30 years of The X-Files
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It landed on TV right as the collective zeitgeist around the governments around the world getting up to shady things ("Echelon's trunk trawler") and the perpetually amusing mythology and conspiracy theories around aliens, ufos, DNA and parascience. Few had BBS/internet/WWW access, so it was much harder to stamp out a lot of the low-level conspiracies that used to float around back then. That helped keep the spirit of X-files alive, somehow. Hm, it's hard to describe.
It's weirdly of its time, and yet it holds up so well -- or at least until it goes off the rails in the later seasons. Still, fantastic cast; great writing, all around; and surprisingly, the special effects and costumes hold up really well, too. The first 4-5 seasons are electrifyingly good because they filmed it in Canada, so it retains this dark, brooding boreal feeling to it.
The amount of gossip around school and between friends whenever a new mythology episode landed was especially fun.
That’s incredibly prescient! What the hell?
The difference on 9/11 was that A) they actually did that, B) they used fully loaded very large airplanes (767s), C) they used two planes for the same attack (four in total but the two hitting the towers were noteworthy by themselves) and D) the buildings actually collapsed.
Remember that at the time airplane hijackings were usually about ransom (either money or releasing political prisoners) and the usual threat scenario were attacks against the airplane itself. Also following 9/11 there was a huge hysteria around the use of "dirty bombs" (conventional bombings using radioactive material to contaminate a civilian population center) which despite its many depictions in TV shows never actually ended up happening (mostly because radioactive material is difficult to acquire and transport in the amounts necessary to perform such an attack whereas the hijackers just needed sharp objects and enough flight training to hit a large building while avoiding hitting anything else).
It'd be an overstatement that this was due to happen but in abstract the scenario wasn't unexpected. The truthers are right about one thing: the scenario was a known possibility. That doesn't mean how it played out is how it was anticipated or that anyone in a position to intervene knew exactly how it would play out once it started.
This standard assumption is a critical point for understanding 9/11.
The well-established procedure was to keep talking with the hijackers, get the plane on the ground at an airport, and negotiate to get the hostages out, etc. Airplane hijacking was also remarkably common, and despite this, there were no real efforts to take measures like reinforcing aircraft cockpit doors.
That set of assumptions is completely incompatible with assuming that hijackers are on a suicide mission.
So the suicide mission succeeded in the first three airplanes, but withing an hour or so, when passengers on the 4th hijacked plane had heard about the other planes being crashed into buildings, they realized that they were all already dead, so attacked the hijackers, and the plane crashed into a field in PA. Fighter jets were also scrambled so quickly that they had no time to load ammunition/armaments, and the mission was to take down the plane (but it went down first); this would also have been almost surely suicidal for the unarmed fighters, having to make contact in midair.
So, as a side-effect, in a single morning, the entire set of assumptions underlying hijacking was eliminated, and hijacking was also essentially eliminated. Any potential hijacker would be treated with the assumption that they were on a suicide mission, and had essentially zero chance of survival, let alone achieving their goal (money or release of prisoners). I don't recall hearing of a single hijacking since then (although a few instances of pilot suicide taking the passengers with them).
How would the unarmed fighters even have taken down the airliner?
I do remember that flap about dirty bombs. It was pretty scary for a while. Thankfully it never eventuated. It's weird how Byzantine the "successful" attack scenario ended up being, versus the techno-sophistication of our imagined ones. Sad and a tragedy nonetheless.
Maybe there was an attempt but it was thwarted in one of those stories that will never make the news because it's all classified.
I looked through his magazines. I remember one magazine recommended that security forces should be on the lookout for terrorists using passenger planes as essentially human guided missiles. Went way into details of how much explosive power fuel would have etc.
I suppose it wasn't especially prescient, more like obvious for any expert in the field.
I guess you're referring to these magazines not being especially prescient, but rather a standard analysis and I'd agree. But on the off chance you meant the Lone Gunmen spin-off, I mean...1) same year, 2) same location, 3) same type of attack, 4) same backstory or consequence...I'd say that's pretty fucking prescient. To land a broad-strokes analysis is not specific; but this is highly specific! It's just wow.
well he was weird and he subscribed to a lot of funny things that would normally be boring things for specific employments that he was not employed as. He basically wasn't employed as anything.
For example he also subscribed to in depth geopolitical analysis journals whose target demographic was evidently people in diplomatic corps - which he was not.
Because then you qualify in my book as a little weird, but I guess our mileage may vary.
on edit: he was a cool enough guy and certainly I myself am prone to non-normative behavior but as I said he was weird, and one thing that you would notice he had a bunch of stuff he didn't really have reasons for having, so you put it down to his weirdness as potential cause, because when someone has a big flag "weird" everything out of the ordinary about them gathers beneath that flag.
Honestly, that doesn't make any sense to me and I'm doubtful. I work at a company that had a data center (built pre-2001) 10 or 20 miles from an airport. It was built like a literal bunk because (IIRC) their threat model included "jet airliner crashes into datacenter" (no terrorism required).
It looks like they were testing/modeling that scenario with nuclear power plants way back in 1988:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/us/threats-responses-reac...:
> The 19 experts, many of them retired, work or worked at universities or companies that build or operate reactors. In an article on Friday in the journal Science, they dismiss fears voiced by opponents of nuclear power that the nation's reactors are vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
> "We read that airplanes can fly through the reinforced, steel-lined 1.5-meter-thick concrete walls surrounding a nuclear reactor," the article says, "and inevitably cause a meltdown resulting in 'tens of thousands of deaths' and 'make a huge area uninhabitable for centuries,' to quote some recent stories." But, they add, "no airplane regardless of size, can fly through such a wall."
> The article says the scenario "was actually tested in 1988 by mounting an unmanned plane on rails and 'flying' it at 215 meters per second (about 480 m.p.h.) into a test wall." The engines penetrated only about two inches and the fuselage even less, according to the article.
Something with two engines at 480 mph is a jet, definitely not a Cessna-type general aviation plane.
I wonder if targeting the control building, or the transformers/electrical shit that connects to the grid with a jetliner would be more effective. Or maybe a shipyard with 'nuclear vessels'.
That is a really odd thing to say on the context of security. If people did indeed have this rationale, I would be surprised at the obvious and absurd display of incompetence.
A vulnerability is a vulnerability, and you expect the attacker to decide how much impact he will try to cause (with a bias into "a lot"). The part about 3 planes is reasonable (something at this level of organization should raise an alert somewhere).
― Oscar Wilde
The issue is that they have managed to reach a critical mass where they can exert some real and harmful social and political influence.
What's more harmful? That basic freedom to believe whatever you please and share it with like-minded people without imposing on others against their will, or having legal authority to impose against such voluntary sharing for supposedly lofty ideals of fighting harmful thinking? (However you want to define harmful)
This is what getting old feels like huh? Heh.
As far as the conspiracy and end-times-horror zeitgeist, I think Millenium with Lance Henriksen had a lot more overlap with The X-Files.
Also, David Lynch almost makes his own genre.
Millennium is more than overlap -- it's an extension of The X-Files: same series creator (Chris Carter), same group of writers (Glen Morgan, James Wong, Frank Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, among others), same shooting locations (PNW), same writer deconstructing the show from within (Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan's brother, who also appeared in TXF in the Flukeman suit). Millennium even got a stealth finale/reverse spin-off that explicitly links the two together -- S07E04 of The X-Files ("Millennium") has Lance Henriksen's Frank Black teaming up with Mulder & Scully.
Anyway, I think the earlier seasons were better in that they were more varied before the show really became all about aliens conspiracies with the odd non-alien episode here and there.
Can't find the episode name but it was a rainy rainy night (what else). I think the set was the interior of a small fishing boat.
X-Files filming happened all over Vancouver for years. People didn't pay excessive amount of attention to the actors and guest stars when they were at hotels, restaurants etc. Unlike some cities.
I'm a big scifi nerd, but didn't get a chance to start watching until I was an adult. It's such a great show and a lot of fun. It's also held up much better to time than most in that genre.
I use that to get through five seasons of X-Files and really enjoyed it. I did the same thing with deep space nine.
The “X-Files” hooked us right from the start. The only show that even came close to that first episode was “Lost” many years later. Most first season episodes were strong, with some downright classics, and the show was captivating from the beginning. Helps that the two leads were well cast and the writing was way better than the typical genre series.
(Two of the X-Files writers went off to showrun the criminally underrated “Space: Above and Beyond”, too. Without the success of X-Files, we wouldn’t have gotten that.)
Not forgotten by me. Some of my favorite childhood memories are ordering pizza and watching Brisco County, Jr. and X-Files on Friday nights for the season Brisco ran.
I was always disappointed that Brisco County, Jr. didn't get a second season. But it did get kind of weird when it veered off of old west stuff and into aliens/supernatural stuff.
I worked for a startup around the time of the millennium and we had >1m registered users. All passwords stored in plaintext, of course.
One day I decided to run a SQL query to see what the most common passwords were.
#1 was "trustno1"
And to confirm my hunch, I guess, I just found this Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/XFiles/comments/pnzc02/is_fox_mulde...
You somehow neglected to mention Home, which had two other writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_(The_X-Files)
But I think Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose is the greatest of them all.
The recent revival had another one written by him, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster", it's amazing.
the mythology was each week more complicated and if you skipped one episode you didn't know any more who was a friend or not
Relevant:
* TIL that James Doohan (Scotty on 'Star Trek') received an honorary doctorate from the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The university gave him the degree after half of its students said in a survey that his character had inspired them to choose engineering as a career. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6onyh6/til_th...>
* TIL that Leonard Nimoy met many fans who became scientists because of Spock's example, and talked to the 'Star Trek' actor as if he were a fellow researcher. Nimoy always nodded and told them, "Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction." <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6o8egb/til_th...>
I haven't seen all of the later seasons but "X-COPS" (the COPS crossover/deconstruction) is one of my all-time favorites—still fun to watch on Halloween.
Sadly it was on NBC so it was doomed to be cancelled
The X Files was GenX's turn at the Art Bell wheel[1].
Stranger Things[2] is built on these foundations for the younger generation sprinkled generously with nostalgia of those eras of conspiracy television.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of..._(TV_series) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Bell [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_Things
Even the more technical episodes are fairly easy to swallow this many decades later.
https://old.reddit.com/r/XFiles/comments/43a6wq/a_guide_to_t...
That sounds like a seed for ..... conspiracy theory.
Not the fact that the conspiracies around high profile pedophile rings (Epstein) and ubiquitous governments monitoring (NSA/Prism) were proven true?
Previous conspiracies over high power pedophiles and mass surveillance turning out to be true lead people to question which other "conspiracy theories" are true and are just about to be proven true.
The group of people that dismissed those theories in the past lost their credibility and conspiracy theorist who gained credibility filled the gap.
Of course not but it does lead to people re-examining their priors. It leads people to ask "what other conspiracies that I've been dismissing might be true?"
> or that some people suddenly gain credibility for their conspiracies
That's obviously untrue. When people are right, they gain credibility and the things they say hold more weight. When people are wrong the opposite happens. How else could credibility work? People don't go around examining everything starting from first principles, the look to people they trust and they decide who to trust by how often they are correct, aka, credibility.
Conspiracy theories aren't more prevalent because the X-Files, they're more prevalent because trust in institutions is, deservedly, at an all time low.