Ahead of the return of The X-Files next year, we look at some classic investigations that could be well worth the show going back to… News broke recently that sent The X-Files fandom into a swirl. After months of waiting, reports emerged that Ryan Coogler’s revival of the show has been picked up for a ... The X-Files Project | five classic X-Files stories Ryan Coogler could reinvent
Ahead of the return of The X-Files next year, we look at some classic investigations that could be well worth the show going back to…
News broke recently that sent The X-Files fandom into a swirl. After months of waiting, reports emerged that Ryan Coogler’s revival of the show has been picked up for a full series order, after production of a pilot episode in the summer.
Being referred to as ‘The X-Files Project’ (though debate remains as to whether that will be the ultimate title), the show will see stars Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel as “two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents who form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.”
Expectation for this project is high. Coogler, in the wake of the Oscar-nominated Sinners, is one of Hollywood’s hottest properties. Deadwyler and Patel are rising, critically-acclaimed stars. Coogler has attracted impressive figures to join them, stars such as Amy Madigan and Steve Buscemi, plus Ludwig Goransson as composer (certainly for the pilot).
And while Coogler will not showrun day to day, busy now prepping a third Black Panther film, he is likely to be very involved on a producing level and perhaps direct or write further episodes.
This is even before the exciting possibility of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson returning to their immortal roles as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, which many fans expect them to do, if as emeritus guests rather than regulars.
Given Coogler’s love and reverence of the show, expect Mulder, Scully and quite possibly plenty of other call backs, characters and more to the show of old, while still charting an exciting and hopefully chilling new path.
To that end, while we have no plot details as of yet even about the pilot (bar a Native American connection to the narrative, which itself is very X-Files), it might be fun to speculate about what classic stories Coogler and his team could reimagine or even continue from the original show, if they chose to do so.
Here are five out of what could be innumerable choices.
Tooms 3
Eugene Victor Tooms only ever appeared in the first series of The X-Files in two episodes, but he was immortalised straight away as one of the show’s key ‘monsters’ that would reflect the dark, terrifying underbelly of modern America.
Played by Doug Hutchison, he was a quiet, unassuming workman who could squeeze into small spaces and killed people to eat their livers, before hibernating for 30-year cycles. His episodes were called ‘Squeeze’ and in the only example of a guest villain getting a story named after them, ‘Tooms’.
Now, Eugene did end up seemingly squashed under the elevator of an abandoned shopping mall, but nobody ever really dies on The X-Files. It would be entirely conceivable for Tooms to have found a way to live on, hibernate and he would be due a return to get some more livery goods (maybe with a nice Chianti) after several decades underground. Or maybe he had an offspring, Tooms Jr, who could take up after his father. A recast could be necessary, given Hutchison’s unsavoury personal life subsequently, but Tooms could survive a new actor. He has lived this long after all…
A Trinity of Vampires
For a show all about the paranormal, The X-Files didn’t really often play with conventional ‘monsters’, certainly from the Universal studios handbook anyway. We only saw vampires twice on the show, and one was a comedy episode (Season 5’s brilliant ‘Bad Blood’).
The other was ‘3’, which saw a lone Mulder face down a trinity of very post-modern, brooding vampires in the Los Angeles heat, pulled into a very dark tale where he is seduced by Kristen (played by Duchovny’s real life beau at the time, Perrey Reeves) and loses perspective.
Now this came at a strange time on the show. Anderson was having her first child and Scully was missing (kidnapped by aliens or government men, the show never really decides) and Mulder was himself in a very dark emotional place. The next episode reaffirms the status quo but ‘3’, though it didn’t completely work, evoked a very 90s style of pre-Twilight vampire well.
There is real space for vampires, tethered to dark religious connotations, to work on the new show. A remake of ‘3’ could be fascinating and, well, Coogler does like his blood-drinkers as we have seen…
The return of Darin Morgan
There isn’t one X-Files fan who would not love to see Darin Morgan return with his delightfully unique, self-aware brand of ironic comedy for the new series. Morgan’s ability to lampoon and pastiche the show from season 2’s ‘Humbug’, through to two of the best episodes of Chris Carter’s 2010s revival of the show, opened up a whole new universe of how to write the show that other creatives, such as Vince Gilligan, took on themselves even after Morgan left the show.
Morgan is extremely self-deprecating about his work and impact on The X-Files but he remains engaged with the fandom (see below my conversation with him on The X-Cast some years ago) and his contribution in the last series, ‘The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat’, saw him tackle conspiracy theory brilliantly.
He remains a voice with something to say and if Coogler opted to have him write for Deadwyler and Patel, finding a comic register to their new investigators, who knows what modern cultural madness he could tap into?
The laughing face of Madness
Three seasons into The X-Files, Chris Carter launched Millennium, a show at times equally as magnificent as its more famous elder sibling. Across its first season, it took the mantle from Thomas Harris in depicting strange, intense and flamboyant serial killers being hunted by a former FBI agent in Frank Black who himself came close to madness via an ability to “see what the killer sees.” The seed for what Millennium became is also visible in Season 3’s ‘Grotesque’, where Mulder himself almost succumbs to primal, psychotic impulses.
Beautifully shot with a haunting, dark blue texture, it sees Mulder – formerly a specialist in serial killers before the X-Files – reconnecting with an old mentor who has a captured killer claiming a gargoyle spirit compelled him to kill. Mulder ends up so immersed in solving the case, he comes close to the edge himself, akin to Will Graham as we later see in Hannibal.
Tapping into this borderland between psychopathy and actual possession could be thrilling ground if a story such as ‘Grotesque’ was considered, plus it could give Deadwyler or Patel the chance to really flex their acting muscles.
A world without History, without Hope
Nobody remembers ‘Synchrony’ from season 4 except me, or die-hard fans, I’m convinced, but it’s one of my favourites.
Sci-fi straight out of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, it sees the strange freezing death of a scientist lead Mulder and Scully to the case of a research time about to discover tachyons that will enable the invention of time-travel, which the aged version of one team member has come back from the future to prevent.
Though it is one of those X-Files where neither Mulder or Scully have any personal development or growth, it’s a great little tale, well-executed, and opens up the pulpier side of science-fiction on a show built around proceedural investigation.
It’s why the show only ever dealt with time-travel (if you don’t count some of the lost time aspects around alien spacecraft and such in the broader series mythology) once, but there is scope for Coogler’s show to weave in these overtly science-fiction concepts in a really compelling way. Would love to see ‘Synchrony’ part 2…
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Honestly, this list could be 50 episodes long. The X-Files span dozens of genres across 200+ episodes, filled with invention, and full of possibility about where these stories could go. Ryan Coogler and his team are likely brimming with all new ideas of how to reflect the darkness of the modern world, which is hugely exciting, but if they ever want to delve into the archives and take a cue from some classic adventures, these would not be a bad place to start.
In the meantime, do check these episodes and the show at large out ahead of the new series, if you haven’t already. The truth is in there.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts (including The X-Cast: An X-Files Podcast) and books, via Linktr.ee here.
Don’t miss his recent conversation with series’ creator Chris Carter too on his director’s cut of the second X-Files movie.
