‘The X-Files’ Review: We Are All Alex Jones

THE X-FILES
Season 10, Episode 1
“My Struggle”
AIR DATE: January 24, 2016
GRADE: B-

“[The X-Files have been closed]…for better or worse. We’ve…moved on with our lives.”
Dr. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson)

It’s been over a decade since The X-Files graced our TV screens and nearly a decade since showrunner Chris Carter tried to get us all off his back by pitting FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, respectively) against European organ smugglers in 2008’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe, ending the film with Mulder and Scully on their way to a remote island for some much-needed vacation.

With their luck, they’d end up battling smoke monsters and hiding from islanders in ratty clothing.

X-Files

FOX has re-booted The X-Files much to the squealing delight of the oldest of the old school fanboys. Yep, that X-Files. The one with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and that one FBI Boss dude with the glasses who “got the most fan mail” because he’s bald and manly with those football shoulders…where was I…?

Oh, yes.

The opener (entitled “My Struggle”) finds Mulder and Scully separated and fatigued, no longer living their dream life of Unabomber Chic seclusion in the middle of the mountains. While she works at the Cure de Christ Hospital from the last film, Mulder has gone from moping over monsters to…well…moping over monsters. “UFOs are a punchline,” he laments as we’re subjected to YouTube’s finest fake UFO footage made by armchair digital artists who should have been doing the effects for this show. We’re in a new era, Duchovny tells us. One where Adobe After Effects is an accomplice of the enemies of truth.

Who do Mulder and Scully turn to? Why, the great Tad O’Malley (guest star Joel McHale), a conspiracy theorist a’la Alex Jones and Glenn Beck who’s so over the top, he nearly makes the aforementioned look sane. O’Malley has uncovered a grand conspiracy “in the works since 9/11” which was, in his opinion “a warm-up for World War III.” Alien abductions are just part of this conspiracy. In fact, so are UFOs. None of what Mulder and Scully have seen or done in the last nine seasons and two movies has been “the truth”.

So what is the truth?

The X-Files

Who knows anymore? Mulder does. He buys O’Malley’s goofballery after O’Malley shows him a crew of scientists working on an “ARV”. What’s an “ARV”? “An Alien Replica Vehicle”. They’re vehicles built by the military utilizing technology found aboard the only real UFO ever recovered: the flying saucer at Roswell. “Well, wait, Matt,” you’re saying. “I’m confused. If UFOs are a giant hoax, how was Roswell real? As it turns out, aliens are just nice beings who have been trying to warn us not to kill ourselves. So they sent ships in to just kinda hover around and not do much. One crashed. And we built a ship using its energy and murdered all the aliens who warned us not to kill.

So, now we have this alien Ferrari that O’Malley just helps hoard instead of, I dunno, contacting all members of the press to expose the project.

What does Scully think? She thinks O’Malley’s insane and that his ideas “border on treason”. That is, when she’s not succumbing to O’Malley’s creepy (and frankly, unbelievable) attempts to get into her panties.

The first episode of the much-vaunted re-boot of The X-Files is frustrating. On the one hand, Duchovny and Anderson continue to have a warm, welcoming chemistry that shows no signs of ever dissipating, as aged and tired as they look. There are moments that really work. The “what you thought was real wasn’t real” storyline (as irritating as it is; Chris Carter’s asking a lot of viewers to dump much of their investment in the last decade of what’s been presented to them) is actually intriguing and, if the show manages to find new fans, gives us something to chew on for the future. On the other hand, the episode feels routine and by-the-book, bogged down by needless expository monologues written by and for the InfoWars mindset.

Granted, that’s the fringe element this show helped build and continues to wallow in. The problem the show noticeably suffers from is what Mulder hopelessly points out: the fringe is considered a laughing-stock and is, at times, viewed with a hostile level of scorn and derision. It’s hard to take any of what we’re saying seriously. Fox Mulder was always noble. We identified with his plight because what he was doing was born out of love, so it’s both confusing and unfortunate that the show portrays Glenn Beck types the same way.

Call me crazy, but I like my conspiracies served up classy, not lumped in with “the guvernmint is gonna take yer gunz!”

Matt Perri
Matt Perrihttp://mattperri.wordpress.com
Matt Perri is one of those literary Ronin you’ve never heard of until he shows up and tells you he’s a literary Ronin. He’s a native Californian, a film buff, old school gamer geek, and a sports/entertainment fan. A lifelong Giants, 49ers and Sharks fan, he also covers the world of pro-wrestling, writing recaps for WWE Monday Night RAW and Total Divas at Scott’s Blog of Doom. You can follow the guy on Twitter via @PerriTheSmark as well as here at The Workprint and his own blog, Matt's Entertainment.

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39 Comments

  1. Well, there is this…”The Deep State, The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government” by Mike Lofgren, and this…”Testing Theories of American Politic: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and finally, this…”Our Occulted History, Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?” by Jim Marrs…other than that we are all just waiting for Hillary and Jeb to get married and lots of have babies!

    • What needs to be understood is what a kill zone is. That is a *long* term ambush… An area is set apart in this case it is 25% of the world (EU,AU,USA,Canada and etc.) Demorize threw education and created poverty, Confuse threw propaganda, restrict travel, and all means to hide. Corrupt, crony law and degrade health. Then by all means disarm. The reason for a kill zone is the number of vicitms to aggressors. The end is to take down only at its weakest point. With the intention of first the victim fighting victim and not the UN military aggressor. The others will be thrown under the bus. The wait time would be likely a week as in the KIng riots. All escapes are blocked. The left empty cities, forests,mountains and etc will be bio weaponed after sweeps. When finished they will swing around the rest of the world.

  2. Our government is as pure as the driven snow. There’s no way these powerful, out of touch elitists would ever do anything to hurt the human capital. Everyone with any information that does not agree with the media has got to be a conspiracy theorist! Wake up!!! This is a tv show, there is a real world out there. In the real world everyone has their own opinions, it’s a shame the people who tout open minded rhetoric are the very same that verbally attack anyone that doesn’t agree with the liberal agenda. So anyone that believes any different than you is a conspiracy theorist?

  3. The author is from California and doesn’t like a show that might support the idea that “the government wants to take your guns.” I wonder if the conspiracy the show talked about was that the government was responsible for introducing crack into the black community, or creating the AIDS virus to infect the homosexual community would the author have found the show much more enjoyable? I’d wager he would.

    • I love The X-Files. I was watching it when it first premiered. The show is mostly about aliens and monsters and doesn’t really go the “dEy w0nT mUh GUNZ” route. I just thought this opener was dumb as hell. The finale was even more ridiculous and was so implausibly stupid, they retconned it completely in the 11th season premiere and pretended like it never happened.

  4. Well I would recommend a book from the 1960’s called “report from Iron Mountain” which puts itself forth as the report of an officially sanctioned government panel.

    According to Report From Iron Mountain, the best and brightest from various disciplines were brought together to solve a problem. The cold war was coming to an end and the “war model” that had been used to maintain order as well as to focus and control societies and the economies world wide, had to be replaced with a new model of control domestically and globally. Definitely worth a read, but I will focus on two interesting points.

    The report talks about using “pollution however severe” as the greatest threat to the survival of the specie (humans). They stated that it would take a generation to a generation and a half before people would be willing to accept it as a possibility; published 1967 + (generation and a half) 38 years = 2005 when did “inconvient truth come out?” 2009… Not endorsing the validity of any document, but someone is using parts of it in an effort to impose controls.

    The report also talks about using a “simulated attack” from outside this planet to unify and rally the nations of the world to work together to solve these extinction level problems. Literally an alien attack that requires us all to work together around the world to survive. This one is a tough stretch for me, but you could make an unmanned drone, or 1000 of them, look like anything you want to and it could literally be controlled from anywhere.

  5. Matt Perri, Except for the bit about the knowledge of free energy coming from Roswell – when all good conspiracy theorists know it came from Nikola Tesla – the story of X-files, whether it’s aliens or man-made guvmint, is the story of mankind itself. Evil people/aliens/demons oppressing & killing weaker people, or even better (from evil’s point of view) tricking gullible people into doing evil to each other. If these 6 episodes never touch on the vaccine industry, and its wake of death, destruction, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and eugenically driven SIDS rates (which must be driven up at all costs by tricking parents into killing their own babies the with exponentially expanding CDC “vaccine schedule”), as well as big-pharma’s 60% sponsorship of the main stream media as the means to cover it up, I’ll eat my hat.

    So Matt Perri, if this stuff doesn’t make you shake in your boots, you tell me why all American newborns are required, within 24 hrs of birth, to receive the highly liver-attacking Hep B vaccine, for a disease only prostitutes and drug addicts must work very hard to get?

    Just what did you think the first attempts with Anthrax, Bird Flu, Ebola & their own panic vaccines, and now this horrible Zika virus out of S. America were all about? Why DID you think the CDC mailed the Anthrax micro-organism to labs all over the country 2 years ago? For a yet TBD coordinated release date, of course.

    Let’s not even discuss killing off insurance-expensive old people with flu and pneumonia injections. GMO’ing whole species of food is only a fraction of step away from GMO’ing the human race, which we are already seeing headlines about on Drudge nearly every day. We already saw that (human DNA editing) touched on in this first episode. Anyone else notice the common theme with Halle Berry’s series Extant? – alien hybrid pregnancies stolen right from their mothers’ bodies, by non-alien men? Hmm… Why do all those corporate customers of Planned Parenthood need all those baby body parts? To grow them larger sewn into livestock, and then resell them on the organ transplant market? Organ transplants rates being driven by organ-attacking pharmaceuticals?

    The writers of X-files would be totally remiss to leave all these juicy plot lines out. The more the public is suspicious of all this stuff going on in real life, the less gullible and susceptible it is to falling for it. The first and best defense against evil is exposing it for what it is.

    I never got into X-files the last time around, but I sure as heck like to see some of this stuff being aired now. Entertainment is so much easier to swallow than “disclosure”. Alex Jones & Glenn Beck only seem “out there”, because the MSM has deemed them so. To the rest of us, they are the child yelling what he really sees, “The emperor has no clothes!”

    • “So Matt Perri, if this stuff doesn’t make you shake in your boots, you tell me why all American newborns are required, within 24 hrs of birth, to receive the highly liver-attacking Hep B vaccine, for a disease only prostitutes and drug addicts must work very hard to get?”

      You are an idiot. The vaccine isn’t required. Also the reason why it is recommended is because the virus can survive outside the body for a whole week.

      Not even gonna bother to respond to the rest of your comment because it’s evident you are nuttier than a squirrel turd.

      • Funny….you pull the fact that it isn’t technically required, and use that to debunk the rest. Hep B is not required but youre definitely pressured and made to feel like your a heretic. It’s also a blood born virus…your quip about living outside the body for a week is bullsh*t. People like you suck…debate the rest of it…stop with the strawman…

  6. I supposed the author is a pro-violence lefty who cannot picture his government doing anything evil like historical and factual “Operation Northwoods” (the plans to kill American public to justify a war on Cuba, see video). Or the New York Times (lefty) documenting all the FBI set up of terrorist acts here on US soil, see video. Here is the video I made to deal with you kind: “Bouquet of Lies” that addresses the deceptive, corrupt and violent nature of your government. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IQSyqF4KcU
    Btw, I don’t want to brag but this is more classy that the X-files. But again, like a sports fan you are you probably haven’t spend anytime researching any of this stuff so you feel it is very easy to ridicule others, isn’t it?

    • “Pro-violence Lefty”?! That’s a thing?

      As for the rest of your ranting, I don’t deny our government is capable of terrible acts. I am just shocked that you’re overly paranoid about so much when you don’t honestly need to be. I ridicule because people like Alex Jones aren’t interested in the truth and are playing you all for fools. He knows there’s money in the conspiracy racket and he’s made himself an incredibly rich man because you’re all gullible enough to believe his lies.

      • It is THE thing. The left has shown itself to be beyond violent…ruled by sheer emotion. Your Democrat voting Detroit and Chicago pets shoot each other in the streets and play games to see who can leave people unconscious after unprovoked attacks…dems be Obama voters, yo. Mass shooters and assassins are almost always atheistic, leftists… James Holmes, Jarrod Loughner, Chris Dorner, just to name a few. Not to mention the Communist (Who are avowed athiests) Purges, famines, and genocides in China, Russia, Cambodia, North Korea…all “leftist Utopias” where capitalism has been smashed and the glorious government shines it provenance on all… You spineless cowardly lefty sh*tbird. I can’t wait until you lefties are forced back into your commie closets…

        • Let’s see…

          “Your Democrat voting Detroit and Chicago pets shoot each other in the streets and play games to see who can leave people unconscious after unprovoked attacks…dems be Obama voters, yo.

          You’re racist…

          Mass shooters and assassins are almost always atheistic, leftists… James Holmes, Jarrod Loughner, Chris Dorner, just to name a few. Not to mention the Communist (Who are avowed athiests) Purges, famines, and genocides in China, Russia, Cambodia, North Korea…all “leftist Utopias” where capitalism has been smashed and the glorious government shines it provenance on all…

          Delusional and incorrect…

          You spineless cowardly lefty sh*tbird. I can’t wait until you lefties are forced back into your commie closets…

          And you’re violent and emotional for no reason.

          Plus you’re also hiding behind a phony IP address, e-mail address and username — and you’re calling ME “cowardly”.

          If you don’t keep things clean on this board, you’ll go bye-bye, away from this board. And you can tell all your tinfoil hat-wearing buddies how I’m “silencing you” because you have no idea how things really work.

      • Matt I’d just like to ask you your opinion of this; so do you think that it’s okay that a Republican lead Senate is going to give Obama (and more then likely all future Presidents) the power to kill anybody anywhere around the world just because they deem them “terrorists”?

        http://www.infowars.com/senate-ready-to-give-obama-authority-to-declare-international-martial-law/

        In my opinion is that what’s happening in the world (and really always has) comes down to freedom vs tyranny. The people that want to control (Symbolized by Smoking Man and the Syndicate in the X-Files) vs people that want their freedom and want people just to let them be (symbolized by people like Mulder and the Lone Gunman in the X-Files). To add in my opinion the people that are too scared to admit how sick our world is and the people controlling it are accomplices to many crimes the world-wide elite are performing.

        So tell me Matthew on which side of this battle do you sit; Tyrant, Truth-seeker and Freedom-lover or Ignoramus Coward?

        • The AUMF? Oh, is this like the LAST time when Alex Jones said Obama was gonna declare “martial law” by “invading Texas” with all those military personnel?

          Tell me: how did that end? Did Texas fight off those nasty men who were gonna take over the country?

          If you’re so naive that you can’t see that the AUMF proposal is a GOP power play (just in time for the election), then there’s no help for you.

          Secondly, when you state something is “your opinion”, then it really means nothing to me. It’s basically you saying, “I agree with Alex Jones.”

          Lastly, I LOVE Ignoramus Coward! Went and saw him in concert with The Freedom Lovers as the opening act just last year! Do you love his stuff, too?

        • “So tell me Matthew on which side of this battle do you sit; Tyrant, Truth-seeker and Freedom-lover or Ignoramus Coward?”

          Your post about Obama declaring martial law?

          Yeah…it didn’t age well, did it?

          I might add that Alex Jones admitted, on tape, that he was a complete and utter fraud. It was one of the most bizarre and sad depositions I’ve ever seen committed to legal record.

          Man, time really pays a price, doesn’t it?

  7. Yusuck Deballs commented on The Workprint:

    It is THE thing. The left has shown itself to be beyond violent…ruled by sheer emotion. Your Democrat voting Detroit and Chicago pets shoot each other in the streets and play games to see who can leave people unconscious after unprovoked attacks…dems be Obama voters, yo. Mass shooters and assassins are almost always atheistic, leftists… James Holmes, Jarrod Loughner, Chris Dorner, just to name a few. Not to mention the Communist (Who are avowed athiests) Purges, famines, and genocides in China, Russia, Cambodia, North Korea…all “leftist Utopias” where capitalism has been smashed and the glorious government shines it provenance on all… You spineless cowardly lefty sh*tbird. I can’t wait until you lefties are forced back into your commie closets…

  8. Matt, Alex has a much larger audience than you. So does Michael Savage, even in San Fransicko. I am sure you love him just as much

    How about tonight’s episode. The govt cracks down on those disseminating classified info; except for the elite like Hilary

  9. Wow.. I only linked to this review because it was ON Alex Jones’ Infowars website! I did not expect to see such vitriolic hatred directed at A.J. here! Goes to show, you don’t have to agree with Jones to make it on his newspage, which is what true journalism should be about! Alex doesn’t need glowing reviews from two-thirds of the media, when the Black Helicopter crowd who grew up watching X-Files would later become Alex ‘ s key demographic of listeners…myself included!

    To mix Jones in with Glen Beck is hilarious and wrong, however! Glen Beck makes me sick to my stomach with his religious grandstanding, Alex Jones brings a tear to my eye when he talks about his faith…been listening to Jones since I was a Marine in Afghanistan and Iraq back in the early 2002-2004 years, and I never made any new friends of the redneck Texan Jarheads who I served with when I played Alex Jones for them! Kind of funny since Jones is a native Texan and he didn’t find listeners in the so-called “conservatives” who would’ve voted for a third Bush term!

    Matt, please actually watch some Alex Jones documentaries, put down the fluoride water, buy a gas mask to filter out the methane from the nearby Aliso Canyon gas leak outside L.A. and get back to me on how a turd like Glen Beck even gets mentioned in the same breath as Infowars or the X-Files!!

    • There was no hatred. Just a simple take, comparing the crusades of two people. A fictional character who wanted the truth about his sister and a real person who feeds snake oil to people like Fox Mulder in order to make money off of them.

      Both Beck and Jones are phonies who both fake cry (it’s an act, as I’ve said) to get people to think they’re actual human beings who care about the state of the world. They don’t. They’re people who are selling themselves for ratings and clicks.

      As for the last bit, it means nothing to me. I’m not into any of what you’re describing. I’m sane, meaning I don’t listen to Jones or Beck’s bullshit. They’re two sides of the same coin.

      Lastly, thank you for your service to the country.

        • It’s not ad hominem if it’s true about the people you worship. And it is.

          Both Beck and Jones are vying for that Crazy cash. They want it, they need it and they know they have to out-crazy one another to get it. Nothing at all wrong with saying that.

      • Matt, thanks for printing my comment. Alex Jones has been around since the X-Files was first on-air. He actually covered the aftermath at Waco, Texas, when the US government used brute military force to kill mostly women and children at the Mt. Carmel compound. He has been around far longer then Glen Beck. Beck fake cries or is so deluded that he makes himself cry! Alex reminds me of a professional wrestler, much like the ones we all laugh at for a fake sport! I don’t think Alex is selling Snake Oil, however…he sells actual viable nutritional supplements that are real and work. It is not cheap to run all the bandwidth that Infowars website actually uses on a daily basis without selling something. Alex has appeared in the animated movies Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. In Scanner Darkly, Alex makes a cameo as the madman with a megaphone on the street who is kidnapped and removed from the street by a white van! In today’s America, dissent is quickly becoming a real crime and anyone who fits the description of the X-Files’ Lone Gunmen, Ed Snowden, or Alex Jones is at risk for being forcibly removed and disappeared forever–myself included!

        Facts are facts…the US did not start adding fluoride to the water until the end of WWII, and that was only AFTER the Nazis were already doing it under the Third Reich! IBM helped the Nazis encode passenger manifests and the train routes and schedules used to take the Jewish people to their concentration camps. All sad and unfortunate truths, I am afraid. Alex talks about these and several other truths EVERY SINGLE DAY, and no these are not lies made up to sell some snake oil! When I told you in my last comment that there is a large methane leak in your home state of California in Aliso Canyon outside Los Angeles , I am being deadly serious and not blowing fear mongering smoke at you! I fled my home state of Mississippi after the BP Oil spill in 2010 because I knew that the health risks of benzene, methane, and a deadly dispersal agent called Corexit would not be good. The seafood market has essentially been ended down there, and be weary of ANY seafood that is caught in the Gulf of Mexico!

        There is a reason Jones’ website is called Infowars!! It is because there is a war to inform the general public about actual real life threatening events that our mainstream media so callously lies about or does not even bother reporting at all!! Seriously, look it up…there is a methane leak outside LA that has been ongoing since last fall…a release of non-stop methane gas into the atmosphere that continues unabated just like the BP Oil spill!! Never have I seen so much environmental damage in such a short few years!! Where are all the so called Democrats and environmentalists these last six years?! Not one peep out of them on the TV! Have to listen to Alex Jones, Steve Quayle, and Coast to Coast AM to get any truth these days.

        As the great San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson said when the Giants won their pennant and were advancing to the World Series a few years ago, “FACT!!” Not fiction being sold by Alex Jones. Glen Beck is a nutty Mormon fruitcake sadly enough though.

        • “Not fiction being sold by Alex Jones.”

          Alex Jones admitted, in a video deposition, that he lied and mislead his audience on several topics and admitted he was a complete fraud. He has no credibility left after that. He even said he was sorry for the entire Sandy Hook saga.

          Hope that wakes you out of the weird Jones stupor.

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