Why The Truth Was Not Out There on The X-Files Series Finale (Excerpt from An Upcoming Book)
Comparing The Series Finale To What Came Before, Why It Was So Horrible And Why It Doesn’t Seem to Have Affected The Show’s Overall Legacy
Before we get started two different kinds of historical notes.
It’s worth remembering that in 2002 the viewing world had a different standard for a series finale than it does now or indeed would have by the time of Lost. Back then, the only measure of the success of a series finale was how many people watched the final episode.
The final episode of MASH was considered the gold standard not because of the quality of ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’ but because it was watched by 77 percent of the viewing public. I imagine that in the eyes of network executives the final episode of Seinfeld did everything they hoped it would: they didn’t care if the entire world hated it afterwards, they only cared everyone in the world was watching it. In that sense, it was infinitely more rewarding ending than Newhart’s.
Dramas never had to meet the same standard as comedy for much of the 20th century, mainly because it was the fate of many of even the most popular dramas to be cancelled before they could come to a conclusion. This was the case for series as different as Dynasty and the original Quantum Leap. This standard held even for some of the greatest dramas of all time: no one ever debates the quality of the series finale of Hill Street Blues the same way they did Cheers. It’s worth noting that Hill Street did bring about the idea of what many of the best network series finales did: they gave both a sense of closure and continuity, our heroes would just keep doing what they did, we just wouldn’t see them do it. (It’s odd in retrospect that very well might be the conclusion David Chase wanted us to draw from The Sopranos finale — and the entire world missed the point.)
But this idea of being brought full circle frequently made up the best series finales of dramas: it happened with L.A. Law when Leland McKenzie came to the conclusion not to retire at the end of the episode and when Homicide ended with its final scene mirroring with some variations, the first scene of the series. Though we didn’t know it at the time, most of the more successful network dramas of that era: NYPD Blue and ER would end their runs with more or less the same perspective of all of these standards and The West Wing would come to a conclusion with the idea that while President Bartlet’s term ended, things would go on for the new administration much as it had for the old one.
The X-Files faced a different set of challenges from its predecessors, the most important being the mythology. Well before the series finale was announced in February of 2002, I doubt even the die-hard fans of the series had any hope that the mythology was going to make sense in the end. And by February of 2002, die-hard fans were practically the only ones watching The X-Files. I certainly wasn’t one of them.
As I wrote before The X-Files had missed multiple opportunities to wrap up the series in a satisfying way. The last chance had come at the end of Season 8 and when it was announced that it was continuing with Gillian Anderson but not David Duchovny, it was a bridge too far for the majority of fans. The ninth season had some creative highlights to be sure but the majority of the final season was a disaster. The Monster of the Week episodes had lost even the spark of originality they’d once had, no matter how good Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish were (and they could be very good) they could not escape the shadows of their predecessors and Gillian Anderson spent the entire season basically in a mix of mourning and motherhood and was absolutely miserable to watch. The fact that the show had decided — yet again — to reinvent the mythology was bad enough, that they kept trying to connect it to the previous story was worse.
And rather than seem relieved by the cancellation, the writers spent the final stretch of episodes deciding to make all the long time fans regret they’d stayed around. The Lone Gunmen, the only group of side characters that had survived the run of the series, were all killed off so ignominiously it seemed like a crueler joke then their spinoff series. In the following episode Scully made the decision, having spent the better part of Season Nine determined to do everything to protect her infant son, to give him up for adoption for reasons that only seemed to be the writers getting rid of a bad storyline. I only heard about these things online — I had forsaken the series at the start of Season 8- and every time I heard about these developments I hated Chris Carter and his writers all the more.
I had been relieved to hear the show had been cancelled that year and has spent much of the next few months debating whether I should even watch the series finale. What drew me in — and I suspect drew those who watched — was the announcement that David Duchovny was returning as Mulder. The fact that the episode would be advertised as ‘the Truth will finally be revealed’ was not a draw to me. The way that Carter had treated the mythology in Season 8 had demonstrated to me what I should have realized long ago: that despite all evidence to the contrary, he was making it up as he went.
I had no illusions that Carter could even try to write a satisfying resolution to The X-Files mythology by now. All I cared about was the reunion between Mulder and Scully. I was understandably infuriated that after seven years of both denial by Carter and all the UST, the consummation of this relationship had not only happened off screen but that Mulder and Scully denied it until after Mulder was gone. (If fans hold a grudge against the writers after twenty years, this is a betrayal that I imagine rankles deeper than all of the flaws of the mythology.) I wanted to see Mulder and Scully back together. I wanted them to deal with the repercussions of Scully’s decision to give away her son without Mulder’s consent. I wanted them to have a happy ending, whether that meant the two of them riding off into the sunset or working together in the basement was irrelevant. The closure I wanted was with Mulder and Scully, not the mythology. It’s telling not only that the finale failed that standard, but that’s by far the least of its problems.
By a quirk of fate The Truth aired on the day of my graduation from college. The actual ceremony was very early in the morning and after the pomp and circumstance, I went back home with my parents. I think I tried to doze for awhile and when I woke up my parents understandably wanted to take me out to Peter Luger’s, the premier steakhouse in New York to celebrate. At the time I was more fixated on seeing TV when it happened (to be fair in 2002 there was no such thing as streaming) and I was conflicted. I believe we agreed that we would go out to dinner and I would tape the series finale which must have been what happened because I had the original VHS recording more than fifteen years later.
So after we got home, later that night I finally saw The Truth. And just like every other fan of The X-Files it who saw it, I came away hugely disappointed. I will describe it in detail because the biggest complaint of the series finale of Lost was how little information about the mythology of the show we got. I think that fans may have been looking for what might be considered an information dump, explaining everything that we had seen over six seasons, putting it into context and telling us why it happened. That is exactly what we got during ‘The Truth’ — two full hours of it, in fact, and almost from beginning to end, it was an excruciating, horrifying, almost laughably ridiculous bad time that while it was going on, the viewer heard explained what we had been watching all this time — and while it was going on the viewer was truly questioning why we had spent so much time and energy giving this much space in your head. Coming away from it, a viewer might have wondered why they had watched this series in the first place.
What hurts the most is that for the opening fifteen minutes you can see the possibilities of greatness. The first five minutes are one of the best opening sequences of the entire series because it mixes both the familiar and the strange. We see something we’ve seen variations on for the first eight seasons — Mulder is moving clandestinely through what we assume is a secret government facility, looking for secrets. But there are differences, and not just that this is the first time in a year we’ve seen Duchovny. Mulder is moving with a certainty we’ve never seen before: he flies on to the facility, walks through doors and has access codes he didn’t have. Just as he finds something he clearly shouldn’t he is discovered by security, barely escapes from danger and runs for his life. Usually he manages to escape unharmed. This time in running for his life, he is not only spotted but kills somebody in attempting to escape. The teaser ends with him being captured.
All of this unfolds in almost total silence. We only here one exchange in dialogue and that’s strange to: Mulder is momentarily rescued by Krycek, who we saw killed last year. In hindsight, this is a foreshadowing of one of the biggest blunders of the episode: the appearance of the dead talking to Mulder with no explanation — and not really offering much. But at the time, we’re used to it.
The next ten minutes are equally brilliant: Mulder is stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and beatings before he finally is forced to confess. It’s a reminder of 21st century politics. Finally Scully and Skinner visit him and lockup and Mulder looks like he’s been brainwashed in how pleasant he seems given the circumstances. That’s actually scarier than we’ve already seen. Finally we learn that Mulder is being held and charged with the murder of Knowle Rohrer, the ‘supersoldier’ who was the nemesis of Season 9 and who as Doggett points out, ‘can’t be killed.”
Then Mulder, Scully and Skinner are reunited and Mulder quotes Silence of the Lambs, calling Scully Clarice. It’s both a sign Mulder is back and a reference to the fact that one of the influences for Scully was Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling. Mulder then kisses Scully deeply and with true love and our hearts swell. Mulder then undercuts it by offering to kiss Skinner too. It’s a sign that something resembling the status quo has been restored and its wonderful. Then it all goes to hell.
Once Mulder is told he’s being put on trial, he says “what’s on trial is the truth.” Immediately after this we see a scene with Kersh meeting with a military figure telling him in no uncertain terms how much of a problem Mulder has been and he wants a guilty verdict. The thing is even without this scene the long-time fan of the viewer knows the moment Mulder has decided that his defense will be ‘the truth’, he might as well have stuck his head in a noose.
In eight seasons on The X-Files no one has ever believed any things Mulder has told them. It basically took Scully and Skinner seven seasons for them to admit he was right, and in the latter case he had to see a flying saucer take Mulder to admit his agent might have been telling the truth about the reports he’d been filing all those years. No one believed Mulder before Scully joined the X-Files and it’s been made painfully clear every time Mulder has tried to explain monsters of the week to the actual law enforcement that he looks ridiculous. Mulder knows better than anyone else that no one will ever believe a word he says: for him to put his life on the line based on his way of thinking is essentially suicide.
The ‘trial’ that takes place is laughably horrible in every sense. The prosecution does its job, pointing out that they have more thirty witnesses who saw Mulder kill Knowle Rohrer. Skinner chooses to represent Mulder as his defense counsel, which makes you wonder if Mulder could have won an appeal on the grounds of incompetent counsel or even pleading insanity.
Scully then comes in and is the first of a series of regulars — I mean, witnesses — to tell every detail of the mythology. How this is supposed to help get Mulder acquitted is actually a point the defense keeps repeatedly making; the fact that everyone of his witnesses never answers that question should be a clear sign. In retrospect, the greatest bit of acting is by the ‘tribunal’ that is hearing Mulder case. They spend the better part of an hour looking deadly serious at Mulder as they hear every detail without so much as cracking a smile. The viewer watching at home has seen all of these events, knows that they took place and if you’re like me, you were groaning in agony as it was recited, every time a familiar face appeared thinking: “I spent so much time taking this seriously?”
The prosecution barely asks any questions in cross examination of each witness undercutting them. He doesn’t have to, really. None of the characters are defense witnesses: their sole purpose is to regurgitate the entire mythology of the X-Files through the use of a dull recitation of facts and flashbacks to previous episodes. The problem isn’t that they’re not credible witnesses — they’ve seen everything that happened — it’s that none of it has any pertinence to Mulder’s trial. And yet somehow even the fact that none of this helps him, Mulder seems to be going out of his way to protect his friends and even his enemies from saying this drivel as his defense. His argument might be he doesn’t want them to put their lives in danger; maybe he wants to spare the audience from another few minutes of what is the same story.
Duchovny, it’s worth noting, does nothing during all of this but sit with his arms crossed in front of him occasionally getting angry. It’s kind of offensive that after advertising the return of Mulder, he basically spends the majority of the episode, looking stern as his fate is discussed and refusing to testify in his own defense. He refuses to tell Scully why — but the dead are more than willing to talk with him.
Yes I forgot to mention. Mulder spends much of the episode communing with the ghosts of the people he lost during his quest. There’s no explanation as to how he can suddenly see the spirits of the dead and it might as well be just a plot device for all the good they actually do. Krycek helps hold a door open for Mulder and then spends time in prison admonishing him. Later on X, one of his informants who was murdered, does exactly the same — and then somehow manages to provide the address of Marita Covarrubias, Mulder’s third informant, who we have been told can break this case wide open. Of course when she shows up and seems on the verge of setting Mulder free, he tells Skinner to abruptly stop questioning her.
Why he wants to save Covarrubias is itself hard to understand. The last time he saw her (in Requiem, the Season 7 finale) she and Krycek told him how to find a UFO that would give him the proof he had searched for. There’s a very good chance that the two of them manipulated Mulder into being taken and we haven’t seen her since then. Besides Covarrubias had worked for the Smoking Man before that and had double crossed almost everyone she’d worked for. But I guess now that Mulder’s life is at stake, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones.
It’s not until the middle of the second hour that Scully finally manages to get actual evidence that could get Mulder off the hook — she gets access to Knowle Rohrer’s body and finds that it is, in fact, not Knowle Rohrer. When Scully comes to them with that evidence Kersh who has been judging immediately argues its irrelevant and orders the trial over. We’re reminded this trial was rigged in the first place — and it makes us wonder why we spent the last hour going over all of this again.
Immediately after this the verdict is delivered and of course Mulder is found guilty. Mulder then is given a chance to speak and does what the show made him and so many cast members do all too often: deliver a long torturous monologue with purple prose and stilted dialogue that’s supposed to be inspiring. The fact that this is somehow pictured as a moment of triumph for Mulder is practically so much of the show in a microcosm: Mulder is speaking truth to power only after its too late to do anything about it.
Mulder being sentenced to death is almost a relief after everything we’ve been through the viewer almost thinks he deserves his fate for putting this through all of this. But there’s still more than half an hour to go.
That night Knowle Rohrer comes to the base Mulder is being held in to terminate him. (You’d think the conspiracy might no better than to use the man who Mulder supposedly killed to kill him in his cell, but the show never applied logic in so much.) Skinner and Doggett have shown up to break Mulder out of jail and they are abetted by Kersh, who tells them he’s there doing “what I should have done to begin with.’ Yes, it’s the typical road to Damascus moment. We practically expect Kersh to be killed immediately afterwards.
He urges Mulder and Scully to get a car and go to Canada. The only way to survive is to get out of the country. Naturally Mulder starts going south because ‘he wants to see a man about the truth’. After driving all night, he gets out of the car at dawn to urinate and is visited by the Lone Gunmen. They’ve always been his biggest allies in life; in death, they tell him he has to give up.
In DC, Doggett and Reyes are trying to protect Gibson Praise (it doesn’t matter) and walk into The X-Files to find that the offices have been shut down. They go to Skinner and find out it’s repercussions for taking Mulder’s side during the trial. Skinner and Kersh go into see a man we saw at the trial who we know works for the conspiracy. Under normal circumstances this would be they’re dead, but as we’ll find out in the revivals both not only survived but had no consequences to their careers. Whatever. Doggett and Reyes are now told by Gibson that they know where Mulder is — and so does he.
Mulder and Scully reach New Mexico. Mulder tells Scully he was sent to the government facility at the start by a man who called himself ‘the keeper of the truth’. With a complete lack of surprise we find that its none other than the Smoking Man. Yes despite the fact he was thrown down a flight of stairs two years ago and was dying of cancer even then, he’s still alive and aside from long white hair is absolutely no different then before.
The Smoking Man then tells Mulder the real reason he’s come. The reason that he’s kept Mulder alive all these year. The ultimate truth that we’ve been waiting for all this time…
…it’s a date. December 21, 2012. That’s the day of the final alien invasion.
Now I’ll confess even after everything that had happened, I still shivered a little internally. I mean, I knew The X-Files was a TV show, complete fiction, and the mythology made no sense but nevertheless…could it be?
Of course now I realize how ludicrous this was not just for a plot standpoint but that it basically makes everything we’ve watched the last nine seasons kind of pointless too. So you’re telling me that this invasion Mulder and Scully have spent nine years trying to stop, that we’ve seen men in smoke-filled rooms talking about ominously…was never going to happen while the series was on the air?! Hell, both Fight the Future and a storyline in Season 6 told us the colonization was going to happen that day and now you’re telling is it was all crap! During this whole period Mulder and Scully could have hooked up, had their son and raised him while making plans on how to save the world. (“Ok, tomorrow night’s the night we have our meeting about how to stop the invasion. Be sure to pick up a nice red wine!”)
Hell by these standards even a death sentence would have been pointless. Just sentence Mulder to life in prison and release him on December 20, 2012 when its too late to do anything!
And knowing this horrible secret the Smoking Man gives Mulder permission to die.
Almost as if to make up for the last hour and a half, much of the last fifteen minutes try to do too much. It’s almost like Carter remembered: “Hey! It’s the final episode. We should have something actually happen!” and then overcompensates immensely.
Magically everybody in the series knows where Mulder and Scully are Doggett and Reyes track them down by helicopter, Knowle Rohrer shows up in a hummer, and huge black helicopters all converge on them. There are numerous exchanges, Doggett and Reyes try to stop Rohrer with gun shots, but luckily he dies anyway and everybody drives away just as the helicopters arrive on scene to blow the Smoking Man to bits and we see him burn down to his skeleton. (He gets better, of course.)
In the final scene Mulder and Scully are sitting quietly in a motel room in a pensive mood. Mulder doubts everything he’s spent his life doing and thinks he failed. Scully tells him that he doesn’t believe that and that despite everything — including the fact that they will spend the rest of their lives running — she wouldn’t change a thing. Mulder cradles Scully on the bed. “Maybe there’s hope,” he says as the iconic theme music plays for the first time for the end credits. I will admit that last scene is moving. Shame it comes at the end of a series finale that’s such an incredible mess and a waste of time.
I need to be honest and say despite my description this episode is better than I’ve made it sound. As I said, the beginning and end are moving, there are individual moments of acting that are very good throughout. Gillian Anderson never steps wrong; Robert Patrick carries himself with dignity and several moments are very cinematic. It’s not the worst episode of the series by a long shot; it at least has the shine of effort, particularly after the last few seasons where so much of the show has been by the numbers.
But it’s a huge disappointment just the same, mainly because for a series finale it doesn’t seem to be ending anything. I realize The X-Files was never the kind of show to give you closure but there’s nothing in this entire episode that we haven’t seen in so many season finales over the years. Mulder’s life being in danger was the go-to move for most season finales, the X-Files being closed down happened at least twice before in Season finales and everything we see seems more of a lead up for a new season then the final episode. Even the last moment in the motel could just as easily be the sign that we’ll be starting over next year…except we all know we won’t.
Now let me get to why I think the comparison to Lost is the most vital. The series finale of Lost is among the most polarizing in history: some people thought it was perfect, some people thought it ruined the entire show. There is no debate about the quality of the series finale of The X-Files: every fan of the show online and in publications agrees that it is terrible and disastrous. One reviewer said that: “It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.” Yet unlike with Lost — and indeed so many other sci-fi fantasy shows with divisive or horrible finales, from Battlestar Galactica to Fringe to Game of Thrones — nobody ever thought the final episode did anything to make them reject The X-Files as a whole. The question is why?
The obvious argument is, of course, that this wasn’t the end of The X-Files. Six years later we got a film: I Want to Believe and eight years after that we got the first of two revival seasons all of which continued the adventures of Mulder and Scully. But that argument only goes so far: the reception for the movie was mixed at best and the box office was small and while many people like the revival seasons, there are just as many who think that it was just another version of what TV was doing at the time. And even if you allow for that fact it shouldn’t let the wretched state of ‘The Truth’ of the hook: the episode was so wretched and by 2002 so few people were watching it than a revival of the show might have been a possibility to extreme for even Mulder to believe in.
And even if you allow for that, the fact remains that both the film and the revival basically ignore the fact the series finale never happened. The series ends with Mulder and Scully on the run under penalty of death but when the film starts, Scully and Mulder are living in the DC area together, basically living normal lives and not entirely invisible. The Bureau finds Scully with no trouble and its clear they’ve known where Mulder was and the fact that neither was living off the grid doesn’t correlate with what we saw at the end. And that’s Mulder and Scully, in the revival, the fates of most of the regulars are either unchanged (Skinner and Kersh) unknown (Doggett) or unexplained (Reyes had switched to working for the new Syndicate.
A more likely reason is that The X-Files was never exclusively about the mythology. Considering that three-quarters of the episodes dealt with what would be called Monsters of the Week and that as the series went on they became infinitely superior to the mythology, the average viewer could still watch most of the episodes and not have their enjoyment unfiltered. It certainly hasn’t affected my enjoyment of the series when it comes to watching it in reruns: though like many I prefer the stand-alone to mythology.
And maybe the most important reason of all was the timing of it. When ‘The Truth’ aired in 2002, the idea of a series final dividing and destroying the memory of a beloved show was unheard of. At that point, the polarizing finales not only of Lost but The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men and Dexter were years in the future. As polarizing as the series finales of Seinfeld and Roseanne had been and still are, it had not ruined the overall enjoyment of the series. At that point, you could loathe how the series ended but not hate the entire series as a result. When Peak TV started to become almost exclusively serialized dramas (and eventually comedies) the ending started to be more important.
The thing is, maybe one lesson we should have taken from The X-Files was that we shouldn’t let a terrible ending stop us from loving the series that we’d spent so much time watching. In a sense I’ve held to this principle my entire viewing life, not just with The X-Files and Lost. If a TV series is an A student for almost the entire length of its run, but its final paper is an F, does that mean you decide that dragged the grade down enough for it to be an F-? I realize the curve for enjoying series went up during the era of Peak TV but this still seems to be a ridiculous benchmark.
Of course there are other reasons why so many of us consider the final episode of Lost enough of a reason to dismiss the entire series. And when I get to the final part of my book, I ‘m going to argue exactly why much of this is a ridiculous standard too.