"We have a problem, they've re-opened the X-Files," the Smoking Man says before taking a puff on a cigarette through the hole in his neck. Personally, I'd say the biggest problem he has is nicotine addictiction. Seriously, try the patch or gum. There's no way smoking through your neck hole is pleasurable.
The X-Files premier illustrates everything wrong with network television. It was pre-empted for 22 minutes by an NFL post-game show. Everyone who set their PVRs missed half the show and were instead treated instead to interviews with jocks who chose getting concussed by even bigger jocks as their profession. Nobody tuning in just for the X-Files could possibly give a crap about that nonsense. Even if you did, the audio had such an echo to it that it was indecipherable. What is the logic behind a post-game? The game is officially over. It's not like they're goiing to score another touchdown. As for the sportscasters, 50% of them were wrong about their predictions for the game simply because they need someone to take the counter-point in their endless debate or else it's be a group of jackassess agreeing with each other. Now you're going to sit around and listen to what these same sport-jacket wearing idiots have to say about the next game after proving they don't know a damn thing? To make matters worse, this post-game was made longer by endless commercial breaks. Then they threw in an interview promoting NASCAR, because fuck you. FOX truly has their finger on the pulse of sci-fi fans.
Incidentally, the theme of the show is government conspiracy and the government trying to control the media. Then the entire episode is pre-empted by FOX. Coincidence?
As for the return of the X-Files, they broke down ten years of the show effiectively in about one minute. Apparently, X-Files: I Want to Believe was cannon, as Scully is still working at the same Sisters of Sorrow hospital she was at while Mulder is just kind of bumming around and complaining about the government while likely collecting unemployment cheques. There's a conspiracy-theory stand-in for Glenn Beck that lures Mulder and Scully back into the game. Mulder is shown an honest-to-God man-made UFO that shatters everything he believes about abductions. Scully, convienently, doesn't get the same viewing so she's still in sceptic mode even though she discovers she has alien DNA. Mulder says his catch-phrase about fifty times to drive up T-shirt sales and goes back to his old work-place to yell at his former boss, as we are all wont to do. He finds the office he abandoned over ten years ago empty and it upsets him for some reason, like he expected everything to be the way he left it.
The show set ups a new "conspiracy" that the government has faked alien abductions to spread terror in an attempt at a global takeover. They had acccess to limitless free energy, cloaking technlogy, alien DNA and interstellar spacecraft, but their main area of concern is making all the sheeple "Baa" in unison. Also: 9/11. This is infinitely dumber than any previous plot twist in the series. Honestly, if they had space ships, do they even need conspiracies? Why bother with Earth at all?
