The X-Files, Season 10: Vol. 1

 I used to love THE X-FILES. Well, sort of love it. I liked when they did the "Monster of the week" shows (I still maintain that "Home", the episode with the inbred family, is one of the single best episodes of of any television show ever.. It's existence earns all of the shitty X-FILES episodes a pass.), but I absolutely loathed the "Mythology", which never made any kind of sense, and kept getting more and more convoluted, to the point where I just gave up on the show entirely. Bees, black oil, kidnapped sisters, alien spies...Jesus, what a fucking mess. So I missed out on Mulder & Scully being replaced, and Scully having a baby, and a bunch of other shit that I had no interest in whatsoever. I watched the two theatrical movies when they hit HBO (I'm not dumb enough to pay for two more hours of mythology!), and thought they were just dreadful. Overall, I guess that I feel that THE X-FILES is a really good idea that has almost never been handled right. Can IDW break that trend, and tell some worthwhile stories with Mulder & Scully....?




 Well, that depends on your mythology tolerance. This is ALL mythology, all the time, and I could barely manage to slog through the entire book. Writer Joe Harris leaves no cliche unturned as he mines old bits of mythology minutiae, and there were more than a few times where I was left scratching my head, since he was obviously riffing on things that happened after I quit the show. The story revolves around a mysterious group that is after Scully's son,  who she gave up for adoption twelve years ago. (That this kid is part alien was also somewhat surprising, but I suppose it shouldn't have been.) Mulder and Scully are right where they were left at the end of their last film, playing house together, although I wasn't clear on whether they're involved, wink wink wink, and Deputy Director Skinner appears on their doorstep to warn them that the whereabouts of Scully's son may have been compromised. From there, Harris fan-wanks us to death, with appearances by Agent Doggett, Agent Reyes, Cancer man, and The Lone Gunmen. Real hardcore fans will undoubtedly "Squee!" with joy, but all I could think was how this was EXACTLY like a really bad episode of the TV show. There's the vague threat of some alien force, the scatterings of clues that amount to nothing, the splitting up of Mulder & Scully, and the big finale where all of the aliens vanish and Scully see a giant UFO. Harris did nail the tone of the series, though, as it completely and utterly took me back to all of the reasons why I lost interest in the first place.

 THE X-FILES, SEASON 10: VOLUME 1 collects issues 1-6 of IDW's X-FILES SEASON 10 series.