Can anyone [on this planet, save the few conspirators who are even nowe planning the rule of their alien overlords] tell me what was with that giant running plot on the X-files? See, I never watched the series from start to finish, so I never saw the plot develop. Moreover, I keep wondering how they got a conspiracy where thousands upon thousands of US government workers, hundreds of high-level government officials, military generals, and random private citizens with a lot of money all managed to keep virtually silent, despite the regular appearance of aliens and spaceships all over the place.
I always liked the “wierd supernatural stuff happened, lets go check it out” episodes over the “alien spaceship” episodes.
The answer is simple: the conspiracy was able to continue for so long because Mulder was willing to accept responses from the participants along the lines of Don’t open doors you’re not pepared to go through and The conspiracy is far larger than you can imagine, instead of insisting on a simple direct explanation. Chris Carter evidently didn’t have a clear idea of his own prmise, so there’s precious little reason to think any fan-analysis could uncover any insights.
There is nothing to explain. It was all a put-up job foisted on the viewers by Chris Carter and co. They laughed, went to the bank, and made us out to be idiots. Case closed.
I loved how, in just about every “conspiracy” episode, Mulder stumbles across some secret that’s been kept buried for a long time (buildings, bodies, medical records, whatever). And within minutes, a platoon of soldiers would come in and destroy everything, leaving him again with no proof.
Well, hell, if the conspirators can destroy the stuff so casually, why didn’t they do it decades ago and save themselves the trouble?
Babylon 5 had great continuity. Star Trek had bad continuity. But only The X-Files had anti-continuity. Unlike Star Trek, The X-Files was not content to simply ignore what it had previously established, it actually went out of its way to rupture its own continuity as often and as violently as possible. I think the only way to figure out what actually is going on in this show is to write out a list of every possible explanation for what’s going on, and then, as each explanation is given on the show, cross that explanation off the list. At the end of the series, whatever explanation you have left is the correct one.
