x-files

This will be news that you either love or hate: Next season of ‘The X-Files’ will only contain two mythology episodes.

While we don’t know how it will be playing out quite yet, we did learn from President of Fox Broadcasting David Madden at the Television Critics Association that:

“It’s going to be similar. The first episode will be a mythology episode, but much simpler than last season’s because we have less to catch up on. There will be eight stand-alones.”

One has to hope that the very first episode will address Gillian Anderson’s disappearance and that she’ll be back for the entire season. It would feel off for Agent Mulder to not be spending all of his time working on recovering Scully if she isn’t back as the season kicks off.  We do know that Annabeth Gish is returning as Monica Reyes and my original hope was that while she would be more involved, I just hope that it won’t be as a Scully replacement.

While on the whole, the monster of the week episodes were better done, it was the mythology episodes which were such a driving force behind Mulder, so it feels out of place with so little of it being addressed here. However, after the panel we did hear from Chairman and CEO of Fox Television Group Dana Walden that some of the mythology could be touched on in the interior episodes, it just wouldn’t be the core to the stories being told:

“It’s hard because I don’t want to say they were disappointing because we have a lot of positive feedback as well, clearly 15-plus million viewers an episode. I think Chris [Carter] is really excited about a new round of episodes. There was certainly no reason for him to have to do it. He’s wildly successful. It wasn’t about the money. He had a real hunger and enthusiasm to do future episodes. Everyone’s seen the first script and it’s excellent, so I think it’s a very good starting place for the show and we’re excited about the next season.”

One interesting mixture to the writer’s room is that they’ve added more women to the creative process which is something the franchise has long lacked:

“Chris has assigned two women episodes. Two of the 10 episodes will be written by women. We do have two female directors and half of our directors are diverse. I think Chris is making moves in the right direction. I don’t want to make excuses for anyone. I just want to explain after 200-plus episodes of a show with a very specific mythology, the tendency is to want to rely on the people who helped you on the original when you’re just doing 10 episodes. The crew with Chris for a very long time happened to be a group of male writers. That’s not an excuse. It’s only to explain how we ended up in that situation at the very beginning of this process.”

Apparently, this happened before the controversy had even popped up and has been a change not made in reaction to complaints but rather something which had evolved naturally:

“We had hired the writers before news broke of this particular situation. No one was replaced so I’m not 100 percent sure of the chronology of this situation. No one was replaced and the two had already been assigned as far as I remember.”

At least that should calm some of the critics of the series.

Are you looking forward to the next season of ‘The X-Files’? Are you happy or annoyed that only two of the episodes will revolve around the core mythology? Will Scully be back as the series kicks off? Share your thoughts below!

Source: /Film