Jess Peacock, author of Such a Dark Thing, posted his Facebook criticism of last night’s premier of the new The X-Files series reboot. In his view the dramatic shift in scrapping the reality of the UFO and abduction phenomenon in favor of a new set of conspiracies is akin to the 1980s television series Dallas where Bobby Ewing appears in the shower and the prior episodes are merely dreams. Here’s my response:

I was interested to see how Carter was going to update the basic premise of the franchise given the changes in the paranormal and conspiracy theories since the nineties. This is of personal and research interest since I’m reading The Paranormal and the Paranoid by Aaron John Gulyas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) for a review in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

The question remains as to what extent this was or wasn’t good storytelling, but I think more is going on here than the equivalent of the Dallas shower dream scenario. As I mentioned above, the different cultural context made it necessary for for Carter to update the basic premise of the program. So while the UFO phenomenon was a significant part of the paranormal in the 1990s, as well as conspiracy theories connected to it, this is not the case in the 21st century. Therefore, the general idea of UFOs and abductions is scrapped in favor of assuming the reality of the Roswell UFO crash and cover up, and connected to contemporary conspiracy theories and concerns about government control in things such as phone wiretaps, drone strikes, the War on Terror as public distraction, global warming caused by the government, etc.

Again, we can argue about whether this scrapping of the explanatory premise of the original series is good storytelling, but it makes sense given changes in culture.