The X-Files - 'My Struggle'*

"Dude; you look rough."

Huh. Apparently I never published this one. I probably would have noticed if I'd watched any of the other episodes.

Ten years after the X-Files closed, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are reunited when Director Skinner forwards a request to meet them from right-wing internet pundit Tad O'Malley because... Okay, I'm not entirely sure why O'Malley, a man who rants about big government conspiracies online merits this call, but apparently he's onto something. He knows a bunch of guys who are reconstructing a spaceship from alien tech, and a woman, Sveta, who claims to have been repeatedly implanted with part-alien foetuses which were then removed.

Somehow this convinces Mulder that they've been on the wrong track after all, and that the real conspiracy is not driven by aliens, but by humans using alien tech to control other humans. O'Malley sets out to broadcast the truth, but the reconstructors are killed by black ops types and Sveta by a flying saucer after publicly recanting her statements, and O'Malley's website goes down. In response to this, Skinner rehires Scully and Mulder and reopens the X-Files, because... Actually, I'm pretty sure that the one absolute in all this is that Walter Skinner doesn't need reasons to do shit. I think he's the mastermind.

The fact that their paranoid media contact was Jeff Winger didn't phase me
for a moment. All respect to Joel McHale, but it wasn't because of his
performance, rather that the rest of the episode was nonsensical enough that
I just went with it.

After a decade away, The X-Files is back, with basically the same credits and way more CGI (well; maybe. I never saw the later series. Hell, I thought Sveta was way off with her psychic visions claiming Mulder and Scully had a kid, but apparently they did. I had no idea.) The leads are older, and one of them at least has not become one lick better of an actor in the intervening years. The conspiracy - be it of alien overlords or the military-industrial complex - makes no sense, and telling us that Scully has alien DNA doesn't distract from the fact that, once again, the weakness of the conspiracy is its willingness to kill everyone except Mulder and Scully. And of course Skinner; who is totally the mastermind.

* I'm not sure who is Hitler in this scenario