THE X-FILES

   US tv series (1993-). Ten Thirteen Productions in association with 20th Century Television. Series created by Chris Carter who is also executive producer; co-executive prods R.W. Goodwin, Glen Morgan and James Wong; supervising prod Howard Gordon; prods Joseph Patrick Finn, Paul Brown, David Nutter; co-prod Paul Rabwin; music Mark Snow. Directors includeCarter, Goodwin, Nutter, Michael Lange, Robert Mandel, Rob Bowman, Harry Longstreet, Daniel Sackheim. Writers include Carter, Brown, Gordon, Morgan, Wong, Darin Morgan, Chris Ruppenthal. Starring David Duchovny as FBI agent Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson as FBI agent Dana Scully. Two seasons to date, the first of 24 one-hour episodes Sep 1993-May 1994, the second season, began Sep 1994, current, 21 one-hour episodes to the end of March 1995. Colour.

   This, which may come to be seen as one of the key sf tv series of the mid 1990s, has been neither a failure nor a great success in the ratings, but has rapidly garnered a very committed cult following. Very much the brainchild of creator/executive producer/director/writerChris Carter, it is a comparatively low-budget series administered by him from Los Angeles and ostensibly set in the USA but actually shot in Canada, in and around Vancouver. A small, secret department of the FBI isdedicated to investigating cases that appear to have an element of the paranormal about them, and the files dealing with these cases are called the X-files. There are only two investigators in the department, male agent Fox Mulder (Duchovny), who is emotional, open-minded, ready to believe in all sorts of strange phenomena, and his female colleague agent Dana Scully (Anderson), who is cool, medically trained, logical,sceptical. The premise is not especially original; the series is a little like PROJECT UFO (1978-79), and more closely resembles the earlier KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (1974-75), which Carter was devoted to as achild. The X-Files, however, is both more sophisticated and darker than either of these.The phenomena investigated cover the full gamut of tabloid weirdness in the area of "the unexplained", ranging from abductions of humans by aliens in UFOs-a recurrent theme-through tales of telepathy, projection of nightmares, vampires, werewolves, alien life-forms found frozen in the arctic, unusual longevity, shape-shifting, monsters, DNA-spliced hybrids, and so on almost indefinitely. In most cases asufficient veneer of rationalisation exists (events pass too quickly for most viewers to subject these rationalisations to real scrutiny) for the series to qualify as definitely sf rather than fantasy. But this is sf slewed towards the GOTHIC, the menacing, towards HORROR. The programme owes a debt to Twin Peaks, a cult tv success of the early 1990s and not itself sf. More direct, famous sources, such as the film THE THING (1951), are plundered regularly and remorselessly, but with sufficiently clever a blend of homage and variation-on-a-theme to avoid the accusation of plagiarism. Many of the strange events in the series result, it seems, from secret, cynical government experiment, and it is here that its characteristic tone- PARANOIA-evolves. A running theme is the existence of high-level conspiracies, possibly centred in the Pentagon, which constantly threaten the professional integrity not to say the lives of Mulder and Scully. The FBI-itself infiltrated-seems helpless in the faceof greater powers. The second season, in fact, is a continuous story involving Scully's apparent abduction into a UFO, connections between this and government conspiracies and the temporary forced closure of the X-files department.What makes the series work so well is its willingnessto penetrate a very long way indeed into the over-the-top and the bizarre (almost to the verge of black farce) combined with an (apparently)completely serious tone. The relationship between Mulder and Scully, no ordinary love relationship, is subtle, developing and absorbingly displayed: the performances are very good. The whole series, indeed, is presented with passion and intensity, which makes for unusual tv viewing.

   PN