive
31st anniversary + short Carter interview
31st anniversary of #TheXFiles today, wow!
Here’s a quick interview with Chris Carter about the new book “Perihelion” in this episode of XF Diaries: in short, he is very glad that there are still new things TXF coming out. He was consulted and offered notes, but this was really Claudia Gray’s work. As usual, he avoids answering anything directly, but he stresses that the book is “keeping with the canon” (a nuance of “canon” per se), I think he just makes the distinction because this is a novel and not a live continuation and it’s not his own work; but it also means that whatever happens in the novel does not comes into contradiction with what he would have done were there to have been a season 12. It’s not clear if he directly shared his own ideas for the future with Gray or just tried to steer Gray away from something. But if the book series continues, more answers will have to be given and we might end up knowing what he’s hiding. For what that’s worth.
He also teases that there’s an easter egg in “My Struggle IV” about where the show and the characters were going and leaves us wondering My bet? William/Jackson was shown holding an egg hatching, and the episode ends with Scully pregnant: he is a life-giver, and he could have had a role in Scully’s new pregnancy, hence the final smile. What do people think?
Main plot vs filler
Some obligatory references to #TheXFiles in this video essay arguing for the return to the episodic format on television, which has been lost with the “everything must be relevant to the main plot” trend of streaming shows.
Perihelion: review/analysis
‘Perihelion‘, by Claudia Gray, Hyperion Avenue (an imprint of Disney Publishing), 2024
<rant>
Before I say anything about this novel, and this is completely independent of the novel’s qualities, I must add a disclaimer. I am much less emotionally involved with TXF than I was in the past and my level of excitement for anything new has dropped accordingly, however I will try to address what the novel attempts to achieve as objectively as I can. I’m considering anything past season 7 as bonus material anyway; and if s8 was like the “Extended Edition” and s9 was like cut scenes and IWTB was DVD extras, then s10-11 were like the making of of the making of in terms of importance. I enjoy new things and past passion still drives me, but it’s not what it used to be. Let’s just say that I’m more interested in things that have something to say and then end, and leave it at that. And now that I’ve done spilling my negativity, let’s move on to the novel.
</rant>
There will be spoilers.
“If the last thirty years of my work have taught me anything, it’s that evidence…evidence is irrelevant.”
This novel is different from all the preceding TXF novels in that it’s the first one that takes place specifically in-continuity and continues the storyline. All the previous novels (the 1990s novels, the short story anthologies) were stand-alone investigations taking place during the show’s run, or at least had no ambition to build their own mythology. Claudia Gray attempts what Joe Harris did with his Season 10 comics in 2013 — which were also blessed by Chris Carter with the holy status of being “canon” (literally canonized), until that was rescinded when the live revival happened.
For certain, the novel takes place in our times. There are discussions of plenty of start-ups, there’s a non-binary nurse, there are several jabs at the era of disinformation and of Trumpian post-truth. It’s been a record six years since Scully announced she was pregnant; with references here from 2018 (‘Where the Crawdads Sing’) to 2022 (‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’) it’s hard to tell when the story exactly takes place, which is a bit frustrating. The timing of the revival itself was very problematic as it seemed to be taking place when the episodes aired, internal timing be damned.
Claudia Gray, an ex-TXF-fanfic writer and better known for her Young Adult novels, knows her stuff! There are a *lot* of references to past episodes and cases. Reading her Acknowledgments, you can tell she is clearly a fan, and one can only be happy for her. Actually, there are so many references to the series and the plot is so closely tied to the revival that one couldn’t recommend this novel to a casual fan: this is for the hardcore audience who still want more (and I suppose that sales figures will reflect that).
There are a couple of nice jokes at the show’s expense (and at Carter?). Mulder muses that “we’re overdue for an update” on their FBI badge photos, it must refer to the opening titles remaining the same even in the revival. Scully’s thoughts that Doggett was OK but that the X-Files was really Mulder and Scully was something we heard from many producers for the show’s thirtieth anniversary. (Oddly enough, absolutely no mention of Reyes: is she kept for a future appearance, with a shock survival?)
“Just because I can endure trauma doesn’t mean I should.”
The novel has to deal with plenty of the baggage left over from the last finale (11X10: ‘My Struggle IV’) and that’s no trivial matter. It’s not the novel’s fault that much of the situation and focus was preposterous — an a priori baseless rejection of William as not their child, a second pregnancy shocker that repeats earlier situations but at a much more advanced age, a tabula rasa of the mythology with plenty of characters ending up dead (?). Instead of side-stepping things, the novel chooses to deal with all of it head-on, and hats off for even attempting that! In parts, this novel feels like proper closure from the frantic ‘My Struggles’ events, if Carter and the show had dedicated the proper time to the characters’ emotional lives instead of car chases. The novel stands as an epilogue to the revival series, leaving the lead characters to a much better emotional place than in the start (the titular perihelion, like day follows night). Things could even end there, as far as Mulder and Scully’s journey are concerned. But that’s not the only thing the novel is doing, and we’ll come back to that.
“I resent that so much of my life journey–even as an FBI agent–is tied to my maternity. It is not the whole of my self, not the sole governor of my fate.”
Much of ‘Perielion’ is Mulder and Scully’s internal thoughts, about themselves, their relationship, their complicated lives, their many traumas. As a plot-driven show, this was rare in the series, and we only got glimpses of this in monologues that became a staple of the show (‘Memento Mori’, ‘Redux’). The open discussion of their relationship is something that was atypical of the series until ‘I Want To Believe’. This being a gap to fill, it was also the typical focus of much fanfic, and this novel does feel like it at times — and this is meant in a good way. The prose is competent, the characters feel alive, the sections flow well from one to the other, the whole package is very professional and satisfying to read. Yes, the writer is a woman, and you can’t help but noting that given how much better everything around the issue of medical rape is treated here.
“William was an experiment. He was never Mulder’s. He was barely mine.”
The novel spends much of its page count showing Mulder and Scully dealing with the trauma and the consequences of the things that happened to them. ‘My Struggle IV’ was an extreme example of both emotional trauma and of absurdly little time dedicated to its aftermath. The novel’s role as the opportunity to debrief, open up, confront and move on is very, very much welcome (although a bit repetitive at times). The novel clarifies that Scully’s rejection of William as their son was a way for her to rationalize her shock at learning that he was the product of the Cigarette-Smoking Man’s experiments. The novel’s denouement nicely brings about Scully having to confront her anger at this situation, enabling her to start thinking about William again in a saner way.
The novel does comment on the absurdity of Mulder and Scully being flatmates intending to co-parent at age above 50. This is in continuity with IWTB and the revival, which had them becoming more distant because of Mulder’s depression from being away from his life’s goal, the X-Files. There’s something very sad about these two people at this stage of their life, with so much common past and common loss, still struggling to find a balance with each other so that they can be young parents as if they were twenty years younger. But this is where the story has brought these characters, and, again, ‘Perihelion’ has to deal with the status at the end of s11.
“William, her son, the one she had prayed for every night for so many years, the product of a vicious experiment by a vicious man, but still her son, the son she had lost for good, always and forever hers–“
‘Perihelion’ walks back on some big and controversial events of the ‘Struggle’ episodes. The CSM pretended William was his son, and this oral revelation was relayed from Skinner to Scully — all this was just hearsay, but the characters treated this as truth. Again through hearsay, Scully is told that the CSM was not William’s father but that he was “just” responsible for her being able to conceive. This mitigates somewhat how awful Scully feels about the whole affair. This medical operation on Scully looks like it happened during ‘En Ami’: she is found to have “new” DNA as young as a baby’s (long telomeres) and hence able to create new eggs (gametogenesis), which ties in with that episode’s tale of technology that cures all disease and makes an elderly woman live even longer. It also ties in with the joke turned fan theory turned near-canon of Scully being immortal.
That’s in-universe justification enough for how Scully could get pregnant at age 50something. It also sets up the same type of fears that the baby might have superpowers and be the subject of experiments as seasons 8 and 9, and I don’t know if I’m interested to go throught this again.
(For what it’s worth, William not being genetically the CSM’s son does contradict established canon, as William’s monologue and visions in ‘My Struggle IV’ clearly established that the CSM was his father, whatever Carter might say in interviews. And let’s not even mention how we should believe that Scully never did genetic tests on William during her pregnancy and after; while here Scully diligently does checks on her new embryo.)
To top it all off, we also get confirmation that the CSM is finally dead for good now (yet still able to influence things in this world even beyond the grave, in one of the novel’s most successful scenes, the channeling! I hope that was a one-off, though, let him rest) and Scully gets a hint that William is still alive (setting up a potential healing reunion later on).
“The truth is still out there, Scully, but now, so is everything else”
But showing us Mulder and Scully building a hopeful future for themselves, as if this were an epilogue, is not the only thing the novel does. It also restarts the concept of ‘The X-Files’ and essentially consists in the first of an open-ended series.
Any continuation of an established precedent has to play a balance game between reusing familiar elements and proposing something new. This novel is no exception: there’s plenty of TXF staples throughout. The thing is, over the past 10 years, between the IDW S10/11 comics continuation and then the revival, this is the third soft-reboot that we get and it’s unavoidable to feel the repetition.
Again, Mulder and Scully return to the FBI as agents after their suspension in ‘My Struggle IV’. That pause had lasted just a few weeks, but it feels as if they are returning after many years (which have actually passed in our world). They’ve been bought by Disney, and so the FBI can’t get rid of them! Again, they answer to an Assistant Director of ambiguous loyalties who is pressured by a mysterious figure — who thinks that whatever Fox Mulder (and *not* Dana Scully) does is very important. Again, like in IWTB, Scully is concerned that Mulder would be consumed by the work and only worries about him, again leaving a better job in medicine for the X-Files. Mulder gets a new informant and the Syndicate is replaced by another group, the Inheritors.
All of this is familiar ground. Maybe too much so. The novel both doesn’t shy away from the oddity of a 50+ year old pregnancy, but also doesn’t think twice of two 50+ year olds returning to FBI service as field agents, when normally at this age they wouldn’t be accepted. Independent private consultants would have been a much more realistic depiction; they could even be the ones training the actual FBI field agents. But it was more important not to change something as fundamental to the brand as ‘a couple of FBI investigators’. It’s 2024, but it will always be 1995.
“Chaos is coming, and the Inheritors have decided that if they can’t govern it, they can at least profit from it”
The neoSyndicate, the Inheritors, looks as if it’s operating out of the same office in that skyscraper in New York City. It is but one of the groups that fill the power gap left by the Syndicate (but those events were over 20 years ago!) and by the carnage of ‘My Struggle IV’. Previous incarnations gave the conspiracy a motivation that tried to feel more of its time: see for example in Harris’ comics the Glasses-Wearing Man’s obsession with news streams and manipulation of public agencies via subsidiaries of subsidiaries; or in the revival the digitalization of the X-Files archive and the prevalence of international private security firms). For the Inheritors, gone are the days of the grand Project and of great idealistic words like “Resist or Serve”: this new group just wants…money, more of it, and what creature comforts it can buy. There’s little allegory I can see in this novel, but if ‘Perihelion’ has anything to comment about our world, is that we really are in late-late capitalism.
“The entire world is about to be an X-File”
The novel slips into case file mode for a bit — there are some welcome chapters of actual investigation, profiling, paper trail, the bread and butter of early seasons that progressively disappeared in the later seasons. Sadly, it vanishes all too quickly when the case proves to be just a pretense for introducing Scully’s new superpowers.
‘Perihelion’ presents us with a fast-changing world. Like in the revival, the aliens are nowhere to be seen, but humans tamper with alien biology and technology. Alien DNA spread in the general population is resulting in people developing supernatural abilities, and forming a sort of community of X-Men. This comparison is inevitable — not only was this discussed during the revival, with the children in ‘Founder’s Mutation’ and William’s ghouli.net musings of joining a group of youngsters similar to him, but ‘Perihelion’ is actually explicit, comparing one of them to an X-Men mutant (Nightcrawler). This continues themes introduced way back in ‘The End’, with Gibson Praise developing paranormal abilities thanks to alien DNA, as this was possibly the explanation behind all the X-Files cases. It’s not clear at all when this new wave of mutations started, whether this was the Syndicate’s or the CSM’s initial goal, whether this is the result of ‘My Struggle II”s Spartan virus or of something else… At this point, the mytharc has become such a palimpsest that even canon works (and this reviewer) no longer try to join the dots.
There is zero mystery or subtlety here. Scully sees the mutants and their superpowers (teleportation, levitation). We are told exactly what the Inheritors want barely after they’re introduced. We hear ‘alien DNA’ sufficient times to stop wondering about specifics and believe it’s synonymous to magic. Everything is super-transparent and specific and *named*. The fact that Scully herself develops ‘D.P.O.’-like superpowers doesn’t help to swallow the pill (again, when did that happen to her? around ‘En Ami’? back when William was conceived? more recently? why does it only manifest now? is the embryo actually responsible?…). And who knows what superpowers will Skinner have once he recovers. All of this continues even more strongly the latter-seasons’ tendency to make the mythology about the protagonists themselves instead of being something the protagonists discover.
This is a natural evolution of the XF mythology endgame, sure, but this new level of pulpiness is jarring. It is also world-changing. Up to now the X-Files world was one just like our own but with plenty of unbelievable things going on right under the surface. With this wave of mutants and with scientists all over the globe identifying the mutations, the X-Files world becomes something different, other, a very clearly fictional place. The mythology progresses, but verisimilitude is lost.
At the risk of nit-picking, what also bothered me was how explicit, again, everything was regarding the Syndicate. The word ‘Syndicate’ was hardly ever mentioned in dialogue throughout the series’ 11 seasons (I counted: 4 times, and only starting in season 6, ‘Two Fathers’); it mostly went by unnamed, adding to its mysteriousness and pervasiveness. Here, Mulder and Scully are shown to know the names and professions and exact associations with the Syndicate of many operatives, which hints at knowledge they were never shown to have in the series. The CSM’s real name, revealed in ‘My Struggle III’, is repeated so many times that one can’t help but think that this old guy Carl must not have been so bad after all and we were just gaslighted into thinking he was powerful.
“The truth has its own value. Our work saved lives, and gave validation to many people who badly needed it. That’s what we have to remember.”
The couple learn that Scully is expecting a girl. Gray had included a child of Mulder and Scully in her fanfic from all the way back to 1995 when season 2 was airing (“Guardian“, Spooky Award winner!); if it’s any indication for a follow-up novel, the child then was a girl and her name was Rebecca!
Between the new pregnancy and the case file of a serial killer targeting pregnant women, that’s a lot of obsessing about procreation, which follows on the latter season’s mythology. Now that Gray has dealt with all of the mythology leftovers, she might develop her own storylines expressing her own interests. I’m not sure I like her direction for the mythology, but I like her Mulder and Scully.
Obviously, this sets up a sequel or series of follow-up novels — by now, this is standard practice for tie-in merchandising of a big brand owned by the largest entertainment company of the world. As Claudia Gray is also involved in writing tie-in novels for another big Disney property (Star Wars), I can see her writing several of these TXF novels in the future. Besides, it’s quite clear by now that no further Carter/Duchovny/Anderson TXF will be happening, and that any talk of a reboot (with potential Duchovny/Anderson cameos) has been premature: the path is clear for one of these novels popping up every year for the foreseeable future, building their own continuity, as long as they sell enough.
Perihelion released
#TheXFiles new novel released today! “#perihelion” by Claudia Gray.
What you need to know (non-spoiler):
- set right after the season 11 finale (so expect Scully-Mulder dealing with the aftermath of that, and stuff about William and the second pregnancy)
- Chris Carter-approved (whatever that means! we know how the IDW comics were decanonized as soon as there was a live revival)
- written by a long-time fan of the show (wrote TXF fanfic as early as 1995) mostly known today for paranormal/romance young adult novels and Star Wars tie-in novels
- mixes new mythology with monster-of-the-week investigation
- sets up more novels in the future (as any respectable Disney tie-in would do: this is, after all, a lucrative business)
- freely comment with spoilers below + shortish review coming soon
PhileFest: Creatives panel
I wrap up my notes on last year’s The X-Files PhileFest events with the Creators panel. This one is so long and full of cool info that I’ll split it in two. Featuring: R.W. (Bob) Goodwin (BG), Frank Spotnitz (FS), Chris Carter (CC), James Wong (JW), Glen Morgan (GM), Kristen Cloke (KC), Darin Morgan (DM). [+ my comments in brackets]
- CC on Scully’s 2nd pregnancy being mysterious and science-fictional as well [eh, rinse and repeat… that My Struggle IV finale will haunt CC’s public appearances to the end of his days!]
- GM cheers on CC repeating GA’s comment about firing all the writers! [I love how they are all comfortable enough to troll each other!] BG praises the writers [in response to GA’s comment] and that he and Sheila had their last child at age 71 [what does this refer to? a grandchild? a film/series he did? BG’s last film credit is “Alien Trespass” from 2009, when he was 66]
- GM on the unwritten “Lincoln’s Ghost” episode
- JW and GM on “Home”, trying to have a sequel in “Millennium”; they get no residuals
- JW: “Home” was the reason for a “violence” check from FOX; BG: Deep Throat’s death in “The Erlenmeyer Flask” had been used to illustrate violence on TV [how times change!]
- GM on doing sequels/prequels (DM: Flukeman as a tadpole! Small Potatoes: The Series!)
- BG on meeting DM in the Flukeman costume
- FS tried to include Charles Scully in “Christmas Carol/Emily” but Pat Skipper was very good, no place for Charlie
- GM on inspirations for “Home” (“Brother’s Keeper”, Charlie Chaplin autobiography, “Dark Nature”), JW on reception of the script by FOX executive Charlie Goldstein (“you’re sick!”), GM on Karin Konoval
- BG on having a nervous breakdown upon reading the “End Game” script with the submarine conning tower (CC had said “Bob will figure it out”), FS pitched that idea based on a New York Times article CC had on his bulletin board with such a photo
- CC on directing Steve Railsback in “Duane Barry”, BG on casting director Rick Millikan, CC on Vancouver extras appearing over and over, BG on using girls after facing difficulties with boys as aliens in “Duane Barry”
- JW on directing “Musings” (GM: “you also had an amazing script!”)
- GM on their 3 main directors, Rob Bowman, David Nutter (“treat yourself”, he got that from his college film professor, that’s where DM got it for “Small Potatoes”), Kim Manners; shooting “The Field Where I Died”, DD’s hypnosis scene originally lasted 12 minutes! Someone fell out for directing “Die Hand die Verletzt” and GM & JW brought over Kim Manners.
- DM on getting help from Rob Bowman on directing; wrote last act of “Jose Chung” in one go during the night before it was due; filming “Forehead Sweat” UFO scene at 3 am
- KC thanks CC for being open to possibilities, that’s what made the show (unlike modern TV); talking with Bowman when shooting “The Field Where I Died” about music and the feel of a scene
- CC thanks BG for producing, pushing for increasing the budget; BG negotiated one extra day of shooting for “The Erlenmeyer Flask”, the studio didn’t think TXF had a chance, proved its worth on its own and so there was no studio interference, studio said “spend what you have to spend, just don’t miss an air date”; budget went from 1.1 M$ in the “Pilot” to 2.8 M$ in “The End” [all hail Bob Goodwin!]
- Did Scully sleep with Ed Jerse in “Never Again”? BG: there was a time he thought everybody slept with DD!
- “Humbug” was a writing assignment from GM to DM, do something with circus freaks and Jim Rose; BG: was supposed to be Florida but it was Vancouver in winter, the crew had to melt the snow
- “Rm9…” was a writing assignment from GM to KC, do something with drones with no dialogue; JW: GM broke up with me because of KC; before that, there was a “Space: Above and Beyond” episode with no dialogue; KC: there’s a real vibrator that tracks your “activity”; CC: the gifts M&S exchange in “The Ghosts Stole Christmas” were vibrators [crowd goes wild! CC is such an enigma, both enraging and enchanting fans and especially shippers!]
- JW: “Beyond the Sea” was written as a reaction to online comments that “Scully’s a bitch”; FS read online comments a lot; CC: we heard fans, we didn’t necessarily incorporate feedback; CC: after “The Erlenmeyer Flask” there was an uproar, that was a great thing [CC likes controversy!]
- BG showed director of photography John Bartley a Caravaggio painting, “The Calling of St Matthew”, as inspiration for the look of the show, to get darker and darker
- GM & JW shot the footage of Frohike being killed at the end of “Musings”, they wanted to put it in the edit, but the footage had “mysteriously” disappeared [CC was against it]; FS lobbied CC not to kill Frohike
Second and last part of the Creatives panel from last year’s #TheXFilesPhileFest. There were more panels, especially one focused on #Millennium, but no recordings have surfaced, unfortunately. Below, more trivia and stories from the past, and some more Carter controversy [+ my comments in brackets]. Here’s to TXF’s longevity!
- DM: “Forehead Sweat”: the only note from the studio was not to mention Trump by name (although they quote him directly); he would change “War of the Coprophages” so that cockroaches kill Frohike! He apologises for killing Queequeg; he remembers struggling with writing “Quagmire”, the writers had floated the idea of giant clams eating Scully’s car (Mandela effect: FS doesn’t remember that story)
- BG on directing 15000 people in “The End”
- CC: the reboot [he still calls it that…he means the revival] aired around Trump’s inauguration, and it predicted everything that came to be in the next 4 years; TXF is not science fiction, it’s a documentary [he really dislikes the term science fiction]; he mentions alien artifacts in TXF and David Grusch [UFO/UAP whistleblower that testified in a congressional hearing in 2023] and the episode “Eve” that dealt with cloning before it was a thing [interestingly, he mentions that episode was “largely” JW & GM, although different writers were credited]
- CC: if he had wanted to end TXF after 5 seasons, FOX would have fired him and taken somebody else to continue [as much as we can fantasize about TXF ending at its peak before declining, that’s the sad truth…]
- FS remembers that the original plan was that Mulder would find Samantha alive at the end of the show [CC doesn’t react to that, it would be nice to have a first-hand confirmation]; but by season 7 they made a “brave and controversial” decision to end differently [and by that time that was a good choice, but we are still left to wonder about that Redux II Samantha]
- When did they know that there was something romantic between Mulder & Scully? CC: in the “Pilot”, in the mosquito bites scene, [FOX executive] Peter Roth asked “where’s the sexual tension?” CC said there is sexual tension, it’s just not of the same kind; FS: he knew from season 1 “Tooms” “if there’s iced tea in that bag, could be love” [ironically, a compliment from the most shipper-friendly writer to the least ones!]
- GM on how a mysterious quarter in his mom’s belongings when she died found its way to “Home Again” (mentions his daughter Chelsea, DM’s wife Caroline)
- GM & JW: quote George Roy Hill, 80% of anything is directing and casting; describe how casting director Rick Millikan was bringing them typical network TV people but they wanted freaks; after the casting of Doug Hutchinson as Tooms, he knew (describes Hutchinson’s casting session; mentions he didn’t hit it off with the episode’s director [Harry Longstreet, indeed he only directed that episode]); “Pilot” casting director Randy Stone saw DD as Mulder directly after reading the script.
- Was the CSM William’s father? CC mentions mitochondrial replacement/removal, thanks to which a child can have two fathers and one mother, and “that’s the answer”; DM and the audience boos him! [a way to have your cake and eat it too – both Mulder AND the CSM are biological parents, according to CC, and that’s final; so much for the CSM just enabling the pregnancy; not to mention that biologically this is wrong, mitochondrial DNA is passed on from mother to offspring only and does not consist in the main cell’s DNA, so at best William is biologically Mulder and Scully’s and has CSM’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA, plus some alien DNA here and there; the more you think about it the less it makes sense]
- How about a season 12? CC doesn’t want to answer [fine by me!] BG gives an impression of how CC works: when shooting the ending of “Anasazi” with Mulder inside a burning box car, CC had said “I wonder how he’s going to get out of there”!
- What was so important about TXF 30 years later? CC: Mulder and Scully! The best advice he got was when he showed the “Pilot” script to a production designer for Spielberg and Cameron who won two Academy awards [that would be Rick Carter, no family relation], that with no money and no time the best thing to do is to keep the scary stuff hidden. BG: there are three elements that define a success, the casting, the writing and the execution (it could have been cheesy) [I especially agree about that underappreciated third item] and “we got it”! BG got a call from Spielberg at some point, he told him that TXF was the greatest TV series ever made! GM: DD & GA! GM credits CC’s thing of “I want to believe”.
Top photo from XFilesNews