The X-Files: My Struggle

Unless you’ve been living on a rock, or in a secluded farmhouse somewhere in Virginia hiding from the government, you’ve probably heard the news: The X-Files is back! And by “back” I mean really back, in every sense of the word, classic opening credits included. The first new episode in nearly fourteen years fell right back into old habits, both good and bad. The good news is David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson fell right back into their roles and usual chemistry, despite there being eight years since the last time they played these characters. (Mitch Pileggi’s Skinner is also back in top form, and thank God for that.)

On the less good side of things, this episode was what I’d call a typical Chris Carter mythology infodump, something he did back in the original series (and often in season premieres like this one). It’s never going to be the best episode of The X-Files, because there’s just too much information to sort out and a bit heavy on the crazy conspiracy-filled rants. But, quibbles aside, it’s still the motherbleepin’ X-Files and this fan is just glad to have those faces back on her TV again. So because this episode was heavy on exposition and mythology, rather than a typical scene-by-scene recap, let’s go with a list of the most important things we learned from “My Struggle.”

1. In the years since the last movie, I Want to Believe, Mulder and Scully have ended their romantic partnership, though there’s still plenty of significant glances between them. Enough to fuel a spaceship just on their chemistry. Scully now works at a hospital in Washington, D.C. on a team of doctors who perform surgery on children born without ears. Mulder is mostly a hermit, but also probably a doomsday prepper and that guy who leaves comments on YouTube about 9/11 being an inside job. Skinner is still Skinnering on over at the FBI.
2. Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale) is a conservative talk show host who does a lot of talking about conspiracies on his show and is secretly a Mulder and Scully fanboy. He goes through Skinner to set up a meeting with our favorite, former, spooky agents because he has a conspiracy story that he’s about to blow wide open, and he wants the experts to on the subject to confirm what he believes. He’s also potentially sleazy and has a thing for Scully, even giving her a ride in his limo that comes stocked with champagne. To be fair, who could blame a guy for being in love with Medical Doctor Dana Scully?
3. Tad introduces them to Sveta (Annet Mahendru), a girl that was once interviewed by Mulder as a child after being abducted multiple times. She claims that she was implanted with embryos multiple times, and had all of those babies taken out of her. Sveta also tells them she has alien DNA and sporadic telekinesis. Later, while Scully is running blood tests on her, she proves that she may be able to read minds by taking about Mulder and Scully’s relationship and their son William.
4. Tad takes Mulder to a secret building where some scientists are housing an ARV (Alien Replica Vehicle), and they basically show Mulder all of its fancy tricks and Mulder lights up like a kid on Christmas morning as he watches it.
5. We get several flashbacks to the crash at Roswell in 1947, where a young doctor is brought there by a Man in Black. They find an injured alien in the desert, who is quickly shot to death by the military. In present day, we meet that doctor again, now an old man (Rance Howard), who has been meeting in secret with Mulder for a decade, and gives the usual cryptic kind of information that informants on this show always give. (Hate to break it to this guy, but informants don’t last long on The X-Files, so I hope you get your affairs in order, pal.)
6. Mulder goes back to see Sveta and in true Mulder fashion, he knows something is fishy about her story. He asks who really took her babies, and she confesses that it was men from the government and not aliens. Mulder, as he does, starts reeling and quickly unravels, realizing that maybe there are no aliens and it’s just been the government keeping him (and everyone else) distracted from the real truth.
7. So, here’s the story, in the shortest, simplest way I can possibly describe it: Remember that invasion that was supposed to happen in 2012? Well, really it was just the countdown clock that began in 2012. Mulder and Tad propose that all of the horrible world events that have happened in the past years was a set-up for the government (or at least this shadow government who has been messing with Mulder for years) to take over everything. It started with the H-bomb tests of the 1940s which drew the UFOs here, because the aliens were like, “Hey, earth people, you’re going to blow yourselves up and we’re worried about you.” But as a result of all those UFO crashes, the government got into tests performed on humans inside the UFOs, including hybridization, gene editing and forced embryo implantations. So it was never the aliens abducting people, it was the government building their forces and using alien tech that they could use against opposing forces, so they could take over the world. They lay out how they think it will happen and Tad plans to expose it all on his show, and Scully calls that irresponsible fear mongering and then heads right the hell out of there.
8. Okay, so, I think that makes sense? Maybe? I mean? This is Chris Carter, so the hell knows?
9. Scully takes a break between surgeries and looks up Tad’s show, discovering that someone has gotten to Sveta and she’s now telling reporters that Tad paid her to lie about the abductions. Oh, hey, remember those blood tests? The first time she ran them, they came back negative for alien DNA. But as Scully meets with Mulder in the parking garage, she tells him she ran them again, as well as her own, and discovered that Sveta was right, and they have something in common. She’s finally, officially, back in, and tells Mulder they have to stop these sonsofbitches (hell yes, Scully), right before they get a message from Skinner asking to see them ASAP.
10. Skinner plays a small, but crucial, role in this episode. He meets with Mulder at one point in the abandoned X-Files office to remind him that he always supported him and backed him up, and still does. (Seriously though, fourteen years and nobody at the FBI turned that room into anything else? That might be the most unbelievable thing in this episode!) His text message to Mulder and Scully at the end is presumably to tell them he’s re-opening the X-Files, which is why we love that man so much. Thanks Walter!
11. Elsewhere in the episode, some big government vehicles blow up the ARV that Mulder saw, along with the scientists. And then poor Sveta is driving down an empty highway when an alien craft appears above her, scans her through her sunroof and then blows her car up before she can escape. (I hope this isn’t the last we see of Sveta, because Annet Mahendru is fantastic in this role, just as she is on The Americans in a vastly different role.)
12. Defying all odds, because, well, this is The X-Files after all, that cigarette smoking bastard Cancer Man is alive (and not super dead like the last time we saw him). He looks like something I scraped out of a frying pan once and he’s now smoking his cigarettes through a hole in his throat, but he’s definitely alive and grumbling about the X-Files being re-opened.
13. Let’s talk about that episode title. “My Struggle” is the English translation of Mein Kampf, which in case you aren’t up on your history, is the title of a little book written by some guy named Adolph Hitler. Yes, that same Hitler who went on to become a mass-murdering dictator who thought eugenics was a swell idea. So if that gives us an indication where this arc is going, well, uh-oh.

Photo Courtesy of FOX