The X-Files Mythology All Makes Perfect Sense, Actually

[Music] Fans of the X-Files know that the show is more or less bifurcated into two types of episodes: the standalone, self-contained stories, which are usually referred to as the "monster of the week" episodes, and the episodes that deal with the show's long-running story that usually revolves around conspiracies and alien visitations. Those episodes being referred to as the show's mythology.

The mythology episodes have always enjoyed posing questions more than providing answers. And they never quite want to close things off and leave you feeling like things have been too spelled out for you, so that there's no room for your own interpretation. And since, by the show's second revival season, the mythology was a continuing storyline that it had at that point been running for over 25 years and always wanting to add new layers and new mysteries to keep it mysterious and interesting, it's fair to say that all of it did get a little bit complicated.

Because of the complexity and the fact that it always made people work to put the answers together for themselves rather than handing you everything, among a lot of viewers, probably most of the show's viewers, and even among hardcore fans, even people who based their whole lives around a love of the show and ran websites about it or wrote books about it, even among those kinds of people, it's just kind of treated as common knowledge a lot of times that the show's mythology eventually became incoherent and impenetrable. Fans just will say this as though it's just an accepted fact. You know, well, of course, the mythology doesn't make any sense. It hasn't made sense for a long time, as far as a lot of people are concerned.

This attitude used to kind of frustrate the hell out of me. I love the "Monster of the Week" episodes. I think many of them are among the best short stories ever written for TV. Some truly transcendent characters and with a level of writing and creativity and variety, probably unequaled by almost any other TV show, maybe unequaled by any other TV show. At times, The X-Files could be the best sci-fi show, the best cop show, the best horror show, and the best comedy on TV. All of that while also doing weird, experimental episodes that almost no other show could get away with.

But in spite of that, the mythology episodes were what really kept me coming back. I love series with long, intricate stories and puzzles to figure out. And when most TV was episodic back then and didn't want to do serialized stories, X-Files was leagues and leagues ahead of almost any other show in that regard. It was a little bit more of a soap opera or an opera. Had that that quality of being part of a larger canvas. So, in some ways, it was permitted to ask more questions than it answered.

"Most people, if they tuned in on that Friday night and turned it on and it was a monster movie, they go, 'Oh, wow. Cool. I wish it was a mythology one, though.' Cuz the mythology ones always went deeper with the audience. I believe they like to be scared by the monsters of the week, but it was the mythology shows that actually hooked them."

Even today, when now almost all TV shows are serialized stories, with 25 years to develop its continuing mythology arc, X-Files makes even something like Lost look comparatively straightforward and simple. And what kept all of it so engaging to me was that although there were endless complications and mysteries added to the story, the mythology always felt to me like it was a puzzle that could be solved. I never felt like some fans that it was just random stuff that Chris Carter and the other writers were making up as they went along.

Obviously, like any long-running story, the show's mythology expanded and it changed as they went, but I always felt like they had some idea of what they were doing. They might not want to pin themselves down, and they might have wanted to leave things open to develop and change them in the future. But I never felt at any point that they would just throw out a mystery without at least having a notion of what the possible explanation for it might be, even if that explanation might change a little before they actually got to giving it to everybody. There were too many little details that added up in the show. Too many little things that paid off years after they were set up to reveal that they had made sense all along. Too many things like that for me to just think that it was all random. People working on the show were obviously paying attention to what they were writing.

"Something called Rous."

"Rous? Any idea what that is?"

"Where the hell you think we are?"

"I think based on their travel time, probably Fort Marlene."

And all the way from around seasons five and six, when they started to give fans some big explanations of things, and up through the end of the original run with season 9, when other fans would complain about it not making sense, I would always scoff and I was proud that I had an answer or at least a pretty good guess to explain just about everything on the show.

Then the revival seasons happened, seasons 10 and 11. And the mythology episodes in those seasons had some gigantic new reveals. Reveals that it seemed threw almost everything that had been explained in the in the mythology in the first nine seasons out the window. It seemed like Carter was making an effort to update the mythology in order to fit a new era, a changed zeitgeist, and incorporate new conspiracy theories while throwing out the ones that weren't as resonant anymore. It seemed obvious why he decided to go this route.

Apart from the fact that times had indeed changed, and things that played one way in 1993 would have landed differently in 2016, fans of the show knew that the mythology storyline had also always been building up towards an alien invasion that was supposed to happen in 2012. And by the time the revival seasons finally came together, that date had come and gone. So, it seemed like Carter had to come up with an alternative for whatever had originally been planned. It seemed like the old mythology got tossed aside to a large extent to do this. That was how I felt anyway. And I think how a lot of fans felt when they watched the revival seasons, but I hadn't watched the show all that much since it had ended in 2002. And my personal head canon of what the truth behind the mythology was and what the show meant, it had ossified in that time. And I hadn't seen some of the episodes for nearly 20 years by the time of the revival. I might have been a super nerd about the show at one point back in the day, and I still probably knew more about it than anybody ever would really need to know, but I was still stuck on what it had seemed to be to me at an earlier time when I was much younger, rather than really looking at what it was in 2016.

Even though I had been disappointed by the revival seasons, I still had fond memories of the show. And I still loved it. And at some point, I always wanted to go back and do a rewatch of my favorite episodes. I sort of thought in the back of my head that it might be interesting to examine the old mythology episodes in light of what had been revealed in what I thought at the time were giant retcons in seasons 10 and 11 and see if there was still a way that I could try to make sense of it all. If there was still any way to make the revival seasons fit even remotely with the seasons in the show's original run.

What I started to notice almost immediately during the rewatch though shocked me. Trying to reconsider everything from a fresh perspective, I found that almost immediately the original explanations that I had in mind for the truth behind the mythology from the first nine seasons didn't make as much sense as I had always thought that they had. And not only could you make the new explanations from seasons 10 and 11 fit with the earlier seasons, but time and time again, looked at through the new lens of the later seasons, the earlier seasons not only still made sense, they actually made a lot more sense than they ever had before.

Now, I know if you're a fan, you'll likely call [ __ ] on that because there are several gigantic things from seasons 10 and 11 that do seem to directly contradict the earlier seasons, or at the very least, they seem like giant stretches. But as I started to notice new things and view the old episodes in new ways, it started to get exciting to me, and I eventually ended up doing a complete rewatch of all 11 seasons, plus the movies, plus a whole lot of reading old articles about the show, books about the show, watching every interview I could find, and watching all the Blu-ray special features. I got into it again. And I got into the show all over again. And by the end, I was amazed that I not only had a new picture of the show's mythology that made much more sense than the old picture ever did on a plot level, but that the new ideas that are explored by these new angles on the show's story make the whole thing that much deeper and more meaningful thematically also, and ultimately just a better piece of art.

By the way, from here on out, I'm going to talk about all the mysteries of the show. So, of course, there will be spoilers for everything. So, this is your spoiler warning. So, now that we're ready, friends, X-Files fans, I am here to tell you that the X-Files mythology actually does all make perfect sense, believe it or not, and that Chris Carter knew what he was doing. And over 25 years, he never dumbed it down. He never compromised it or phoned it in. Even though the cost of that was that sometimes he went way over many people's heads, mine included at first. I think that in the end, we all owe him an enormous apology. And I want to show why.

Although of course there were many layers added to it as the story went on, the mythology as it existed in the first nine seasons of the show can be given a pretty straightforward explanation. And that explanation was more or less set out by very clearly by different characters in the show and in the first movie and repeated at several points. The general idea is that there were aliens here in prehistoric times. Their genetic material was the origin of life on this planet and they're planning to return and recolonize the planet.

"I believe that life came to Earth millions of years ago from a meteor or a rock from Mars."

"So what you're saying is life, human life is extraterrestrial by definition."

"They're here, aren't they, Mr. Moulder? They've been here for a long, long time."

It gets confusing for people because there appear, especially in the early seasons of the show, to be several different types of aliens with different agendas. There were the gray aliens and then there was the black oil which climbed inside people's bodies and could mind control them. And there was also a lot of talk about releasing some kind of virus or plague which at times in the beginning seemed to be another separate issue from the aliens or caused by the aliens for unknown reasons.

"All these ETs running around. It's hard to keep these aliens straight without a scorecard."

All of this actually has a fairly direct explanation that was given in the show more than once. The alien species in the show that's returning to colonize Earth actually exists primarily as a virus, which in the show is usually referred to as the purity virus. The virus is extraterrestrial. We know very little about it except that it was the original inhabitant of this planet.

"Your aliens, Agent Moulder, your little green men arrived here millions of years ago. Those that didn't leave have been lying dormant underground since the last ice age in the form of an evolved pathogen."

"So, a meteor crashed to Earth, but along with the biological building blocks on it, there was something else. An alien virus."

"I believe there was a virus which thrived here prehistorically."

"What happened to these aliens?"

"They died in the last ice age 35,000 years ago."

"And the virus?"

"It lay dormant underground until it surfaced once again during our current geological period."

In all the many references to an alien virus, this is what they're talking about. The virus is sentient. It can move from person to person and it can control them. It's important to understand that when people are talking about the black oil on the show, the oil itself isn't the alien life form. It's simply a medium through which the virus can travel, just like it can travel in people's bodies. Traveling in oil is a way for it to move around in a limited fashion outside of a host body and to travel from body to body. But the oil itself isn't the alien.

It's explained early on after the virus has left, the oil that it was in is just normal oil. In the case of the black oil that traveled from a downed World War II airplane in the episode "Piper Maru," they state clearly right there that the oil itself without the virus in it is just normal diesel fuel.

"The suit was covered in a thin film of oil. As was the French diver when I found him lying delirious on his kitchen floor."

"What kind of oil?"

"According to the analysis, it's 50 weight diesel oil. Scully, that's the same oil that was used on World War II submarines and on P-51 Mustangs for that matter. I think it's a medium. A medium being used by some kind of alien creature that uses it to body jump."

Then, what they finally revealed in The X-Files movie was the virus could also gestate inside of a host if it chose and create a larger life form.

"I believe that virus infected early man and transformed his physiology."

"Changed him into something else."

"Into an alien life form himself."

At first, this larger life form seemed like yet another new type of alien, stronger and more vicious than what we had been shown before. But it was explained very soon after, actually, it was explained in the very next episode of the show after the movie that this larger alien was a younger form of the gray aliens that we had already seen many times on the show. So rather than all this being several different types of aliens, this shows that the black oil, the gray aliens, and so on are all just different phases of the life cycle of the same alien. It's all one alien.

The show likes to be circumspect like that to keep you guessing. But while it often likes to play with your expectations, when you finally put all the pieces together, you'll see that, as in this case, the answer is usually simpler and more direct than you thought. The black oil was an alien creature that invaded your body through your eyes or your nose or your mouth and would take over your self and control you. And then when it was done with you, it would move on. The oil then, if it stays in you, it can gestate into the alien from the movie and then the alien from the movie can then become a gray.

People also tripped out somewhat because there seemed to be different types of black oil. Some of it came in a meteor thousands of years ago. Some of it came in a Mars rock that landed in Tangusa. Some of it seems to ooze and flow more. Some of it seems to travel in a more wormy kind of shape. But again here, I think people are just overcomplicating things. This is all the same virus. When I got here millennia ago, there was some on Earth, some on Mars. Some got trapped in underground oil deposits. Some kinds might behave a little bit differently when they'd been separated by thousands of years of evolution. And if different deposits hadn't been in contact with each other, they might not all be up to speed on recent developments. But there's no reason to assume that this isn't all just the same virus. Different people have different personalities and different colonies of the purity virus might have different personalities and act differently as well.

Even something in the show like the presumably alien worm that they find in the season 1 episode "Ice" could just be a similar kind of thing or a different creature from the same planet. It also seems like this worm came here on a meteor in the distant past. It also seems to be hibernating in ice until it's thawed. It also seems to find a host and mind control it. It even bleeds a black oily substance like the black oil and like the gray aliens also bleed. Whatever the worm creature was, it could have just come here on the same meteor as the purity virus, and it could just be the same kind of thing again.

Then there are also, of course, the alien-human hybrids and the alien bounty hunters. And later on in the show, there would be the super soldiers, but I'll get to all those things soon.

The big second layer to the show's mythology is that there's also a conspiracy of men which seems to be run by a shadowy group that's known as the Syndicate, which was abetting the aliens in their colonization plans, mainly by working with aliens to create a race of alien-human hybrids that were meant to assist the aliens as a slave race. This is what the abductions and experiments on people were supposed to be about: creating these hybrids and also the explanation for the alien-human hybrids that were running around at different points in the show. They weren't a separate kind of alien, but rather a hybrid between humans and the alien species that we already knew about.

"No, there's the matter of Agent Scully's abduction in 1994."

"Abduction by whom?"

"By the military working with the government conspirators to develop a breed of human-alien hybrids that the aliens would use as a slave race."

While the Syndicate and the humans in the conspiracy were explained to be conspiring with the aliens in their colonization plans, they also seemed to be secretly developing a vaccine that they thought might be able to make them immune to the purity virus without the aliens' knowledge.

"What were their interests?"

"Developing an alien virus vaccine before the Russians developed one."

"How do they go about that?"

"By testing innocent civilians all over the world. They were pretending to work with the aliens to infect the entire population with an alien virus. But the conspirators were trying to save themselves by secretly and selfishly developing a vaccine."

In addition to the alien-human hybrids, this basic story of the aliens and their human collaborators was complicated somewhat by the introduction of what again appeared to be other factions of aliens: the alien bounty hunters and the alien rebels, and later the super soldiers that seemed to be sent by the aliens to run colonization after the rebels destroyed the Syndicate. But even still, in the original versions of events, these things could be relatively easily explained as just new wrinkles in the evolving original colonization plot. Different groups working with or against one central conspiracy.

"The conspirators believed all life in the universe had been infected with the virus, including a race of shape-shifting alien bounty hunters who policed the conspiracy for the aliens. But they were wrong, and it led to the destruction of the conspiracy."

"And who destroyed it?"

"A group of renegade aliens who had avoided infection with the virus through self-disfigurement."

"And the conspirators themselves, what happened to them?"

"They're all dead now, killed by the same faceless aliens."

After what were described as alien rebels killed most of the Syndicate in season 6, another group of characters referred to as super soldiers started to appear. They were humans turned into and replaced by what seemed to be alien replacements that were mostly invulnerable except for their one weakness, which was to a special form of magnetite, to which the metal alien technology in their bodies reacted very badly. The way I understand it, the only way to kill a super soldier is with some rare metal. Major Scully says it's a form of magnetite from some meteor that fell to Earth.

There's another level here to how the alien virus works that explains all this. As is shown a few times, the aliens, when they're in their virus form and traveling in black oil, seem to be able to interact in some direct way with the metal that makes up their spaceships. Since these aliens exist primarily as a virus, it's not like they would run the ship by levers and buttons. They're interacting with this metal on some way on a microscopic level. It seems like they must have a telepathic or telekinetic connection to the metal. But on a plot level, the important thing is that this metal, which is apparently vital to the aliens' ships and to their technology and also to the super soldier technologies, is vulnerable to magnetite.

"The aliens, they fear this place, its geology, magnetite, like that which brought down the original UFO in Roswell. Indian wise men realized this over 2,000 years ago. They hid here and watched their own culture die. The original shadow government."

The idea that the aliens have had contact with Native Americans in the past is a thread that establishes the idea that the aliens have been coming to Earth for a long time. And it's one of those things on the show that if you pick up on it, you can then use that to read between the lines and connect many more details in the show's mythology. I would see a lot of literature about the Anastasia, which is an Indian culture that just completely disappeared. And that was a culture that had created images that looked like they were extraterrestrial images.

This historical connection between Native American cultures and the aliens is a link that explains many, many things in the show. For one thing, the link geographically explains why so many of the things in the show happen to occur around the American Southwest.

"Rock, northwestern New Mexico this morning."

[Music]

"It's a disease called microtia. Children born without ears. It's most common in Navajo Indians."

"What's so striking is how alien it looks."

"I assure you that is simply a random coincidence."

The idea here is that the geology here is what brought down the spaceship in Roswell. It's also why the Anastasia hid there from aliens.

"Pueblo Anastasia Indian abandoned 2,000 years ago. Nobody knows why."

It's why the conspiracy has hidden evidence of some of their experiments there. And the historical connection between native cultures and the aliens is also hinted at by the fact that some of them have immunity to the black oil.

"Well, his employment records list Mr. Simon Dea Cruz as of mixed Mexican ancestry when in fact he is Waiter Indian. The Waita are an indigenous Mexican culture that has a rare undiluted gene pool. Now, these genes may have an innate immunity to infection."

"The writing is cryptic, phonetic Navajo, but no literal interpretation makes any sense."

In the show's mythology, this connection is also why the Mayans knew in their calendar in 2012, a date that they apparently learned from the aliens would signify the beginning of the end for the human race.

"Ten centuries ago, the Mayans were so afraid that their calendars stop on the exact date that my story begins. December 22nd, the year 2012, the date of the final alien invasion."

So, all of those few things that I just laid out was the pretty direct, basic structure of the mythology through the first nine seasons of the show. The aliens had been here throughout history. They had long planned to come back and it was going to happen soon in 2012 with a conspiracy of men helping to plan it and to cover it up. With that information, anything that wasn't explained explicitly in those seasons, you had enough to at least put together a solid explanation that made sense within that framework. There were always a lot fewer unanswered questions in the show than people think.

By the time of The X-Files movie, after season 5, they had plainly laid out general explanations for everything, much more than people realize. When the movie was released, we felt an obligation. Expectations were going to be huge that things were going to be revealed in the movie. So, there's a scene in the movie where the Well-Manicured Man is in the back of a limousine with Moulder and he really lays out the whole history of the aliens on Earth and in very explicit terms.

"There are a couple scenes in the movie, especially the ones with the Well-Manicured Man in the car, that lay out a clear explanation about what the project was doing, how the aliens work."

At the time, the movie wasn't really just a tease of more stuff to come, at least not stuff that was going to come right away. The movie really was their big explanation for everything. They always meant to leave certain things open after the first movie and also after the end of the series because Chris Carter always wanted to do more movies later on and he had to save some things for 2012. But Carter also said a lot of times in the early years that his original rough plan for the show was for about 5 years and then they were going to move on to a series of movies, hopefully. So I think that the movie really was originally the end of his big five-year plan. It really laid a lot of things out, put a lot of the cards on the table. The super soldiers and other wrinkles that they added in the next four seasons after the movie developed a lot of things. And then there were other things that he was saving for the movie for 2012. But while people were always complaining about unanswered questions, we still had most of the answers already.

I still today see people say stuff like, "Oh, remember the bees? That was so crazy. What was that all about? So many unanswered questions." But I mean, the bees were explained almost as soon as they were introduced. The bees were being bred as a possible way to spread a virus. One of several mechanisms the conspiracy was looking at to release a mass contagion. They tell you this like the second or third time that the bees are in the show and then that was it. The mystery was posed and it was solved.

There were some other parts of the mythology that required a little more guesswork and had more blanks to fill in than others. But if you accepted that it was part of the concept of the show that they never wanted to spell things out for you completely and just spoon-feed you all the answers and that you were supposed to have to put in a little work on your own to put it all together, to put all the puzzle pieces together, then you could feel that you did have all the puzzle pieces if you wanted to put them together and it all did make sense more or less and the alien colonization plot basically was the explanation for all of it. Or at least that's what I thought at the time.

"Well, you're wrong, Agent Moulder. I can't tell you how wrong you are. How wrong you've always been."

And then seasons 10 and 11 happened and threw several wrenches into that whole alien colonization thing.

"I'm talking planned invasion, the colonization of this planet by an extraterrestrial race."

"I thought you were serious."

"I want to talk about the coming back with season 10 or 11 on The X-Files."

"I thought about it. I thought, why, why do I want to come back? What story do I have to tell? What..."

"I don't want to just come back and do a victory lap. Um, I have something to say."

"Yeah."

"And I did a, I did a four-part arc through two seasons to say all the things that I wanted to say."

"What we had set up throughout the whole mythology of the show was that the conspiracy was between certain levels of shadow governments in cahoots with some kind of an alien presence. The twist that Chris put on it in the first episode was: there are no aliens. We have their technology. That's it. The conspiracy is just humans."

"So, I like that, you know, because it didn't rewrite everything. It just kind of made a very clever twist."

"There was a moment you were being asked about your abductions, about your pregnancies, how the aliens took your babies, and before you answered, you looked at Ali. Why?"

"Because it's not exactly the right question."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Because I don't believe it's aliens who are taking them."

"Who took your babies?"

"Men."

"Men? Humans? You saw their faces?"

"Yes, but you always wondered if they weren't lying to you too."

"I've been misled. We've been misled. What if everything we've been led to believe in is a lie? What if there is no alien conspiracy?"

"Moulder, what are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about everything we've been led to believe. Our work, the X-Files, everything."

"Tell me what this is about."

"It's about controlling the past to control the future. It's about fiction masquerading as fact."

"My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory like fire is radiant and immutable. While history serves only those who seek to control it, those who would douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men, for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth."

"Because you weren't even close. Waring aliens lighting each other on fire and other such nonsense."

"What I'm saying, Moulder, is that there is no such thing as alien abduction. It is just a smoke screen."

"Roswell was a smoke screen. Roswell, that was a smoke screen."

"So, I've been told. I figured it out. It all makes complete sense. All these years, we've been deceived."

"This is not an alien conspiracy. It's a conspiracy of men."

Seasons 10 and 11 add many new twists to the show's mythology, and I'm going to get to all of them, but of course, the biggest one is the notion that the aliens never had plans to colonize Earth at all. When I first watched seasons 10 and 11, I had the same reaction of many other people, and I felt like this was the biggest retcon in the history of franchise retcons. How could they possibly say that there was no alien colonization? Alien colonization was what the entire mythology story of the first nine seasons had been about. It was the whole show. Saying that there were no plans for alien colonization seemed like Jurassic Park doing a sequel where they said that actually there had never been any dinosaurs in the previous movies. You had just imagined all of those parts.

The entire series, many times in many different ways, starting in season 2, had clearly said that they were counting down to 2012 when alien colonization would begin.

"In this time, the dawning of the age of Aquarius, 18 Earth years from the beginning of the new kingdom."

"In the final phases before it begins, will most likely be assemblies."

"We're 15 years away. The timetable has been set."

"The date is set."

"You heard the man. The date is set."

"December 22nd, the year 2012. The date of the final alien invasion."

"The countdown has begun. It began in 2012, but no one knew."

"It's been in motion since 2012."

But if the aliens weren't coming in 2012, then what was the countdown to 2012 all about?

"When I turned 11, my powers grew."

The fact that he says his powers started to develop when he was 11. And this quote seems like an oddly specific detail, doesn't it? Why wouldn't he just say that they started when he was around 10 or 10 years old? Well, like many details in the show, you'll be rewarded if you look into it more and you'll find out that it actually makes perfect sense and that there was nothing random about it. If you go through the timeline and work out when William was born, you'll find out that he was born in 2001. So, you can figure out when he would have turned 11. But, we'll get back to William soon here.

At first, this idea that there were no plans for alien colonization, it seemed to turn everything on its head. But I'm going to show that not only can you reconcile it with earlier seasons, if you figure out a few subtextual things and watch the earlier seasons with this in mind, the new explanations not only work, they actually work so much better than the old explanations. Many things that didn't quite make sense before or that required elaborate explanations before suddenly all make perfect sense and they become simple and direct.

Now, I know that you're going to say, "But what about this or what about that scene that doesn't seem to fit with what was revealed in seasons 10 and 11?" And I'm going to get around to those because, believe me, at one point, I had those same questions. But first, I'm going to start with the things that immediately when you rewatch, not only make more sense after seasons 10 and 11, but that were practically telling us the twist of seasons 10 and 11 so plainly that when you see it in retrospect, those twists hardly seem like they were twists at all. They were always right there. They were out in front. In fact, things that felt like huge retcons in seasons 10 and 11 were actually plainly stated many times in the earlier seasons, but most viewers didn't see them at the time.

"If you prepare people well enough to believe a lie, they will believe it as if it were true. And if you tell them a really big lie, like there are aliens from outer space, much more than a small one, they will believe it. And if you suggest to them that these aliens are doing bad things to them, the power of this suggestion will be to make certain people believe that certain psychopathologies and neuroses that they're suffering from can now be attributed to that."

"But you've cited evidence. You've made claims yourself."

"What I've seen, I've seen because I wanted to believe. I If you look too hard, you can go mad. But if you continue to look, you become liberated and you come awake as if from a dream, realizing that the lies are there simply to protect what they're advertising. A government which knows that its greatest strength is not in defense but in attack. It's strongly held by believers in UFO phenomena that there is military complicity or involvement in abductions. But what if there is no complicity? What if there is simply just the military seeking to develop an arsenal of weapons against which there is no defense? Biological warfare which justifies in their eyes making an ass out of the nation with stories of little green men. A conspiracy wrapped in a plot inside a government agenda. And..."

"All these reports of abductions, you're saying they've all been lies?"

"Not lies exactly, but citizens taken unsuspecting and tested. Classified military project above top secret and still ongoing."

The seasons of the original run of the show do establish clearly that there are aliens that have made contact with us and that part of what the conspiracy is doing is trying to hide the details of them from the public. And seasons 10 and 11 don't contradict that. What they change is the idea that we had before of why the aliens contacted us and what the relationship was between them and the human conspirators.

"No sooner had we defeated Germany than a new threat started appearing in skies over America, drawn to Earth by the latest threat to extinction, the H-bomb. Explosions acting as transducers, drawing alien life forms through wormholes in spaceships using electrogravidic propulsion. Advanced extraterrestrial species visiting us, concerned for mankind and the threat of our self-destruction. Foretelling our annihilation through their own self-sacrifice."

"But they're not here for the reasons that you might think. They're here to deliver a message. The aliens came to study us. We're prepared to work with us. World leaders signed secret memos directing scientific studies of alien technology and biochemistry. Classified studies were done at military installations S4, Groom Lake, Wright-Patterson, and Dulce, extracting alien tissue. Tests were done on unsuspecting human subjects and elaborately staged abductions and craft using alien technology recovered from the downed saucers."

"Roswell was a smoke screen. We've had a half a dozen better salvage operations."

Especially in the first seasons of the show, when you watch them now, you'll notice that there's scene after scene where it seems perfectly clear that the human conspiracy was not working with the aliens. And in fact, they seemed to be at odds with the aliens. In the episode "Fallen Angel," there's a crash of an alien spaceship. And the military response is to try to hunt down and kill the alien that was on the ship. It hardly seems like they're working together, but it is exactly the reaction that the military is shown to have in seasons 10 at the crash site at Roswell. Actually, it's stated several times in the early seasons that it's government policy, both in America and in other countries through an international agreement, to kill any alien that they come into contact with. After the Roswell incident in 1947, even at the brink of the Cold War, there was an ultra-secret conference attended by the United States, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Britain, both Germanies, France, and it was agreed that should any extraterrestrial biological entity survive a crash, the country that held that being would be responsible for its extermination. Security Council Resolution 1013 states any country capturing such an entity is responsible for its immediate extermination.

"Again, a policy of killing every alien that they see hardly seems like they're cooperating with the aliens."

Another interesting detail to this is that [ __ ] talks about them getting alien technology through salvage operations.

"Roswell was a smoke screen. We've had a half a dozen better salvage operations."

Now again, if they were working with the aliens and in fact were doing the aliens' bidding, why would they only have access to alien technology through salvage operations? If the tests they were doing to create alien-human hybrids were something the aliens wanted them to be doing, wouldn't the aliens need to give them the technology to do those tests?

In the season four episodes "Tempest Fugit" and "Max," a plane crash is caused when the character Max is smuggling what he believes to be an alien power source on a plane and what appears to be a UFO intercepts the plane to take it. But the crash isn't caused by the UFO. It's caused when a military aircraft is sent to intercept the UFO. It seems like the story is that the military had the alien power source. The UFO is trying to get it back and the military is trying to stop them. Assuming that what stopped the plane really was a UFO in the first place, then it would seem like the aliens and the humans are once again at odds. They're fighting over this power source, not conspiring together on anything.

You could have explained this kind of thing before with the idea of the conspiracy was in part cooperating with aliens, but also in part secretly working on other things to pursue different agendas that they kept secret from the aliens. This makes sense to an extent, but it still wouldn't explain why they had a policy of immediately killing any alien they find. You would think that if the aliens were controlling the conspiracy and involved in it that they might get a little pissed at that. It's just a much cleaner explanation overall that suddenly makes sense of all these little details if you realize that the aliens and the conspiracy weren't working together at all.

But then you could also point out the fact that some people who were abducted seem to have memories of seeing aliens, like Duane Barry. So if the aliens weren't involved in the abductions, then why would they have memories of seeing aliens? The idea of those memories not being true though was actually clearly explained in the episode "Jose Chung's from Outer Space" where they tell you explicitly that the abductions people thought were done by aliens were actually done by humans and then their real memories were altered or replaced by implanted memories. But most people don't listen to what that episode explains because of course it's seen as a comedy episode.

"Rinse her out and give her the usual abduction rigmarole."

"He's stealing my memories."

"What do you do with the abductees?"

"Take them back to the base. Let the doctors work on them. Nothing physical. They just mess with their minds."

"Hypnosis."

"At the base, I've seen people go into an ordinary room with an ordinary bunch of doctors, and come out absolutely positive they were probed by aliens."

"How many times have you been abducted, Seda?"

"I lost count."

"And then there are the screen memories. They implant..."

"The memories implanted over actual memories to make abductees forget."

"I'm familiar with the syndrome."

"It's a detailed file of alien abductees, or rather innocent people who've been brainwashed by the likes of Morris Fletcher."

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute. It can't all be fake memory implantation. What about that third alien? What? What was that thing?"

"Who? Lord Kimbo."

The episode of "Jose Chung's from Outer Space" not only explains how and why fake memories of alien abductions are created. There's even a repeated joke in the episode where there's that guy that keeps telling them, "You can't hide the truth." And he yells, "Roswell, Roswell." Every time they try to shut him up.

"Roswell, Roswell."

The whole "Roswell was a smoke screen" idea and mistakenly assuming that Roswell was the start of everything is one of the points that was made back in season 1 and which Carter returned to again in seasons 10 and 11. The "Jose Chung" episode even explains the idea of military pilots flying ships created with alien technology. Something that would finally convince Moulder humans were behind all the abductions when he saw one of those ships later on in season 10. But which again, this was hinted at all the way back in the first regular episode of the show, "Deep Throat." The idea that all those memories people had of alien abductions were just fake would seem like it was a cop-out if it was something that had been introduced late in the series as a retcon, but it actually goes back even further than "Jose Chung." Way back to the beginning of the show. It's another thing that's there. All the way back in the very first regular episode of the show after the pilot, "Deep Throat," when Moulder sees a UFO on a military base, they establish that they wiped his memory of it.

"I did see something, but it's gone. They took it from me."

If you look closely in that episode, you can see that what Moulder saw is actually the same type of triangular UFO he would see years later in season 10 and would learn was made by humans and which would finally convince him that humans were behind the abductions, not aliens.

"Do you know what an ARV is?"

"That's what you brought me here to see."

"This is Garner. He'll walk you through the science."

"That's an alien replica vehicle."

"Given your background, I would have thought you'd seen one."

"No, never. Not like that."

In fact, all throughout the early seasons, when the characters see UFOs, they're always around or associated with military bases, and the show talks about them making experimental aircraft based on alien technologies. So, why wouldn't you assume that those ships were just what they were eventually revealed to be, alien replica vehicles, ARVs, created and operated by humans using salvaged alien technology?

"The only UFOs that soldiers are likely to see are secret military aircraft. The Pentagon has all but admitted they've been testing a secret class of suborbital spycraft over the western US. Maybe these guys are flying those planes."

The ship Moulder sees deep in season 1 is at a military base again. And it's pretty clear that humans and the military are behind what he sees. Rather than cheating later on, the show is laying the scenes for these things right from its very first episodes. Way back in season 2, even Duane Barry, who of course believed he was being abducted by aliens, he's also very clear that the military is involved in the abductions and that he saw humans there during the abductions.

"The government knows about it. You know, they're even in on it sometimes, right there in the room when they come. They work together."

Even under the alien colonization explanation for the purpose of the conspiracy, it's unlikely that there ever were alien abductions on the show. The humans were supposed to be running these experiments to create alien-human hybrids and that's what people were supposed to have been abducted for. So why would aliens be abducting people and experimenting on them? If there were abductions actually done...

by aliens, it would have been a whole separate thing from the alien human hybrid project and there would have needed to be a whole second purpose to it that was never explained. Saying that the aliens weren't doing it at all again makes things clearer than before and cleans up a lot of issues.

You don't even need the explanation of implanted memories to explain things like why in Dwayne Barry's memories of of his abductions he seems to see aliens. A few times we do see characters that look like aliens involved in abductions or interacting with the syndicate. Like in the season 6 episode One Son, those things are taken as evidence that the aliens were in fact involved in the conspiracy. But if you think about it, there's no evidence that what we see in those scenes actually were aliens.

One of the only times that Moulder gets up close to the body of one of those types of quote unquote aliens and is actually able to look at it is when he finds the dead bodies in the box car in the season 2 episode Anastasia. And in that episode, as soon as he looks at the bodies, he sees that their arms have smallpox vaccination scars. So why would aliens have smallpox vaccination scars? The answer is that they wouldn't. What he's seeing are humans who were part of the alien human hybrid experiments who took on some of the appearances of aliens. Again, watching that episode the first time without the information about the alien human hybrid experiments from later seasons, you just assume that Moulder found a pile of dead aliens. I mean, you saw it with your own eyes. But if you go back, there's no cheating. They tell you right there the minute that he finds them that they aren't aliens. Because if they were, they wouldn't have those scars.

Again, in the early seasons of the show, we're shown things that look like aliens, but that could actually just be alien human hybrid experiments. And sometimes in episodes like 731, we're even clearly told that they are alien human hybrid experiments, not actual aliens.

"There are uh gray aliens that we've seen or maybe not seen. We we've hinted at them. Skelly has even seen some of these, but we don't know if they're aliens."

The other time that Moulder finds a body of that type of alien looking creature is in the episode Gethsemane and the two episodes that follow. This time he has the body a little longer and he's able to do a scientific analysis of it. And as soon as he does that, he finds out that it's not an alien. It's manufactured artificially.

"Cellular material found in the ice core samples were a direct match for what this man Kitskow described. Hybrid cells, chimeras within the matrix."

So in fact, when you look at it, even in the old mythology where the purposes of the abductions and tests were supposed to be part of the alien colonization plan, it was still always really clear that the abductions were being done by humans. 6 years ago, Agent Scully was taken in a military operation staged as an abduction. When Scully's abducted, it's by the same people who are behind Dwayne Barry's abductions, and it's made very clear that she was abducted by humans, not aliens. We see her when she's abducted in a white room being experimented on by very human-looking medical technology. Later on, we're shown where she was taken, and it was to a train car. The character referred to as the first elder in the syndicate takes her to one of these train cars, and he shows it to her. They explain the doctors who were working on her, how they were tied to World War II Japanese medical experiments. There's no ambiguity that her abduction and what was done to her was all done by humans.

"What I'm saying, Moulder, is that there is no such thing as alien abduction. It is just a smoke screen."

"Roswell was a smoke screen."

Scully here even uses the smoke screen line again to once again repeat the idea that the aliens being behind what's happening is a cover story. We were told this so many times in the early seasons that it's actually a testament to Chris Carter's cleverness that it still seemed like a twist in season 10. He was able to not cheat, to have the truth right there, but to have you misunderstand it until he wanted to reveal more.

Of course, the biggest visual evidence we get of alien involvement in the conspiracy is the ship we see at the end of the first X-Files movie. Being the first X-Files feature film, it needed a big climax and big payoff. So, this would be where Moulder finally sees a giant alien spaceship. But does the ship being there actually tell us that aliens were involved in the conspiracy? The ship does certainly seem to be using alien technology. But it also seems to clearly be run by the human conspirators. There are no aliens on the ship when they go there other than the ones that had been brought there by the humans after just stating from the black oil and human hosts. They show human computer systems hooked up to the ship controlling its operations.

In fact, it's established in the movie and also several places in the show that cold is bad for the purity virus. It's how Scully stops the virus's progress in the episode Endgame.

"For some reason, this retrovirus goes dormant at cold temperatures."

And keeping the host cold is how they slow the gestation of the aliens in the movie. So, if the ship we see in the movie is actually being operated by the aliens or a place where the conspirators are in contact with aliens, then why would it be in the Antarctic? They take the people that have aliens just sitting inside of them there seemingly to freeze them and to keep the aliens from emerging from them. If you think about it, even if the ship was originally built by aliens or if it was built with alien technology, the reason to have it in the Antarctic seems specifically to make it inhospitable to the aliens or to hide it from them. Its location there seems to indicate once again that though the conspiracy is using alien technology, the aliens aren't actually involved in what's going on.

But if they weren't working to aid in alien colonization though, then what was the conspiracy actually doing? The alien colonization project, as we understood it before, had two prongs. The first was the experiments to create alien human hybrids, which I'll get to the true purpose of in a minute because going into that reveals the ultimate goal of the project. The other part was all the experiments with things like the bees, which were about different ways to release a mass contagion. We assumed that releasing a contagion like this was how the aliens would take over because the aliens primarily existed as a sentient virus and these were ways to distribute that virus. But if the aliens weren't trying to recolonize the planet in the form of a virus, then what was all the work the conspiracy was doing in ways to spread a mass contagion actually for?

"I just want someone to tell me what the hell is going on here."

"A government hiding, hoarding alien technology for 70 years at the expense of human life and the future of the planet driven not only by corporate greed but a darker objective. The takeover of America."

"And then the world itself."

"When we were young men in the military, your father and I were recruited for a project. They told us it was biological warfare, a virus. What killed those men?"

"What killed them, I won't even write about. We have no context for what killed those men or any appreciation of the scale at which it'll be unleashed in the future."

"A plague."

"A plague to end all plagues. Agent Moulder."

"I've seen it. You've seen once, Scully."

"I know how it begins. There's a virus, the Spartan virus. It shuts down our immune systems and it starts a pandemic."

"When a simple pathogen would kill billions and billions, there's going to be a contagion. A virus is going to be unleashed. People's immune systems will be decimated."

"Your immune system will go first, but this is what will finally kill you. The aliens are not coming, Mr. Moulder. Just so you understand."

"No interest in a warming planet with vanishing resources."

"The beauty of a planet returned to its savage state."

"Living as we were intended."

"So just unleash a plague."

"This is no ordinary contagion. This is an alien pathogen."

"The ultimate weapon. The ability to depopulate the planet to kill everyone but the chosen."

So over the years, the show did a number of what I usually refer to as backdoor mythology episodes, which are episodes that tell basically self-contained stories and are usually considered monster of the week, but the mysteries of which probably have something to do with the aims of the larger conspiracy and the syndicate in the mythology storylines. In addition to all the talk in the mythology episodes of some kind of massive plague or extinction, there are also several of these backdoor mythology episodes that also show projects that were going on with the goal of finding different ways to release a mass contagion.

In particular, there's the uh season 2 episode Fama. Like all the episodes with the bees, this one again shows insects being used to spread an infection. Interestingly, the CSM shows up in this episode to interfere in their investigation and to give orders to Skinner. And towards the end, Skinner says to Moulder,

"You really have no idea who you're dealing with, do you? For every step you take, they're three steps ahead. I'm saying this is a friend. Watch your back. This is just the beginning."

So, they clearly meant for the experiment being shown in this episode to be part of something larger. Like I said before, since we knew that the conspiracy was planning to release some kind of mass contagion, we thought we could assume that it was planning to release the purity virus on a mass scale. So all humans would be infected and controlled without it having to travel to them one at a time through oil. And in that way, the planet would be colonized. And what we finally revealed in the movie was that in fact the black oil was a virus that has been around since before man was around, alien in origin that has taken over the universe. And ultimately that's what colonization on Earth would be. Would be this black oil infecting all of us.

In season 10, it's revealed that since there was no colonization happening, the mass contagion they were actually releasing was something called the Spartan virus. Again, this isn't actually a retcon. It's an explanation of something that they were already talking about in the show. The Spartan virus is a version of the alien virus that they've developed, but this one has the goal of killing everybody that it infects.

"I was given a smallpox vaccine as a child, as I'm sure you were as well. It was standard practice in America at the time."

"If you are suggesting that there is more in that shot than than a vaccine."

Of course, the show came back to mentioning something being done to people through the smallpox vaccine many times over the years. These guys were keeping records of smallpox inoculations.

"An inventory."

"Of what?"

"Of us. Test subjects were tracked through DNA identifiers in their smallpox vaccination scars."

"Without the subject's knowledge."

"Mostly some develop suspicions. I saw Russians who cut off their arms to prevent being tracked."

People were said to be tracked through markers left in them by the smallpox vaccine. The records that Moulder and Scully found in the mines in season 3 were of people being cataloged and recorded based on when they were given the smallpox vaccine. In the episodes that deal with the bees, it's also explained that the virus they're carrying is a mutated form of the smallpox virus.

In Paper Clip, we really begin to realize the extent of the government conspiracy and the cataloging of of all of us. This is where Chris first introduced the idea of genetic material being taken through inoculations for smallpox in this case. But other than being used as a way to track people, it was never really explained in the show's original run what was in the smallpox vaccine that was so important to the project and why they had put it there. Season 10 finally explains that the way the Spartan virus is supposed to work is that everybody or mostly everybody had a weakness placed in them through the smallpox vaccine that makes them vulnerable to it to the to the Spartan virus. It also explains that the alterations the vaccine made to a person's biology can then be passed on to their offspring through them. So over generations they've marked almost everybody with this vulnerability that they want them to have.

"The Spartan virus removes the adenosine deaminase gene from your DNA. Remove the ADA gene and your immune system will simply vanish. What they have, what you have, what I have to presume the entire population has is something entirely different. It's in the germ line already. It's in sperm. It's in eggs. It's a virus within a virus that was put there through the smallpox vaccine. It's what these men are calling the Spartan virus. Then the Spartan virus can be released on a controlled timetable via various means."

In seasons 10 and 11, the show mentions chemtrails several times.

"They are dosing us, folks. And now I know what you're asking. Why would they dose us? Why would they use these planes? It's the same reason that chemtrails."

"If you see graffiti like this in your neighborhood, you can suspect your DNA is being targeted by a release of aluminum into the atmosphere through chemtrails."

This whole thing with chemtrails seems like an attempt at the time to keep the show current with the conspiracy theories of the time. In this case, 2016 through 2018, but this also has roots in a number of earlier mythology episodes and backdoor mythology episodes. In season 2, there were the episodes Blood and Red Museum that both deal with something similar. In Blood, there is a government experiment to induce psychosis in a population by releasing a chemical and pesticides from crop planes similar to chemtrails. In Red Museum, there's a project to release a similar kind of chemical that creates a similar kind of psychosis. This time by a doctor in a small town. In that episode, one of the people involved in the project turns out to be the man that Scully saw shoot [ __ ], which shows that these projects, these backdoor mythology episode projects have a direct tie to the larger conspiracy and to the syndicate. They show a similar type of chemical yet again in the season 11 episode Kitten. This time saying that it was being tested to induce psychosis in soldiers in Vietnam. Those episodes are showing a chemical agent that's different from the Spartan virus, but they deal in similar territory of the conspiracy trying methods of mass-releasing something on unsuspecting citizens and also of the conspiracy's interest in finding ways to mass control the population.

The way the Spartan virus is revealed to work is that it would destroy people's immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to every other type of disease and infection, ensuring that virtually everybody infected with it would soon die.

"A scale we've never dreamed. A scope that quickly becomes global."

"A massive contagion. Then not one contagion, but a variety of contagions. If the flu doesn't kill you, then something else will."

"You're describing it as a fast-moving AIDS without the HIV."

"Our immune systems decimated by the same tampering to all our genomes."

As the CSM rationalizes it, humanity was on a path of self-destruction anyway, destroying the environment and the planet. And so he was just controlling the timetable like a controlled burn of part of a forest to get rid of dangerous vegetation and make sure that the rest of the forest doesn't burn.

"My plans are airtight. And even if they were to get out, they would be dismissed as so much fake news. That's the world we live in, Monica. Every day a new disaster when the one thing no one is prepared for will wipe the slate clean. We refuse to imagine our impending extinction, the acceleration of the cataclysms. We've thrown science out the window in favor of scandal and opinion. Civilization a joke and my plan merely the punchline."

"These are people you're killing."

"I'm just cleaning the mess that they made. I didn't set out to destroy the world, Moulder. People did. You can't justify your actions. We have just had the hottest year on record on planet Earth. I didn't do that. I'm not responsible for the 40% loss of of bird life or the decimation of the megapona."

"Just murder all the people."

"Aliens predicted all this. They saw it happening to themselves."

"Yeah, and you kept it a secret."

"Look at world history, Fox. Neither you nor I could save mankind from self-extermination."

"So, you plotted your endgame."

"I just changed the timetable."

So the aliens, it's explained, started visiting again shortly after World War II because they sensed that we had used our first atomic weapons. And they came here to warn us that we were on a path to destroying ourselves. This is the point of self-annihilation that they had predicted that we'd arrive at by 2012. When they come back to warn us, they're trying to give us one final chance to avoid it.

"No sooner had we defeated Germany than a new threat started appearing in skies over America, drawn to Earth by the latest threat to extinction, the H-bomb. Explosions acting as transducers drawing alien life forms to the wormholes in spaceships using electrogravidic propulsion. Advanced extraterrestrial species visiting us. Concern for mankind and the threat of our self-destruction. Foretelling our annihilation through their own self-sacrifice."

This is one of those details that fits so well in retrospect that like the link between the Magnetite and the Native Americans that wasn't explained until the last episode of season 9, this connection feels like something that Chris Carter must have had in mind and been sitting on for a long, long time before he actually got around to explaining it. The idea that the aliens were coming as a response to our using atomic weapons explains very nicely why Roswell happened when it did right after World War II and how the whole conspiracy would have its roots in that war and the Cold War and escalate from there. But when the aliens came to try to warn us, rather than taking their warning as meaning that we needed to find ways to be less destructive, the men privy to what was going on, like the CSM, saw this as an opportunity to use the technology the aliens had brought to make even more dangerous weapons. But this time, weapons that they could control for their own purposes. If everybody or almost everybody was going to be wiped out, they wanted to be the ones deciding how it all went down.

"A government preparing to use that data against you when it strikes and the final takeover begins."

And again, like all these other things I've been talking about, when you look back over the show, you'll see that this isn't a retcon. It was all hinted at really, really heavily. The show talked many times about the coming sixth extinction.

"It first appeared in the sea almost 4 billion years ago in the form of single-celled life. In an explosion of life spanning millions of years, nature's first multicellular organisms began to multiply. And then it stopped. 440 million years ago, a great mass extinction would kill off nearly every species on the planet. The cycle repeated again and again. Reptiles emerging independent of the sea only to be killed off. Then dinosaurs struggling to life. Along with the first birds, fish, and flowering plants, their decimations, Earth's fourth and fifth great extinctions. Only a 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens appear, man. From cave paintings to the Bible to Columbus and Apollo 11, we have been a tireless force upon the earth and off, cataloging the natural world as it unfolds to us, rising to a world population of over 5 billion people, all descended from that original single cell, that first spark of life. Will we pass as those before us into oblivion? Into the sixth extinction that scientists warn is already in progress."

Note that here when they're talking about this, they're talking about an extinction clearly, not colonization with humans or human alien hybrids living alongside aliens as a slave race. The prediction is that in the coming apocalypse foretold by the aliens, the human race would be wiped out, not enslaved, not colonized. The second of the sixth extinction episodes is entitled The Sixth Extinction to Amore Fati. Amore Fati translating as love your fate or love your destiny or accept your fate. This is a counterpoint to another of the show's repeated lines, fight the future. This is what CSM has been saying all along. All of humanity is going to die soon, so there's no point in fighting it. We need to accept it. This also explains why various parts of the conspiracy were working on a vaccine in secret from one another. The Russians would obviously want a vaccine if they had an idea of what the Spartan virus really might do.

"There is something that has been um brewing uh from the end of the second season on, which is the idea that uh this conspiracy to uh keep a secret the existence of extraterrestrial life is a global and multinational conspiracy, not just a uh an American one. And uh there is a another cold war afoot, a race to find um what may be the cure to an alien virus that's on the planet."

In season 10, by explaining the mechanics of the Spartan virus, the show finally explains all these ideas of an extinction and an apocalypse that make much more sense of all the clues we've been given than any of the other explanations that were given before. But we do still know that the project was also doing experiments in creating alien human hybrids. And so if the plans to release a contagion were about killing everybody, not controlling them or making them a slave race to live alongside aliens, then what were the alien human hybrid experiments for?

"What are they trying to do?"

"That's the missing piece."

"Why is more complicated than you may ever know."

"Basically, something was done to you. Something that you're just beginning to remember. You can't quite figure it out, but it can be explained and it will be explained."

"I'll explain everything."

"I have a long and complicated story to tell you. The larger plan. You mean colonization at hegemony, Mr. Moulder. A new origin of species."

"Classified studies were done at military installations extracting alien tissue. Tests were done on unsuspecting human subjects. They've been doing experiments since World War II. Tests on innocent civilians."

"The aliens made you pregnant."

"A number of times. What are the tests for?"

"You're nearly there."

"You're close."

"There are people with immunity."

"Agent Scully has it. And her son, they'll survive with a select few."

"You're protected. Your abduction. The tests, your DNA, Dana, you're safe. You're one of the chosen elite."

"Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral Holocaust will be those immune to it. Human alien clones."

"The ultimate weapon."

"It's a weapon. Ask yourself, my friend, what could be more valuable than Star Wars? More valuable than the atomic bomb or the most advanced biological weapons?"

"A standing army immune to the effects of those weapons."

"Alien DNA is what I have. And alien DNA is all that can save us."

"But what are we looking to do?"

"To amplify my DNA. Using alien DNA to defeat the Spartan virus by creating a vaccine against it."

"I don't have to tell you that we live at the nexus of certain government agencies. Doing experiments on the mind even before the Cold War. I've also seen things that could only be described as superhuman."

"Hegemony, Mr. Moulder, a new origin of species."

"You impregnated her with science, Mr. Skinner. Alien science to create the first superhuman child."

The explanation of what all the alien human hybrid projects were actually for is where it all finally comes together and where I think you can clearly see the beautiful structure to all of the mythology to which Chris Carter has long alluded. The idea eventually revealed in seasons 10 and 11 is that the ultimate goal of the conspiracy was to find a way to use alien DNA and technology to give humans superhuman abilities, including the ability to survive the Spartan virus when it was unleashed. So that after the coming plague, the chosen few who were given this enhancement would survive as a race of basically immortal superhumans.

"21st century genetic engineering will not only eradicate the Siamese twins and the alligator skin people, but you're going to be hard-pressed to find a a slight overbite or not so high cheekbone. You see, I've seen the future and the future looks just like him. Imagine going through your whole life looking like that."

This idea that what the conspiracy was trying to do was create superhumans might seem like yet another layer and yet another divergent goal, another conspiracy within conspiracy, but I'm going to explain how what it actually does is tie everything together into one elegant super conspiracy that makes sense of everything throughout 25 years of the show. I talked earlier about how people got confused at the time because it seemed like the gray aliens, the black oil, these were all different types of aliens running around, but actually it's just different parts of the life cycle of the same alien. And Carter was piecing it out gradually and letting you put it all together. There were still the other kinds of aliens and alien human hybrids, though, which people thought were even more confusing. But once you understand the idea of what they were doing to create superhumans, suddenly all of that has an elegant, simple explanation as well.

There were the alien human hybrids with the green blood that we saw running around as far back as season 1. And then there were the alien bounty hunters which seemed similar but seemed like they worked for the gray aliens. And then there was Jeremiah Smith who seemed like one of those aliens but working at cross purposes. There were also the alien rebels who seemed similar again but these ones weren't infected with the purity virus which it seemed like the hybrids and possibly the bounty hunters were. And on top of that, the show eventually introduced the super soldiers who seemed like still another kind of alien enforcer like the alien bounty hunters but different. The thing that you have to understand that makes this all not confusing at all is that these aren't all different things. They're all part of the same single project, which is the project to create superhumans. And this isn't a retcon. There were hints about this all along.

There's one obvious clue that all these types of characters share, which tells you that they're supposed to have something in common. They all have something done to them on the back of their neck.

"You're feeling it, too, aren't you?"

"Here."

"You have the mark, don't you?"

"What mark?"

"Here on the back of your neck. We all have them. It's where they put the implants."

"Then one of them pinched me kind of far and then I was better right away."

"He pinched you where?"

"Right here."

"Here, here, and here. Implants. A chip in the back of her neck. It's a weapon, isn't it? Used to pierce the back of the neck."

"Flyers."

But what about that? You kill the alien human hybrids by stabbing or shooting them in the back of the neck. You do the same for the alien bounty hunters and for Jeremiah Smith. When Scully is kidnapped and experimented on, where did they put the chip that controlled the changes they had made to her body, which gave her cancer and then cured it? That would be in the back of her neck. The anomaly in the body of Scully's clone daughter, Emily, that was on the back of her neck. In the episode, Inami, they cure the boy's cancer through some technology that they inserted into the back of his neck. In the same episode, they show an old woman that they helped to live to age 118 by some kind of technology that they inserted again in the back of her neck. When the super soldiers show up, how do you identify one? Through the metal with alien technology that's in the back of their neck.

People seem to have the idea, and I had the same idea originally, that the alien bounty hunters and the alien rebels were another species of aliens separate from the gray aliens. The gray aliens had black blood and then there were these other shape-shifting aliens with green blood, right? But if that's true, something about that never made sense. The defining attributes of these aliens, the bounty hunters and the rebels, were that they bled green blood and that they had shape-shifting powers. The weird thing about that is that they shared these attributes with the alien human hybrids. As we saw many times, the alien human hybrids also bled green. The alien human hybrids, though, we know are attempts to create hybrids between humans and the gray aliens, the purity virus aliens.

"What do they have there?"

"The Wellspring Scully."

So, if the alien human hybrids were humans combined with gray aliens, the virus aliens, then why would they seem to have the attributes of this other species of green-blooded aliens if that's a separate species? The reason is because the green-blooded aliens, the bounty hunters and rebels, aren't another species of aliens at all. They're alien human hybrids. I mean, think about it logically. Don't complicate it when there's no reason to. They look and act and bleed like the hybrids because they're the same thing as the hybrids. And the hybrids are a combination of humans and the gray aliens. There's no second alien species involved here. I always thought that the reason that the hybrids had this green toxic blood was because they were attempting to find a way to make alien human hybrids that retained the desired alien attribute, super strength, immunity to illness and so on, but also make them immune to the purity virus or at least make it so that they weren't controlled by the purity virus. So that's why they had blood that was toxic to the virus, but they could still shapeshift and still had super strength in some of their abilities. That's just part of my thought about why they had the toxic blood, but it makes sense, doesn't it?

So, there is no other species of aliens, no several other species of aliens, no alien bounty hunter species, and then a slightly different race of rebel shape shifters and so on. Much of the confusion people have from the mythology is because they made incorrect guesses early on and then tried to stick with their incorrect head canon when the real answers were explained. I mean, trust me, I know because I made this mistake, too. But since we know that the alien human hybrids have green blood and all of the attributes of the alien bounty hunters and we know that the alien human hybrids are hybrids between the humans and the gray aliens, then it follows that that's what the alien bounty hunters are too and the rebels and Jeremiah Smith. Some of them decided to work with the project. Some of them rebelled and decided to work against it. But they're the same type of thing, the same type of hybrids. There are no half a dozen confusing different alien species and factions. It's all just one thing.

"Of course, you weren't even close. Waring aliens lighting each other on fire and other such nonsense."

And we already know, as has been shown in episodes like Colony and Endgame. And going back to the very first confirmed appearance of a green-blooded hybrid in season 1, some of the alien human hybrids when they start to understand what they are and what the project is for, some of them rebel and set out to have their own agenda or to stop what's happening or to just leave the project. That's all a character like Jeremiah Smith is. It's a hybrid that's decided to rebel and stop the project or at least to try to stop part of it. The alien bounty hunters are more loyal alien human hybrids who have decided to work with the project and hunt down hybrids who are getting out of line. The alien rebels are similar again, but I'll get back to what I think their exact agenda was later on in a little bit.

When the super soldiers were introduced, I remember fans of the time complaining that it was yet another side story, yet another faction within a faction, further complicating the show's mythology. And again, yet they actually weren't a new idea at all. The idea that the government and the conspirators were doing experiments to create super soldiers and stronger humans with special powers goes back to the first seasons. In season 1, we have the Eves which were an experiment in creating people with super intelligence and even telepathic abilities.

"Are you here to give me an IQ test by any chance? I think I can top 265. We're very bright Eves."

In season 2, we have the episode Sleepless, which was about projects during Vietnam to create super soldiers that didn't need sleep.

"Top secret military project born of the idea that sleep is the soldier's greatest enemy."

"I don't sleep."

And incidentally, where were the surgeries done on these soldiers to give them this ability? That would be on the back of their neck.

"Back of the neck."

"On the back of your neck."

The idea that they were experimenting on soldiers in Vietnam also ties in again with the season 11 episode Kitten.

"Let me say there was a rumored program out of the Cold War, a plan to create a super soldier. What you're chasing is a prototype."

There's also the episode Salvage from season 8 where they show the result of an experiment to create an indestructible man by using a kind of smart metal that allows his body to rebuild itself. This obviously seems like another version of the same kind of super soldier thing, only another earlier, less successful version because they weren't using the alien technology with the metal from the alien spacecrafts that could more successfully interact with organic creatures. The super soldiers we'd eventually see in seasons 8 and 9 were the next stage of these projects, after they learned more about the alien technology and how to create alien human hybrids. The idea was played with in the show that the super soldiers might be created by aliens, perhaps to manage colonization after most of the syndicate had been killed. But this was pretty clearly a red herring. It was pretty clearly a red herring even back at the time.

"What are you?"

"I'm the product of 50 years of military science. The program your old friend Null Roar told you about. I'm a bioengineered combat unit."

Knowing that these super soldiers were created by human conspirators and not the aliens, we can also figure out that the conspiracy that created them was connected to the same people behind the alien human hybrid projects. Aside from the back of the neck hint, among other reasons, it's explained in the super soldier episodes that the process by which people are transformed into super soldiers involves the same purity virus doing something to its host's body. And the same vaccine that stops the purity virus also stops people from turning into super soldiers. The way the super soldier forms inside the body of the person who's transforming like a second organism and it then sheds the host's skin when he dies is even similar to how we saw the purity virus gestating an alien inside a human host. So the super soldiers are made by humans but with alien technology that makes them part alien which is exactly what the alien human hybrid project was doing all along. Again, it's the same project. And the goal of the changes made to people both by turning them into alien human hybrids and turning them into super soldiers, another type of alien human hybrids, is to use alien DNA to give them certain attributes and powers of the aliens like strength, healing, and vulnerability. In other words, to turn them into superhumans, exactly as it was eventually explained in seasons 10 and 11.

In the case of the super soldiers, they're clearly using some technology from the metal in the alien spaceship, which we know because they're they're vulnerable to the same magnetite that those ships are vulnerable to. And because they have this metal in their spines, the technology in this metal in this case is key to their invulnerability because we're shown that if even a small amount of that metal survives, it can regenerate the entire super soldier. Incidentally, I always wondered in the episode Tithonus why it was so important for them to get that particular stiletto Moulder's mother had in order to kill Jeremiah Smith if they could just go to a grocery store or something and buy an ice pick to do the same thing, right? But while the super soldiers can't be killed by being shot or stabbed any normal way because of the alien technology inside of them, they can be killed by a particular kind of metal, a certain kind of magnetite. They share that weakness with the alien spaceship because the technology is the same. Could it be that they needed not just any metal stiletto to kill Jeremiah Smith, but rather one that was made of that particular kind of magnetite? They do show that when the bounty hunters are shot or injured in the back of the neck by means other than one of these stilettos, they can come back. Could it be because the bullets weren't the right kind of magnetite? It's just a thought.

"Simple gunshot won't do."

So, I think in retrospect, it's obvious that all these different factions are a part of the project to create alien human hybrids. The ultimate goal of which was to create a kind of invulnerable immortal superhuman that could survive the coming plague. It was all one project, one goal, and it only involved one species of aliens.

"What are they?"

"The best I can figure, there's some kind of secret military project. Ordinary men made invincible."

Doggett says in season 9 that the super soldiers are ordinary men made invincible, which again, in retrospect, is the exact same thing as the superhuman project that was explained in seasons 10 and 11. We just didn't have a few of the pieces yet to figure out that this was the goal of the entire conspiracy. He also says back then that the super soldiers were a military project, which links it again to the kinds of projects we saw in episodes like Eve and Sleepless, and explains yet again that it's the human conspiracy creating these things, not the aliens. Giving humans immortality was the goal. The super soldiers were another stage in the project, but they still weren't the perfect superhumans the project was trying to create. They were physically immortal, but they relied on the alien metal to keep them alive. And being part machine, they still had a major vulnerability to the magnetite that could destroy those machines. And they seemed like to an extent like they were mindless automatons. They were good soldiers for the people running the project, but not what those people running the project wanted to become themselves.

When you understand that the alien human hybrid experiments were about making humans with superhuman abilities, this is something where once again you can not only go back and find clues dating back to the earliest seasons of the show, but you also start to notice many things that suddenly make much more sense now than they did before. And many things that didn't make sense at all before suddenly make sense with this explanation.

"The tentacles reached far back into the last century, but it wasn't until victories in Europe and Japan and the onset of the Cold War the political and economic conditions became perfect for actual execution."

"They've been doing experiments since World War II, tests on innocent civilians."

"In 1947, a spacecraft was reportedly recovered in New Mexico. No doubt you know of this, and of the reported recovery of a body at the site. These incidents coincided with not only the end of World War II, but an ignominious project which brought Nazi scientists and war criminals to this country to exploit their knowledge."

"Operation Paperclip."

"Yes, you know of it already. And you must also know of the work of Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Nazi angel of death. Mengele thought that he could produce a super race through genetic engineering."

"As did many of his colleagues at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene."

"Like Victor Cleer."

"Poor Victor, he loved his orchids. Did you know that he was able to create some of the most beautiful hybrids?"

Cleer was trying to create an alien human hybrid. That's what I saw in the box car. He was using human test subjects. The title of the season 3 episode Paper Clip is a reference to Operation Paper Clip, which is a real program in which Nazi scientists, rather than being imprisoned, were brought over to America so that we could use their scientific knowledge. The show talks about this being part of the origin of the project that would eventually involve the syndicate and the alien human hybrid experiments on the show. And when the well-manicured man is explaining the conspiracy's project to Scully, he specifically says it started in World War II when the Nazis were trying to create a race of superhumans.

"And you must also know the work of Dr. Joseph Mengele."

"Mengele thought that he could produce a super race through genetic engineering."

The well-manicured man then says that it wasn't until a few years later until the crash at Roswell in 1947 that they had alien technology to advance the project that they had already been working on. In addition to telling you that the project is about creating superhumans, this explanation also clearly tells you that alien colonization wasn't the origin or the original driving goal of the project. If you think about it, because the whole thing predates any alien involvement.

"They've been doing experiments since World War II."

I'd seen this episode Paper Clip many times, of course, but it was a shock revisiting it how closely this lines up with seasons 10 and 11. Here, the well-manicured man is saying that the project predates the aliens. He's saying it was about creating superhumans. He's laying all of this out there back in season 3.

"Mengele thought that he could produce a super race through genetic engineering."

It's one of several moments where when you look at it back on it now, it makes the twists in seasons 10 and 11 hardly even seem like twists. They were already there. They're already telling you this. In retrospect, they barely even seem like twists and they're certainly not huge retcons. And if you doubted what well-manicured man was saying here, it's worth noting that Chris Carter has always singled out the well-manicured man as being the member of the syndicate with a conscience and the one who's always telling the truth.

"John Neville has uh been on the show. Uh he plays a character named the well-manicured man. All these all the bad guys uh don't have names. They only have descriptions. uh and uh he uh is an important part of the group of elders who run the conspiracy because he's the voice of reason. He's a person who believes that violence is the wrong way in which to uh protect the secret that you need to uh let a certain amount of information out so as to sort of keep your uh uh pursuers uh close so you can control them. John Neville was uh such an important um sort of counterpoint to the syndicate because he was an honest man with integrity. In fact, his character could always be counted on to tell Moulder and Scully the truth up to the point where he felt comfortable doing so. So, he was really the uh direct opposite person to the cigarette smoking man who was venal and uh could never be trusted. Carter gave us a lot of the answers about the origin and purpose of the project right here back in this episode in season 3. And he was telling people to listen to the person that was saying them."

"You're lying."

"No."

The idea that the alien human hybrid experiments had their roots in Nazi eugenics and not in alien visitations is hinted at all throughout the show in many ways. Actually, there's a season 4 episode called Herrenvolk, which shows clones of Moulder's sister, Samantha, and also features the bees, hinting that the cloning and genetic experiments and the plans to release a mass contagion are connected projects. Herrenvolk, the title of the episode, is a is German and it literally means master people, and it was a concept in Nazi ideology referring to a master race, which they believed had an innate right to rule over the world. The project in the show is trying to create a master race to rule over the world. And by making the Nazi connection here, they're once again tying that project to Nazi eugenic experiments and also once again linking the origin of the project to a time before alien technology was involved in it.

"Rob just said to me is a mixture of Stalin and Hitler."

The actor who played Struggled

In the movie, it says that they told him specifically that his character was based on Hitler. One of the first times that we get a good look at the subjects of the project's alien human hybrid experiments is in the episode in Asia at the end of season 2. There's even very strong Holocaust imagery there to link what was done to these subjects to the kinds of eugenics experiments done to Holocaust victims by Nazi doctors, some of whom survived the war and continued working in America as part of Operation Paperclip. The alien human hybrid bodies are found in a box car, and they're shown being gassed and then left piled up in a mass grave. The Holocaust connections couldn't be much more clearly implied here.

And then, of course, there's also the fact that the four-part mythology story running through seasons 10 and 11, the episodes were named "My Struggle" parts 1 through 4. "My Struggle," of course, obviously being a translation of the title of Hitler's book, *Mein Kampf*. The title of the first episode is "My Struggle," which could be sort of likened to Hitler's *Mein Kampf*. That wasn't my idea exactly. I was reading a terrific series of books by a guy named Knausgård, the first one called *My Struggle* about his life, and they were in intimate detail. And so I thought, why not get into the sort of intimate detail of Mulder's life as well? When Chris Carter has talked about this title, he's pointing out that the title "My Struggle" also has other sources besides Hitler because he's trying to not be too on the nose about it and pin it down to one single meaning. But at the same time that he points out that there's other possible sources, he also says that he's obviously aware of the Hitler connection and even points this connection out himself.

Even the name of the conspirators gave to the virus, "Purity," hints at the purpose of the project to create a pure master race, Herrenvolk, and to purify the world of all the people the elites see as unworthy. All that kind of obvious Hitler stuff. The first time we see the name "Purity," it's on a flask titled "Purity Control," again, because they're trying to purify and control the world. Season 3 even goes into this World War II connection again when it talks about Japanese doctors that had been doing experiments on humans whose discoveries were also part of the project. Again, another thing dating the start of the project back to before the contact with aliens. In the episodes called, uh, "Nisei" and "731." "731" is referencing Unit 731, a covert unit in the Japanese army that did biological and chemical research and experimented on humans with lethal results. And "Nisei" being a Japanese term for the child of a Japanese immigrant that's born in the Americas. That's presumably referencing the work that they're doing being something that was imported from Japan to America with the doctors brought over after World War II.

>> What is this?

>> That's a group of Japanese medical officers taken during World War II.

>> I've seen this man before.

>> He was the commander of an elite section of the Japanese Medical Corps known as 731. A unit now known to have experimented on human subjects. They performed vivisections without anesthesia. Tested frostbite tolerance levels on infants. Exposed innocent prisoners of war to diseases, the plague.

Like the Nazi connection, showing the link to these experiments during World War II both hints at the aims of the project to experiment with human biology and also that these aims, once again, clearly predate alien contact at Roswell. When you're re-watching the show from the beginning with the new seasons in mind, that all starts to make more and more sense. At first, like I keep saying over and over, but then the new understanding of events does seem to hit a roadblock in around seasons five and six, where characters in the Syndicate and characters who seem like they would know the truth about the conspiracy, including the Well-Manicured Man, start to talk very specifically about alien colonization, which would seem to confirm that alien colonization was in fact what was happening with the project.

In season 5, there are several scenes of people involved in the project talking to each other about alien colonization and the alien colonists.

>> Collaboration has allowed you to prepare to stall colonization.

>> My group has been working cooperatively with the alien colonists.

>> They know that when the aliens learn of Cassandra, colonization will begin.

>> To put a stop to it before the colonists intervene.

>> He's a resistance fighter against the alien colonists.

In these kinds of scenes, these are members of the conspiracy, and they're only talking to each other. So, they wouldn't seem to have any reason to be lying or to be trying to deceive an outsider. So, it seems that they definitely believe that alien colonization was happening. So, if we're going to go with the explanation that alien colonization wasn't the goal of the project, then what could the explanation for this be, right? Did some people in the project know and others didn't? It seems weird to think at first that people in the Syndicate didn't know what was happening because before, when you watch the show, you always believe them to be the ones holding all the secrets. I'll admit, at first glance during my rewatch, that these scenes seem to blow any hope that seasons 10 and 11 could fit easily with the earlier seasons out of the water. And the first time I watched the series, before there were seasons 10 and 11, these types of scenes seemed to confirm unambiguously what the conspiracy in the show was all about. But when you look at these scenes and what we know about the Syndicate a little more closely, you'll realize that this actually isn't a contradiction at all either. And if you take the time to think it through, you'll find that yet again, in light of the explanation of the conspiracy given in seasons 10 and 11, like many other things, like everything else in the show, these scenes with the Syndicate also suddenly make more sense than they ever did before.

>> I'm going to give you an explanation.

The simple thing that you have to understand to make sense of these scenes first here is that the Syndicate isn't the top level of the conspiracy, and they're not the ultimate decision-makers, and they never were. This isn't a new idea either. It's not a retcon. Chris Carter more or less explained this on the audio commentary for the movie, the first movie, back between seasons five and six.

>> The people who make up the conspiracy are mostly men in their, uh, 50s, 60s, and 70s. The idea being that these were people who were in positions of power or of fledgling, burgeoning power in during the Cold War. And, uh, as the Cold War escalated and then collapsed, these men were in positions to learn certain things as a result of, uh, secret scientific experiments, uh, um, Cold War, uh, politics. They splintered and or split off from the, uh, uh, body of government that they were working for and banded together with this new knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life and used that knowledge to their own purpose. They are elders, we call them, uh, men from different nations, all of whom have kept the secret to themselves and will do anything to protect it. So what we are seeing is really the, uh, result of the predictions, I think, about the military-industrial complex, about global politics being shaped by, uh, not necessarily, um, the good of the people, but by moneyed interests. And I, I think that it is, uh, allegorical in that way with what we're seeing in the, uh, uh, in the, in the world today. Uh, we do have a, a rather, um, sort of far-fetched idea which about, uh, alien life, but I think the, uh, world it takes place in and the players are all too believable as people who may, um, in fact, find reasons to, uh, be, uh, involved in something, um, like a global conspiracy for purposes that are completely selfish.

What the Syndicate really is are a kind of power brokers and managers for the project. They're people who have ties to different levels of power and ties within different governments who can coordinate and get things done, but they were never meant to be the originators of the conspiracy or the people who are ultimately running it. It's clear that they have people that they're answering to. When the Well-Manicured Man tells Mulder too much, they kill him right away. The members of the Syndicate are being controlled, and they're not allowed to step out of line. The real power behind the Syndicate is a cabal of wealthy elites that are running the project for their own nefarious reasons.

>> Who called this meeting? Strug?

>> [Music]

>> They all are in service to the leader, a man named Struggold, who has been a name only in The X-Files. He made the, uh, somewhat far-fetched ideas, uh, uh, of this, uh, science fiction notion that the, uh, that aliens are, uh, plotting to colonize the world. He took it and, uh, made it believable.

This is also made clear in the movie with the character of Struggold, who comes in and is able to give the Syndicate orders, make decisions about what they can do. Struggold was actually foreshadowed earlier in the show in season 3. His name is on the mines where Mulder and Scully find the records of people's smallpox vaccinations.

>> The photo was taken to the Struckhole Mining Company in West Virginia.

>> He's supposed to be some kind of billionaire who got rich off of these mining companies and off of things like the smallpox vaccines.

>> I would say he is really the evil person. He's the maker, troublemaker to a certain extent. And he is creating his own world, and he's a mixture of, uh, yes, of evil. Rob just said to me, he's a mixture of Stalin and Hitler. He's creating an awful new world.

It's also implied that there are others like Struggold, and it's clear that the Syndicate answers to these people. It's ultimately all about money and self-interest, which we'll see is the key to everything as it's eventually laid out in the revival seasons. Looking back, it's clear the Syndicate was at odds with the CSM, right? That he had his own agenda that they didn't know about. They also don't know what was going on with the project in other parts of the world, like the groups working on the vaccine in Russia.

>> Inside the intelligence community, there are so-called black organizations, groups within groups conducting covert activities unknown at the highest levels of power.

>> The, the characters who make up the conspiracy have kept their secret, um, a secret by sort of maintaining a united front. But inside the, uh, the conspiracy, there are politics.

>> It was a big thing to show there was a Syndicate, and and now here we were creating a, a Uber Syndicate, this international group.

And after the main group of the Syndicate we had been seeing the show mostly is killed in season 6, somehow the project and the conspiracy continued on. So that tells you again that obviously there was somebody more besides this one group of characters running it. It could continue on without them.

>> And the conspirators themselves? What happened to them?

>> They're all dead now. Killed by these same faceless aliens.

>> And what are you afraid of now? Why resist testifying here today?

>> Because the conspiracy continues, just in another form, by other men.

>> We're all part of a Syndicate involved in alien colonization. Surely you knew about this business. You're conspirators.

Note that in this episode, like I point out, Mr. X says that he was part of the Syndicate, which again shows that the characters that were killed when we were told the Syndicate was destroyed in season 6 were only a part of the operation, and that it continued on without them. Once you understand that the Syndicate weren't actually the originators of everything or the ones running everything, it makes sense that they might not have understood everything that was going on. This not only actually makes sense, but when you think about it more, you'll realize that it's the only way that the conspiracy in the show could actually make sense. For the conspiracy to do all the experiments and all the logistical work it would need to do over decades to plan and orchestrate Armageddon and the creation of a new race of superhumans, many thousands of people would need to be involved in different capacities: doctors, scientists, government, and military personnel. But if the entire purpose of the conspiracy is to wipe out most of the world's population and leave only a very few chosen elites to have the world all to themselves, then not all of those thousands of people involved in the project, and certainly not all of their friends and family that all those people would want to save and take with them, could still be part of the chosen elite few. So if many of the people involved in the conspiracy would eventually need to be eliminated, how do you get them to participate in a conspiracy whose goal was their own destruction? You'd obviously have to lie to them about the purpose and the nature of the conspiracy. And in addition to providing the technology they'd need, both for the plague and also to turn them into their desired race of superhumans, the alien technology that they recovered provided the perfect lie that they needed to tell all these people to get them to participate in the project. They could tell them that the aliens were behind this project, and that their experiments to create hybrids with alien DNA were a self-preservation measure, and that the aliens would wipe them all out if they didn't do it. It certainly would have seemed like a reasonable explanation to them because creating alien human hybrids with alien technology was in fact what they were doing. So why wouldn't they believe that the aliens were in fact behind what the project was doing? So I think that the people in the broader project were told that they were working on engineering a plague based on the alien virus, which was basically true, but they were also told that the virus would just control people, but they would still live on, even if as a slave race. They were told this was for alien colonization. So they thought that they had no choice. They were being forced by the aliens, and this was their best chance of finding a way to fight back or to survive it. They believed that this would happen whether they cooperated or not, but cooperating would give them some input into the outcome and might buy them time to make a vaccine and survive. This is how you'd get the thousands of people that had to be involved to plot wiping out most of the world when a lot of them would probably be among the people who were going to get wiped out.

When the Well-Manicured Man figured out that the virus could kill a lot of people in the movie, when they see for the first time that the virus could just gestate a new alien inside of its host and wasn't just mind-controlling them, it was actually killing them. That's when he decides to help Mulder. And then, as soon as he does that, they kill him for it.

>> Until Dennis, we believed the virus would simply control us. That mass infection would make us a slave race.

>> Imagine our surprise when they began to just gestate. We've been forced to reassess our role in colonization by new facts of biology which have presented themselves.

>> The virus has mutated.

>> Into what? A new extraterrestrial biological entity.

>> My God.

>> The geometry of mass infection presents certain conceptual re-evaluations for us about our place in their colonization.

>> This isn't colonization. This is spontaneous repopulation.

Well-Manicured Man doesn't realize the full plan here, but they say right here in the first X-Files movie that they realize that what they were doing isn't colonization and that the Syndicate was lied to about the purpose of their project, even if he doesn't yet realize who it was that was lying to him. It's another interesting detail in the movie that members of the Syndicate seem so surprised that the virus can just gestate inside of a host to grow an alien. It seems like most of what they knew about the gray aliens, they were guessing from the bodies of ones that they had killed or found, which makes sense under the premise that they weren't actually collaborating with the aliens at all. When the gray aliens come back after World War II, they were trying to give us a warning that we were on a path to wiping ourselves out. But that's actually what the project decided to do was to wipe most people out. They shot down and killed any aliens they saw because they didn't want the aliens to warn anybody else.

In the last episode of season 9, when Mulder accesses the government file about what's supposed to happen in 2012, this was supposed to be him finally finding ultimate proof of alien colonization. But if you pause the screen and you read it, there are some interesting details here, too. The screen Mulder is reading is at a military base, and it's explaining to the personnel there that when the alien invasion starts, they're supposed to stand down and not resist. This would be another useful goal of telling people at some levels of involvement in the conspiracy the lie about alien colonization. Because when the Spartan virus starts to be released, they'll think that it's part of the planned alien invasion, and they'll already have instructions on how to react, how to not resist. They'll think resistance is useless, and they won't try to interfere with what's happening until they actually realize it's not what they thought it was supposed to be, at which point it, it'll already be much too late. They even explain in season 11 that some of the first people that'll be targeted by the properties of the virus will be military people and emergency personnel, anybody that could help fight back and resist it. This is also another purpose of the ARVs, the alien replica vehicles. They could start spreading the virus, start dismantling any resistance, and have people, even people with knowledge about the project, not realize the truth until it's too late.

>> It'll probably start on a Friday. The banks will announce a security action necessitating their computers to go offline all weekend.

>> Digital money will disappear, followed by the detonation of strategic electromagnetic pulse bombs to knock out major grids. What will seem like an attack on America by terrorists or Russia.

>> Or a simulated alien invasion using alien replica vehicles that exist and are already in use.

The screen Mulder reads in the military base gives an explanation about how when the invasion starts, control of the government will go to FEMA.

>> The building of prison camps by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with no stated purpose.

>> This is actually another idea with deep roots in the show.

>> They put the bomb in a building across the street because it did have federal offices here. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had a provisional medical quarantine office there, which is where the bodies were found. According to the newspaper, FEMA was called out to manage an outbreak of the Hantavirus. Are you familiar with what the Federal Emergency Management Agency's real power is? FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. Think about that. What is an agency with such broad sweeping power doing managing a small viral outbreak in suburban Texas?

>> You're saying it wasn't such a small outbreak.

>> No, I'm saying it wasn't the Hantavirus. It'll happen on a holiday when people are away from their homes. The president will declare a state of emergency, at which time all government, all federal agencies will come under the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, the secret government.

>> We'll just sidestep security at a facility known as Mount Weather. Place where they say our so-called shadow government is installed. He saw it at Mount Weather, where our own secret government will be hiding when it all comes down. They hid here and watched their own culture die. The original shadow government.

Mount Weather, where Mulder breaks in to find the information about 2012 and where he's imprisoned when they catch him, is said to be the base of operations for FEMA and where they would operate from as a shadow government if our government collapsed, if you believe in that kind of thing. The show established going back to the first movie that the forward-facing government thought it was doing one thing, but that there were shadow levels of the government operating with their own agendas behind it. The document Mulder reads about 2012 lays it out that the military and one level of government think that this alien invasion is coming. And that's the pretext used to tell them that when it starts, they should just stand down and let FEMA take over. This is setting up the idea that even people with high levels of government clearance and some knowledge of the conspiracy might think they know what's going on. But then there's a shadow government that's really running things, and they've set up this alien invasion idea as a device by which the visible government will step aside and smoothly allow the people that are really running the show to transition to full control of everything. This show has always had a deep state feel that people are talking about all the time now. You know that there's an ongoing government within the government that exists no matter who's elected and no matter whether it's a Democrat or Republican that gets in. It's kind of a government that runs itself, and that these are unelected but very powerful people that form a nexus between politics and business. Those have always been our villains. That's what Cigarette Smoking Man is, and that's what Mr. X is, and that's what Erica Price is. The idea that there's a shadow government and a small group of people running everything behind the scenes, manipulating governments and nations for their own benefit is something that, of course, goes back throughout the show. But with seasons 10 and 11, who these people are and their relationship to the rest of the project comes into much clearer focus.

>> We did talk a lot about immortality and how technology could help you live forever. That was a big theme of the season.

>> Of course, if you're rich enough and if the technology is developed enough, you might be able to achieve death. Montan came here 450 years ago looking for the fountain of youth.

The idea of the project all being in service of a small group of wealthy elites whose ultimate goal is their own immortality is something that's hinted at in several more backdoor mythology episodes in seasons 10 and 11.

>> I don't accept the premise that we have to grow old.

>> One of our best incentives here is that you and loved ones don't ever die.

>> Skinner, tell us who they are.

>> It's Proloo Services, an American security contractor with headquarters in Moscow.

>> A private contractor has ascendancy over the FBI.

>> Under a classified security directive.

>> From the executive branch.

>> We would have all saved lots of money and headaches if we only knew that Americans would have been just fine within the Cold War if they could only make a little money off of it.

In the second episode of season 11, it's called "This," a character named Erica Price recurs from the mythology episodes. Is this time shown to be running a project that promises people immortality by scanning their brain patterns and recreating their consciousness in a digital simulation. This project is shown to have ties to a Russian firm that's been given authority over parts of the FBI by bidding for the job. The episode says that this was allowed by the current administration. The idea being that they're privatizing control of government agencies, authority over our privacy and safety being for sale to the highest bidder. Again, returning to the idea that the true power behind our institutions is a select group of money elites that have their own interests at heart, not ours. The computer simulation project, ostensibly created to make the people whose minds are scanned immortal, turns out to be a scam. The episode says they're scanning the minds of society's geniuses and innovators and artists. But the reason that they're scanning the minds of these people is so they can be a kind of digital slave, a simulacrum of the real person still existing in a server somewhere, so that the wealthy elites still living after the Spartan virus can have the benefits of using that person's mind for their innovations and creativity even after those same wealthy elites have killed those people off to have the planet to themselves.

>> And I'm begging you, destroy it. We're living a lie here. It's a work camp where digital slaves take our uploaded minds to develop science that only the elite will use to leave your world.

>> We turn theories of space colonization into realities for them.

>> We dream, but we're not allowed to have dreams. And all the great minds that have died since they realized this place are here. Steve Jobs, Marvin Minsky, Michael, they all hate it here, and they don't even know who they are.

>> What we were act like is completely opposite from what we are here.

People being purchased and copied into a server in this way has an eerie echo of how back in season 2, Mulder's father said the project referred to its test subjects as "the merchandise."

>> You're going to hear the words, and they'll come to make sense to you.

>> What words?

>> The merchandise.

Episode 9 of season 11 is called "Nothing Lasts Forever" and is again about elites using people they see as a lesser commodity as a means to make themselves immortal. This time in a story about a TV actress and a doctor who are running a cult where they literally eat their own followers and other people in order to keep themselves from aging.

>> I found a cure for the Christ disease to afflict mankind. Every human being has a time bomb built into their genes. I diffused it.

In season 10, Mulder talks about a project in which a select group of wealthy billionaires would be able to avoid the sixth extinction by having the means to leave the planet.

>> A runaway global warming scenario that leads us to the brink of the sixth extinction. Those with means will prepare to move off the planet into space, which has already been weaponized against the poor huddled masses of humanity that haven't been exterminated by the uber-violent fascist elites, if you believe in that kind of thing.

This is brought up again in season 11 in another episode with Erica Price and another character who's a part of the Syndicate, Mr. X, talking about their plans to move off the planet. This is part of the portfolio of services that members of the Syndicate offer to the wealthy elites who are bankrolling them.

>> He wants to exterminate humanity. What's your budding enterprise?

>> The colonization of space.

>> We're closer than you think.

>> Building Dyson spheres and magnificent habitable structures. Oh, that's the plan. A secret space program.

>> I don't think so. I think this is a power play. You want me to kill him so you can implement your own plan? You want to see blood in the streets? The colonization of space? How do you plan to do that? Transport all humanity off planet? Seven billion people? That's not possible. Only a chosen few. This is ripe for a conspiracy of men. Taking the few, the elite, the people that can afford it, off planet.

>> Why are we going to Mars? It's not about going to Mars to visit once, but it is to make life multilanetary, um, so that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of the universe and to ensure the long-term survival of civilization, uh, in the, hopefully unlikely event that something terrible happens to Earth, that there is a continuance of consciousness on Mars.

Mr. X and Erica Price are trying to cast themselves as altruistic here, as though the CSM is the one who wants to hurt people and they're the ones offering to save them with this plan to leave the planet. But of course, Mulder immediately notes that there are no plans to transfer seven or eight billion people off the planet. They're doing the same thing that CSM is doing, letting the world burn and almost everybody die while saving only a very small number of people who have the money to afford it. Everything being for sale to billionaire elites is the theme that the show keeps returning to, which is the true reason they were running the project, out of their own self-interest.

>> But by a venal conspiracy of men.

And again, while seasons 10 and 11 delve into this theme more, it's also not new to the show. With Carter having explained this back on the commentary for the first movie, when he talked about how it was money elites who were really controlling the Syndicate. And ultimately, the idea that this plotting and conspiring we've seen in the show is all about evil men is more scary and disturbing than blaming it on aliens. Because this version of the story has much firmer roots in real documented history and things that we know billionaires and governments have actually done. It's not much of a stretch to think that there are evil billionaires plotting how they'll take over and run the world if society collapses. One of them even recently bought a popular social media website so he could post about his plotting every day and make people listen to him go on about his plans to re-engineer society in his own image. They aren't subtle about it. You can, of course, see parallels to how the cult followers in the episode "Nothing Lasts Forever" seem to be happy to continue to follow their cult leader even as she kills and eats them, in the way that some people now idolize and hero-worship certain billionaires with the idea that if they aspire to be like them, then one day they'll be asked to join the club and become billionaires themselves, when, of course, the billionaires they worship don't view them as anything more than fuel for their own ambitions.

>> The merchandise.

On the audio commentary for The X-Files movie, Carter also talks about how he wanted to root the conspiracy as much as possible in real documented things. And they based a lot of it on real stuff about ex-Nazis after World War II and that kind of thing, and people who were involved in the Cold War because he says that while he thought the alien part of the conspiracy might seem silly to people, the idea of wealthy elite humans and the government and the military conspiring on plans that aren't in our interest is something he thought was very believable and based in real history. So he basically says right there on the commentary what the twists in seasons 10 and 11 would later make more concrete. Aliens coming in the future isn't as scary to him or as important to what he wanted to deal with in the show as people in our own species doing things that could possibly wipe us out right now. The connection between these more documented things and the more speculative parts of the show dealing with aliens is the idea that alien DNA could give us the kinds of attributes real projects like the Nazi genic experiments the show references were after. It was something that I'd seen in a movie called *Shoah*, which is about the Holocaust, and it was about, um, how the, the Nazis had, Nazis had had shipped Jews back and forth over the country, and in the ledgers, the human cargo were called "merchandise."

>> The merchandise.

I actually met a man, uh, very early on during the course of, uh, The X-Files. I told him what I was doing, and he told me that he was one of the, uh, people responsible for leading the, um, uh, US project to map the human genome. And I became very interested in what he, uh, he was telling me, and I realized this was exactly what I wanted to, uh, do with the show. Carter talked about how early in the show's run, he read about what was happening at that time with mapping the human genome. And he thought that the possibilities this opened about changing human biology were what he wanted to base the show around. On a plot level, it underlies everything. As I'll come back to soon, the search for immortality also underlies everything the show is about. On a thematic and symbolic level, as well.

>> He seems to be some sort of a missing link here, a link between we mortal humans and the alien populace.

I thought it was interesting in this quote from Kim Manners, who was the show's most frequent director. He referred to Gibson Praise as being a link between mortal humans and aliens, implying that the aliens could be the key to immortality. Their technology and genetic attributes could be the key to doing away with human frailty and cheating death. That's the connection that ties all this together. But that immortality that the elites behind the Syndicate were pursuing obviously wasn't on offer to everybody. They just wanted that for themselves. So, I think now I've established the idea that there was more than one level to the conspiracy, and that a lot of the characters in the Syndicate and their associates who we saw during the show weren't necessarily privy to the truth about what they were actually working on. This idea of a lie being used to control people within the conspiracy is also the same reason that the people in the conspiracy gave up children and family members, which means that it also happens to be the explanation for what happened to Mulder's sister, Samantha.

>> I was 12 when it happened. My sister was eight. She just disappeared out of her bed one night.

>> What more could you possibly hope to do or to find?

>> My sister.

Mulder's main motivation in season 1 was uncovering the secret about his missing sister. And that was really, I think, what drove season 1 and certainly the entire mythology of The X-Files was the was the basis, was was was Samantha Mulder. The question of what happened to Mulder's sister Samantha is, of course, one of the central mysteries of the show. And it's also one of those things like the bees that people have the impression wasn't explained satisfactorily, but it was actually explained pretty early on if you were paying attention.

>> The aliens distrusted their human collaborators. Members of the conspiracy were made to surrender family members as human collateral.

So Mulder's father gave up Mulder's sister. What became of her? Samantha.

>> She was returned. She was sent to California where we were raised together. She was taken many more times and suffered horrible tests.

Mulder spent years looking for her, several times thinking that he'd found her, but he was tricked. Samantha was part of the cloning experiment done by the conspiracy. She herself died in 1987. From the time it was clear that Mulder's father was involved in the conspiracy, it was heavily hinted throughout season 3 and 4 that he was told he had to give up one of his children to be taken, and he chose for them to take Samantha.

>> When Samantha, before she was gone, did Dad ever ask you if you had a favorite? Did he ever ask you that?

>> Fox, please.

>> Mom, did he ever ask you to make a choice?

>> Don't do that.

>> Mom, listen to me. I need to know. Did he make you make a choice?

>> No, I couldn't choose. It was your father's choice, and I hated him for it. I hate him still.

The question was why Mulder's father had to give up a child like that. And that was explained pretty soon as well.

>> As he will explain, Mulder's father eventually came to go along with the Syndicate, and reluctantly agreed to surrender his daughter Samantha, just as the rest of them agreed to surrender members of their family as security. They were to surrender members of their own families in exchange for being given an alien fetus which contained the DNA necessary to do the research to create the alien human hybrid.

The idea was that members of the conspiracy were made to each give up a family member as a kind of collateral to guarantee their cooperation. Samantha was taken, but she wasn't returned because Mulder's father was always a kind of reluctant member of the conspiracy. So she was raised on a military base by CSM with his son Jeffrey and his wife Cassandra Spender, who was the family member that he'd given up to be abducted as his collateral. The family members they gave up to be abducted were subjected to versions of the alien human hybrid experiments. As we've seen, that most people abducted as part of the conspiracy were war, the various clone Samanthas Mulder discovered over the years were created because she was part of the alien hybrid tests. And when she was 14, because of the tests, she tried to run away from the military base where she was being kept, and she died. That's what happened to Samantha. It's all been explained and settled. What didn't make sense before was the part of the explanation for why all this was done. The explanation they were told was that the aliens made the members of the conspiracy give over family members to the aliens as collateral in exchange for giving them an alien fetus that they could use in the alien human hybrid experiment. But it seems obvious looking back, though, that Samantha was never taken by aliens. They establish again and again that the experiments done to her were done by humans, not by aliens. After her initial abduction, she lived on a military base. Cassandra Spender, too, who was supposed to have been taken for the same reason as Samantha, was plainly being taken and experimented on by humans, not aliens. Although, we'll get to more about Cassandra Spender later. They even make it clear in season 6 that they're trying to hide what was being done to characters like Cassandra from the aliens. So again, it was not the aliens taking them or doing any of this to them. But aside from the fact that what was done to them with the experiments was part of the project run by humans, not something the aliens were doing. The initial explanation that they were taken in exchange for the alien fetus never made total sense to begin with. For one thing, several characters like Deep Throat seem to think that that one alien fetus was the source of the material that they used in all the hybrid experiments, but were shown in the very first episode where the idea of the fetus is introduced, that that's a lie because the show's CSM has several alien fetuses just like it. Maybe they needed alien fetal tissue or stem cells specifically, but they also had the bodies of other aliens. Going back to the crash at Roswell.

>> We were surprisingly successful with a clone from a human egg and alien DNA. DNA that the government had since 1947.

It seems like not only did they have more than one alien fetus, they would have had alien DNA for a long time before 1973 when Samantha was taken. So the idea that in 1973 they needed this one fetus doesn't quite make sense. In the Erlenmeyer flask, there's an elaborate scenario where they kidnap Mulder and demand that Deep Throat get the fetus in exchange for Mulder. And then they shoot Deep Throat when he makes the exchange. Deep Throat and the people demanding he get them the fetus seem to believe that this is vitally important. But then, as soon as they have the fetus, CSM just sticks it on a shelf in the Pentagon with a bunch of other ones just like it. It seems like he never needed the fetus at all. I think what was actually happening in that episode was that they kidnapped Mulder and then told Deep Throat he had to steal something from the project in order to get Mulder back. And when Deep Throat did it, they learned both that he was helping Mulder and that he was willing to betray the project. So then they shot him. The point of the whole thing in that episode was to flush out Deep Throat and see if he was a traitor, not to get the fetus, which they actually didn't need. I think the alien fetus was similarly used as a lie to get members of the conspiracy to give over their family members. They believed this idea that in exchange for the family members, they were getting the fetus for genetic material that they needed. But that part of it doesn't make sense if you know what CSM knows. This is another example showing that not all of the people working within the conspiracy knew everything that was happening, and that some of them were lied to about who was actually behind the alien human hybrid experiments and what the purposes of the experiments were. Deep Throat thought the fetus was necessary, but it clearly wasn't. The idea of them giving over family members that would be experimented on in alien human hybrid experiments also suddenly makes more sense if you think of it in the context of the superhumans explanation for the tests. You could ask before, why would they be doing those tests on their own family members? Why wouldn't they do tests on random other people?

>> But he sacrificed my sister. He let them take Samantha.

>> Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral Holocaust will be those immune to it. Human alien clones. He allowed your sister to be abducted, to be taken to a cloning program for one reason, so she would survive as a genetic hybrid.

Even CSM gave her one of his own family members to be experimented on. So, it wasn't just people lower in the conspiracy being forced to do this.

>> They're all the abductions and the tests, but it was you.

>> I ordered them. Yes. But it was never my intention to harm you. It was to save you.

Cassandra Spender hated her husband for what he allowed them to do to her, but he told her that he did it to save her. He says that the experiments they were doing were supposed to make her immune to the coming plague. The idea of turning select elites into superhumans is that a chosen few will be able to live on after the release of the Spartan virus killed most other people. So, it makes sense actually also that they'd want to give these superhuman abilities to people that they knew. And the people that they were choosing to survive the plague with them. The tests might have been horrific, but in their twisted way, the people who knew the purpose of the tests thought they were saving the people that they were testing on. The test subjects weren't being sacrificed necessarily so much as they were being chosen. They were chosen to be part of the elite few that would survive the plague. The episodes in the two-parter in season 7, "Zunícite" and "Closure," the episodes that are meant to finally settle the questions about Mulder's sister, are actually among my favorite episodes. Although I know that they catch a lot of flack from fans. I think part of why people had such a hard time with these episodes was that it didn't feel like a revelation because we already had been told a lot of the explanation those episodes presented. So, it wasn't news in some ways. What some people were hoping for was that those explanations were a lie and that it would turn out something different had happened to Samantha and that she'd turn out to be alive or something like that. But like what happened with several other mysteries on the show, it turns out that we had been given the correct answer pretty early on. People just weren't putting it together, or they were hoping for a different answer. We had already known for years what had happened to Samantha. And if you thought that through, you could probably also guess that she was already dead because otherwise she would have still been around in some way, like Cassandra Spender was. She would have come back already.

>> What we wanted to do was, uh, finally deal with the story of Samantha and give people an answer to that. And we didn't want it to be an easy answer. So, we thought the more emotionally honest thing to do without damaging what Chris has in mind for the end of the series was to give the answer then and there that Samantha was indeed dead, and also to make it, uh, cathartic and and kind of, uh, moving and a release for Mulder and and this guy who's suffered under the weight of her disappearance the entire time we've known him.

The idea that the show uses saying that she was taken by walk-ins, spirits that take people to protect them from trauma, wasn't an alternate explanation or a way of saying that any of the previous explanations about why she'd been taken weren't true. It was just a much more elegant way to confirm that she was dead than to have Mulder find her body or something morbid like that. This way, the show showed that she was dead and gave resolution in that way, but also that she was at peace and that her suffering had ended, so there was a closure to it. And it also gave the idea that she had been saved eventually, so Mulder could stop trying to save her. It also gave the ghost or spirit element to it so that Mulder could even have a little farewell moment with her. I thought it was actually a beautiful and poignant way to deal with all.

That, but it just wasn't the one that fans had been hoping for. The walk-ins weren't a copout or a new idea in the show either. They were actually introduced way back in season 2.

Another link in the episode Red Museum:

>> In prayer.

>> What a walking.

>> We the second souls of the first bodies.

>> We the second souls of the first bodies.

>> Bearers of the word and keepers of the sacraments of a new enlightenment.

>> Believers in soul transference.

>> Enlightened spirits who have taken possession of other people's bodies.

>> The guides speak through me today as messengers of the word that we may be free from death and the passage into spirit.

The show relies on you to take these big pieces and use them to read between the lines and put together the answers to a lot of the mysteries of the show. But once you have the big pieces, you'll find that if you go back and look at the show with them in mind, obvious answers to things big and small start presenting themselves all throughout the show.

There's a big overarching con story line going through seasons 5 through season 9 of the show that's mostly communicated entirely in subtext and which I think is easy to miss entirely. Before I get to my thoughts on that bigger storyline though, I want to point out several more smaller things that I think are answered by the revelations in the later seasons.

The idea that alien colonization was a lie makes the fate of Moulder's sister and also the reason for her abduction much more direct. And the idea that this was a lie people at the top of the conspiracy wanted people to believe, not a secret that they were trying to hide, also is one possible answer to the long-running question of why they'd never kill Moulder. He was spreading the exact story that they wanted him to.

>> But I've seen aliens.

>> I've witnessed these things.

>> You've seen what they wanted you to see.

>> What Moulder may have seen could expose our plans.

>> What Moulder's seen only serves us.

>> Decade of my life in this office. All the time I was being led by my nose through a dark alley to a dead end. Exactly as they planned.

Some people within the project believed that he was spreading the truth and wanted to kill him. But CSM and others were clearly protecting him at times during the show. And you know how important agent Moulder is to the equation.

>> The ones who were protecting him were the ones who knew the truth.

The true goal of the project being to find a way to make a select group of superhumans immortal through alien DNA. And the fact that Scully, through the experiments done to her, is one of those people also happens to explain another little loose end people have wondered about over the years.

>> All right. So, how do I die?

>> You don't.

>> Your abduction, the tests, your DNA. Dana, you're safe. You're one of the chosen elite.

Another loose end this idea tidies up is how the CSM survived the last episode of season 9 when he looked about as dead as you could possibly get. But if the point of the alien human hybrid projects was to give the select group of elites the power that the hybrids and super soldiers have, then it follows that there's no reason that if Billy Miles could come back from this, then the CSM couldn't also easily come back from this. And he could even come back from this.

>> Some people ask if if he'll ever die on the show, and my answer is always, uh, you can't kill the devil.

It also explains how Jeffree Spender could have gone from this to this. And at first, like a lot of people, I assume that the point of showing the CSM so totally incinerated in season 9 was to show us beyond any shadow of a doubt that after the several other times that he survived attempts to kill him, this time he was really finally dead for good. So, when he showed up back in season 10, it felt like a cheat to me. But looking back, they were telling us all over the place that part of what the project was working on was giving these characters the ability to regenerate themselves.

>> You can't kill the devil.

Not only do the super soldiers have the ability to heal themselves, Jeremiah Smith has the ability to heal people. The alien bounty hunters have the ability to heal people. Uh, one of them uses that ability to save Molders's mother. The metal technology from the alien spacecrafts is shown to have healing abilities. Cassandra Spender's wounds heal spontaneously.

>> Oh, they have so much to teach us. They are great healers.

She tells us that the aliens are great healers and that they're going to give us the power to end all disease. Cassandra misunderstood who is behind it, but she was explaining here the idea of the superhuman project right here. The fact that Cassandra Spender's wound is able to heal itself spontaneously is how they show that she's what they consider to be a successful alien human hybrid. Giving people these abilities are clearly a main goal of the alien human hybrid experiments.

How exactly the CSM would have got these powers is also an interesting question in itself though and another one that I think has a clear answer once you look for it. The culmination of all these alien human hybrid experiments begins in season 5 with the arrival of Cassandra Spender and that kicks off what I think is the subtle subtextual storyline that runs through the mythology all the way through season 9. The subtextual story line I was talking about earlier.

There's a repeated line in the show where a character is called the key to everything. And it's used so many times that I've seen people make fun of it over the years, asking just exactly how many keys to everything are there. But I think Carter was aware that he was using the same line again and again. And he was using the same line to show a connection between the different characters to which it was referring.

>> This kid may be the key not just to all human potential, but to all spiritual unexplained paranormal phenomena.

>> The key to everything in the XFiles.

>> He could be the key to everything in the XFiles.

>> She's the key to everything.

>> I've spent my life looking for what's out there. The answer to what theologians have pondered for millennia. The key to everything, to life itself.

>> That girl is the key.

>> Scully is the key to everything.

>> She's the key to everything.

>> Sveta is the key.

>> And Jackson himself was the key.

>> I found a key.

>> take to every question that has ever been asked.

There are a lot of repeated lines on the show. Uh, I want to believe, don't give up, trust no one, fight the future, to name just a few. But all these lines are used very deliberately. It's not like when Carter is writing them, he's not aware that he's written these lines before. When a character is called the key to everything on the show, it's always because they're a different version of the same thing.

>> Gibson praise can read people's minds.

>> Mold and Skully prove this scientifically.

>> There's a certain junk DNA which all humans share but has no apparent function. Gibson's junk DNA is functional. DNA which is believed to be alien.

Whichever of these characters they're referring to, Gibson, Cassandra, Zeta, or William, what makes them the key is that they're a combination of alien and human DNA that has led to human being able to have some of the kind of desirable alien attributes. Telepathy with Gibson, healing with Cassandra, and we'll get to William in a minute.

>> I have alien DNA for sure.

This is what makes them the key to everything because that combination of alien and human is the goal of the whole conspiracy to be able to make humans with the desired powers that the conspirators think they can get from alien DNA. And this is also a key to everything in the sense that it's an explanation for everything else in the XFiles as well. The idea that's alluded to in the show is that alien DNA could be the explanation for almost every exfiles case for telepathy and telekinesis for all the various monsters and mutants with special powers that they encounter. And Carter and Frank Spotnets have talked about how this was their intention. This was the overriding concept tying together everything on the show from the conspiracy to all the monsters of the week.

One of the ideas Chris and I had discussed for years before we actually introduced Gibson Praise was that the reason so much paranormal phenomena occurs in the world of the XFiles is because in fact we are part alien that there's something alien about human beings and that's why there's telekinesis and psychics and all these other things. So that led to the creation of the Gibson praise character who was the missing link whose incredible ability demonstrated that we are in fact related to aliens and so indirectly proves that alien life exists.

>> Don't you see all the mysteries of science everything we can't understand or won't explain every human behaviorism cosmology psychology everything in the X Files it all owes to them it's from them.

>> I am searching for the key that was the seed to all of these terrible genetic abnormalities.

>> Alien DNA.

So, when they keep telling you a character is the key to everything, that's actually what they mean. They're trying to tell you, look here, the concept we're illustrating with this character is what ties the whole show together. It's the key to everything.

Cassandra Spender is the key to everything because she's the first fully successful alien human hybrid that the project has managed to create. They don't spell out the extent of what was done to her, but they show that she's able to heal wounds almost instantaneously, which would of course be one of the desired attributes they'd want their planned superhumans to have. Illustrating again how this all ties together. By the way, they show her being experimented on in train cars, exactly the way Skully was experimented on.

When the experiments on her prove to be a success, immediately there are certain parties that want her killed. The explanation given for this at the time is that if the aliens know that she's been a success, then there they'll start colonization. This doesn't really make much sense, though, since when they're talking about colonization, it's always been said to have a set date when it's beginning. It begins in 2012, not whenever they make a hybrid. The date is set.

>> It makes sense, though, that certain parties would want her killed if not having a successful hybrid would mean that the people behind the project had to wait to release the Spartan virus because they weren't guaranteed to survive it.

Cassandra has some interesting ideas about her own abductions, and she definitely believes that she's being kidnapped by aliens. So, if we're going with the idea that aliens weren't involved in the conspiracy, then we have to also assume that her memories have been altered in some way in the ways that we've established earlier that abduction memories could be altered and false memories could be planted.

>> Cassandra, you were found in a train car. You've been operated on by doctors?

>> Yes, that's right.

>> And these are the doctors who cured you?

>> No, the aliens cured me. The doctors were working with the aliens. That's what I wanted to tell you.

Cassandra's not crazy, though, and what she's saying about why she's being abducted actually makes a lot of sense in the big picture. Cassandra talks repeatedly about how the aliens are great healers, how they can cure any illness, and how they have so much to teach us.

>> I don't need a wheelchair.

>> [Music]

>> She believes that ultimately her abductions are a good thing because we'll get the gift of all this science from the aliens and that her abductions will ultimately end death and disease.

>> I told you about their power.

>> You said you didn't believe it.

>> She was in a cult.

>> A UFO cult who believed they were going to be carried to immortality in some kind of flying mother wheel.

Again, in retrospect, she's clearly talking about creating the race of superhumans that was explained in seasons 10 and 11. And ultimately, with what's explained in seasons 10 and 11, she's completely correct about the reason behind her abductions. Jeffree Spender says the abductees believe their abductions will make them immortal. That's exactly what the purpose of the experiments is, to create superhumans that are immortal, immune to disease. She's been lied to about who's kidnapping her, but she has managed to figure out what the experiments are for.

The success of their experiments on Cassandra seems to trigger the storyline with alien rebels who show up at that same time and start to emulate people who are part of the same test Cassandra was a part of. And eventually in season six, they kill a large portion of the syndicate. The idea is that these were aliens that wanted to stop the colonization and the spread of the purity virus, having mutilated themselves so that they couldn't be infected by the virus. But if that was their goal, why did they wait until the project had a success with Cassandra? At that point, they've been experimenting on Cassandra for over 20 years and conducting their experiments in human eugenics for over 50 years. So, why did the alien rebels decide not to act until right then if their goal is to stop the experiments?

So, I mean, look, we're getting into a bit of speculation here on my own pet theories, but stick with me on this one for a minute. I've already explained how I think that the alien bounty hunters and alien rebels are actually alien human hybrids made with the DNA of the grey aliens and not a separate race of aliens from the grey aliens. That would also mean that they'd been around for a time before they suddenly decided to start killing everybody. So, what if the alien rebels weren't actually working against the project, but rather working for higher levels of the project? After the elites running the project had got what they needed from that phase of the project with the experiments with Cassandra, they decided to clean up loose ends and get rid of evidence. And so they sent the rebels to kill off all the test subjects that hadn't been as successful and also to kill off the parts of the syndicate who as we had seen were the ones involved in overseeing those particular parts of the tests.

If you think about it, what the alien rebels are doing doesn't actually stop the alien human hybrid projects. It just kills off the people who were involved after they'd already accomplished their goals. If we're going to go with the idea that this part of the syndicate was being lied to about the true purpose of their experiments, then it would follow that they weren't meant to be part of the final group of elites that would survive the Spartan virus and live on as superhumans. After Cassandra was successful, they'd serve their purpose. And so now Struggled and the other people who were really running the show didn't need them anymore.

>> Waring aliens lighting each other on fire and other such nonsense.

Either way, as to the reason those members of the syndicate were killed, Cassandra obviously represented the project, completing one stage and moving on to the next one. The next real mythology episodes the show does are the three-parter biogenesis and the six extinction episodes. In these episodes, Moulder is exposed to rubbings from the metal in the in an alien spacecraft, and it sets off something in his brain that begins to give him superhuman cognitive abilities. The reason for this seems to be that he was exposed to a version of the purity virus earlier in the show and he was also given a successful vaccine for it. So that could have unlocked features in his brain like the alien DNA in the brain of Gibson Praise that gives Gibson telepathic abilities since we know that the aliens probably communicate telepathically with the metal in their spaceships. It follows that the metal could create some kind of telepathic reaction in Moulder's brain, unlocking the alien abilities which allow them to communicate with their ships.

CSM is excited by what whatever it is that's going on with Moulder's brain in these episodes and he refers to him as another kind of successful alien hybrid. Then he has some sort of surgery done to himself and Moulder taking whatever altered hyperactive materials there are in Moulder's brain and transferring those materials to himself. So it seems that basically Moulder's exposure to the virus and vaccine combined with his exposure to the rubbings from the alien spacecraft unlocked some kind of alien abilities in him. And these were abilities which the CSM had been hoping to acquire from alien DNA for himself. Cassandra Spender having been their first fully successful attempt to take alien genetic features and combine them with a human. I'm assuming allowed them to now do this procedure where they could transfer these abilities from Moulder to CSM when it seemed like before they had been struggling to do that. So that means Cassandra represents step one and what happened with Moulder here in these episodes represents step two.

Then the rest of season 7 is relatively light on mythology episodes except for the ones explaining Moulder's sister until the end of the season. But there is the very important episode which I think of as a mythology episode uh in Amii. The title of this episode is a pun. The the phrase in a mei is French and it's an expression that means from a friend meaning something is coming from a good place or from friendly intentions. Uh amii being the French word for friend. But the pun is that to English speakers, the phrase of course sounds like the word enemy. So they're using the phrase here as the title of an episode about the CSM because the episode is playing with the idea of whether he's actually a friend or an enemy.

It's important in the episode that CSM attempting to gain Scully's trust lets her in on a little bit of what he claims the conspiracy is working on. And what he shows her, he says, is based on extraterrestrial technology which can cure cancer and allow people to live longer.

>> What we're being given,

>> it's not the cure for cancer. It's the holiest of grails, Dana. It's the cure for all human disease. It's from that final frontier. It's largely extraterrestrial. There are those who would use this power for their own purposes, to choose who will live and who will die.

The speech he gives to Scully about alien technology which cures human frailties, of course, is information from the earlier seasons, which once again lines up exactly with what we'd eventually be told about the project's ultimate goals of creating immortal superhumans. He even tells Skully that this technology will be used by those who control it to decide who will live and who will die, which is the whole plot revealed later on about how the conspirators want to use their superhuman technology to decide for themselves who gets to survive the sixth extinction and the Spartan virus. The reason for the events of this episode happening at this point in the show's timeline have to do with CSM's ulterior motive for taking Scully on a road trip and are ultimately extremely important. But I'm going to come back to that part of the episode later.

But aside from the episode end of me, the next major mythology episodes in the show after Moulder has his reaction to the rubbings from the alien spaceship are the three-parter that starts with the season 7 finale Reququum. What happens in Reququum is that the project starts taking previous Abductees again and as we'll find out in the next season returning them as super soldiers. If we're operating under the premise that the alien human hybrids and the super soldiers are the same project, which I think I've established enough, but I'll show even more proof of that later, then it seems obvious that the reason they start creating this new type of super soldiers at this point in time here is because the previous stages of the project had advances that made it now possible. It's no coincidence that over these couple of years in the show, the mythology episodes all deal with the project making several advances in the alien human hybrid projects and that after those advances, they then start with the super soldiers. I think we can draw a clear line from their success with Cassandra being step one to what they were able to do with Moulder being step two. And then once they were able to do those two things, they were able to start with creating the super soldiers as step three.

It'll be to see

>> what you can see they did to me was a failed attempt to turn me into one of these alien men. I was a guinea pig, a test subject. And now I want to expose their evil plans.

>> What plans are those?

>> To do this to you, to everyone.

The super soldiers represent the project being able to give humans many alien attributes of super strength and healing and invulnerability. But like I said before, they were part machine and imperfect and not quite the kind of superhuman that the elites running the project wanted to become themselves. What they wanted was to become a species that had these abilities innately and gave birth to people with these abilities that didn't need abilities grafted onto them by machines and that was immortal without being reliant on alien technology. And that would be what they would try to accomplish with the next major phase of the project. A vaccine was needed, one that had to be created with a combination of human and alien DNA. And Jackson himself was the key.

>> What is the point of all of this?

>> I always saw the show as a search for God in a way. From the first episode of The XFiles, you see this poster with a spaceship on it and it says, "I want to believe." And that really is Moulder's mantra. He doesn't believe. He wants to believe. He wants to find reason to believe. And that's kind of for me the basis of faith is that you continue. Faith is a is a is a struggle. It's an effort. And Moulder's faith was a struggle and an effort. His faith defined the truth about his sister. So that poster, I think, really sums up so much of what became the mythology that search.

Part of my problem with seasons 10 and 11 when I originally saw them was that I already had a very convincing head cannon about what William was, how he was made, and why he was important to the coming alien colonization. It was very heavily implied in the show that he was meant to be some kind of savior figure or Christ figure going back to the episodes when he was born and even before. The episode where William is born is full of imagery from the Christmas story. Moulder findiness where Skully is giving birth by following a light in the sky and they even have the lone gunman show up as the three wise men. They show up burying gifts.

The hints about this connection continue and they even go back much further in the show. In Momento Mori, the episode where Skully finds out the tests that were done to her gave her cancer and where they start to learn more about those tests. Moulder finds the password to get into a lab that was involved in her tests on a very strange little prop. There's a little snow globe with both what appears to be an Easter egg in it and also a snowy forest. It would seem odd to have Easter eggs in the snow. Easter being in spring and specifically associated with the rebirth and new life of the season after the snow has passed, but the snowy trees in the snow globe also seem to resemble Christmas trees. The globe seems like it has symbols for both Christmas and Easter, the birth of Christ and the death and resurrection of Christ. The symbols together representing the life of Christ, death and rebirth, and so on. This still could have just been a random little prop, but it always stood out to me as being too odd and specific to just be totally random. We also know that in the show, again and again, background details like numbers, names, and all that kind of thing were almost always intentional Easter eggs.

>> I think anyone who's been a careful watcher of the show knows that we tend to put in Easter eggs, as they call them.

In this case, literally an Easter egg, or at least a plastic depiction of one. And we also know that these kind of details were usually chosen by Chris Carter. He really loves that kind of thing. So, it seemed very unlikely that the snow globe would just be random, especially when it was important enough to provide the password that would reveal more secrets about the test that had been done to Skully. It turned out that I was right that it wasn't random. In the episode's audio commentary, Frank Spotnets points out the snow globe prop, saying that it was something that Chris Carter specifically wanted and even went to significant expense to have custom manufactured.

>> This was uh Chris's idea, the snow globe with Vagrville. I believe that snow globe costs something like $2,000, believe it or not, to have a snow globe made specially. It's incredibly expensive prop. Don't ask me why.

>> Is this a message from me?

So, you have a Christmas symbol combined with an Easter symbol representing life and death of Christ and his resurrection from the dead representing eternal life and the promise that if you believe in him, you'll live forever.

>> I am the resurrection and the life saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though we were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

This is interesting in a show that's largely dealing with experiments, the main goal of which was later revealed to be a quest for immortality. And it's also used in an episode where Skully is learning that she might die. The cure for her cancer being a major plot point. Not to mention that her cure is also accomplished by technology created by the same project. Around the same time, Skully also got an Oraborus tattoo, which is another symbol representing eternity, the cyclical nature of life, death, resurrection, and rebirth. This is an example showing similar symbols from different philosophies being different ways to express essentially similar concepts.

It's interesting also then that Carter wanted the egg and the snow globe to be not just an Easter egg, but specifically the egg from the Canadian town of Vagraville. The Vagraville egg is a large sculpture at 31 feet long and three and a half stories high. It's the second largest egg sculpture of its kind in the world and it has an interesting history of its own. It's an Easter egg but specifically it's a Ukrainian style pisanka which is a style of decorated eggs that were used in Slavic pagan traditions that are thought to predate Christianity. Like many symbols in Christianity, Easter eggs have similar counterparts in other belief systems, some of which predate Christianity. I think this is interesting too as the XFiles will later start to delve into the idea that different human religions and mythologies all have common ancient origins in the mythology of the show, ancient alien origins. The egg in Vaggerville was constructed to celebrate that town's large Ukrainian heritage. And so it's this specific type of an egg with an associated style of decoration as opposed to a more generalized modern Easter egg. And again, Carter wanted to specifically reference this particular statue in Vagerville and to also have the name of the town on the snow globe prop to be clear about exactly to what he was referring.

One more interesting layer here is the history of the construction of the egg itself in Vaggerville made in 1974. Creating an eggshaped design with the flat metal panels that they wanted to use was a complicated engineering problem that eventually required creating a computer program and writing an algorithm to solve. Because of that, this egg is considered to be the first physical structure whose specifications were completely designed with computer software. The unique software that they designed to create it would later go on to be used to design a space shuttle. So, a giant Jesus symbol that was used to create a spaceship seems very appropriate for the XFiles version of the Christ story, doesn't it? And even the title of this episode, Momento Mori, means remember you will die, which is deliberately discordinate to the imagery from the Christ story, the promise of which is that if you believe in Christ, you'll have eternal life.

>> And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

This theme in relation to the test done to Skully continues on. In season 5, Skully meets Emily, a little girl made with her DNA as part of the test done to her. And she finds Emily during her Christmas visit with her family. The episode where she finds Emily is even named Christmas Carol. You couldn't make the Christ connection much more obvious. Even if Emily wasn't also a virgin birth, which she is. Carter has even talked about how he wrote the episode I was talking about earlier, Momento Mory, during his Christmas vacation. This is obviously what was on his mind.

But although it's undeniable that it's heavily implied that William is some sort of savior or Christ figure, he's not the only one on the show about whom this is implied. Early in the show, during the three-parter that starts with the season 2 finale, Anastasia, and goes through the first two episodes of season 3, Moulder goes through an archetypal death and rebirth journey. Of course, a hero dying and being reborn or visiting the afterlife and returning is a universal theme in many stories and myths which follow the Joseph Campbell style type of hero's journey. Whether it's Orpheus going to the underworld or it's Jesus Christ or it's Luke Skywalker, the idea is that for the hero to fulfill his quest, he needs to confront death or conquer death. So this part of the show is touching on the mythologies of many cultures. But to make the Christ symbolism and savior idea clear, these episodes trade very heavily in Christian imagery.

Moulder literally goes below ground when he descends into the buried box car. The sequence of the box car is full of hell imagery. It's buried under red rock and when CSM tries to destroy it, he does it with fire.

>> For 3 days, the blessing way chant was performed. When Moulder is rescued, the ceremony that's performed to save him is specifically said to go on for 3 days before he returns to the land of the living. 3 days, of course, being the amount of time between Christ's crucifixion and his resurrection. On the night of the third day, he opened his eyes and asked for water. The ritual bath must be given outside the hogan before sunrise. The FBI man was weak from his journey and did not wish to speak. But like a rising sun, I sensed in him a rebirth.

Albert Hosting in the show says he knows Moulder has returned to the land of the living when he asks for water and he's given a bath. The water bath and so on, of course, being symbols for baptism, being reborn in Christ. The Christ symbolism goes on with Moulder's story throughout the show.

>> Um, when Skinner was embracing Moulder. Now, tell me that wasn't Christ being held. I mean, is that

>> You make up your own mind.

>> Okay. Well, it looked like, you know, it looked like the very famous.

>> Yeah. And I I noticed already and everyone thinks I'm crazy. I go, did anyone notice that but me that he was embracing Moulder like that? And

>> so I'm glad you at least agreed with me on some of that.

The episode in season 4 where Moulder discovers a fake alien body which makes him question his belief in aliens is even named Gethsemane after the garden in the Bible where before his crucifixion, Christ questioned whether he had to die on the cross. Gethsemane was uh it was one of these big idea episodes about the existence of God or not.

>> What I especially loved about that episode, aside from the production value of shooting in a frozen set for the cave where they were digging out this supposed alien corpse, was this idea about religion. Because what became increasingly clear to Chris and me in years of working on these mythology episodes was that Moulders's quest for extraterrestrial life

>> was akin to trying to prove God existed.

That's also the episode that leads to Moulder's loss of faith for the entire season. In the season 7 episode, The Six Extinction 2, Amore Fatigue, when Moulder is undergoing a medical procedure after rubbings from the spacecraft unlocked alien abilities in his brain. They not only show him tied to a table in a crucifixion pose, he even has a crown of thorns in a halo.

>> Fact remains he's become our savior.

Specifically, Christian symbols are all over the show, but whether they're used regarding Moulder or William, it's reductive, of course, just to simply directly say that William is Jesus or Moulder is Jesus. Chris Carter, as I understand it, is a Christian, but he recognizes that these themes of a savior figure and the idea of a hero's journey involving death and rebirth are ideas that go through many religions and mythologies. While he might be Christian himself, he's always also had an interest in and respect for Native American history and mythologies, which has found its way into the show going back to the early seasons.

When the FBI man Moulder was cured by the holy people, we were reminded of the story of the Hila monster who symbolizes the healing powers of the medicine man. In this myth, the Hila monster restores a man by taking all his parts and putting them back together. His blood is gathered by ants, his eyes and ears by sun, his mind by talking God and pollen boy. Then lightning and thunder bring the man back to life.

>> This relates here with the white buffalo story which is told as Moulder is returning from death.

At the end of the ceremony when the FBI man had been healed, we heard the news from other Native Americans in the northern plains that a great event had taken place. Like the Navajo, these people have their own stories and myths. One of these stories tells of the white buffalo woman who came down from the heavens and taught the Indians how to lead virtuous lives and how to pray to the creator.

>> She told the people she would return one day. Then she turned into a white buffalo and ascended into the clouds, never to be seen again. But on this day, when the holy people had given the FBI man a miracle, a white buffalo was born. And every Native American knew, whether he believed the story or not, that this was a powerful woman and that great changes were coming.

The White Buffalo's story is in some ways a similar savior story to the Christ story. The God that visited Earth earlier said that she will return. As in Christian beliefs, Christ is supposed to one day return in the end times or the Armageddon. In the XFiles, that Armageddon is the six extinction. The idea of the six extinction is a scientific theory and it's not specifically Christian, but it's also worth noting that in Christianity, the number seven is sometimes associated with the full and complete world or perfection, healing, and God. There are seven spirits of God, seven thunderous voices, seven seals, and so on and on. God created the world in six days in the Bible and then on the seventh day he rested which is one reason that seven represents completion. You can see why this concept resonated with Carter when he was writing about how the CSM and the other conspirators orchestrating Armageddon wanted to create a perfect world that would be complete on the day after the sixth extinction or on the seventh day. And like all these symbols I'm talking about the symbolic use of the number seven has analoges and anticedants in other religions and mythologies outside of Christianity. This is similar to how telling elements of both the Christ story and the White Buffalo story isn't mutually exclusive. Like I said before, the hero dying and returning isn't an exclusively Christian concept or exclusively Native American either. It's also a very common idea that all religions are different versions of similar ideas and different ways of talking about the same universal truths.

>> A passage from the Bible on an artifact that you're saying is extraterrestrial. And uh how did the aliens get it?

>> They gave it to us. The text came from them.

>> What if there was a spaceship that washed ashore in Africa and uh this spaceship contained passages from the Bible and the Quran and all these religious texts? What would that mean?

>> No, it would mean nothing, Moulder.

>> No, it would mean that our progenitors were alien, that our genesis was alien, that we're here because of them, that they put us here.

The show explores that the aliens might be the progenitors of human religions and mythologies. And it says that the ancient ship, which has the Bible verses on it, also had verses from the Quran and other religious texts. The Christ analogies in the White Buffalo story are used to show different cultures and belief systems for telling the same thing. The appearance of some kind of savior figure which will save us from a coming apocalypse. Of course, the implication in season 3 when they tell the White Buffalo's story is that Moulder is some kind of savior figure. But then later in the season 9 episode William, they also spend a lot of effort to clearly imply that the White Buffalo story is actually being used in reference to William. With the symbols in season 8 and n so heavily pointing to William, at first it seemed clear that William was supposed to be the chosen one that would save people from the coming apocalypse, which we thought was supposed to be alien colonization. So because of this, the way he was presented in seasons 10 and 11, where he suddenly seemed dangerous or possibly even evil, at first that seemed to me to throw all that earlier symbolism out the window and to disregard what we'd learned about William in those earlier seasons.

It turns out though, like with all these things that I'm talking about in this video, if you go back after watching seasons 10 and 11 and reevaluate everything, not only did Chris Carter not disregard or forget what had come before, it actually now all makes much more sense than it ever did before. For one thing, in the episode My Struggle Four, which is the one that focuses on William and his true nature, the tagline in the opening credits of the episode has been changed to Salvatore Mundy. Salvatore Mundy is a reference to the Da Vinci painting of Christ and the words translate to Savior of the world. Putting this phrase as the tagline of the episode, which focuses on William, shows that Carter obviously not only didn't forget the whole issue of William or somebody on the show being a Christ figure and a savior, actually, he's calling attention to this issue. It's just that the question is whether or not William is that Christ figure.

We call it the miracle of life conception. A union of perfect opposites. Essence transforming into existence. An act without which mankind would not exist and humanity ceased to exist. Or is this just nostalgia now? An act of biology commandeered by modern science and technology. Godlike, we extract, implant, inseminate, and we clone. But has our ingenuity rendered the miracle into a simple trick? In the artifice of replicating life, can we become the creator? Then what of the soul? Can it too be replicated? Does it live in this matter we call DNA? Or is its placement the opposite of artifice, capable only by God? How did this child come to be? What set its heart beating? Is it the product of a union? Or the work of a divine hand, an answered prayer, a true miracle? Or is it a wonder of technology, the intervention of other hands? What do I tell this child about to be born? What do I tell Scully? What do I tell myself?

>> You impregnated her

>> with science, Mr. Skinner.

>> Alien science to create the first superhuman child.

>> Mhler's not the father.

>> I'm asking who's the father.

>> I am.

>> William is my son.

Like I just showed, the idea of there being a Christ figure and some kind of savior figure goes back early in the show, but there was also always a little bit of ambiguity as to who that figure would be since the symbolism and signs importance were applied variously to more than one character. Chris Carter remembers this too and he's actively playing with the question of who the savior is. In every episode this season, we chose to replace the truth is out there with something. And in this case, it's Salvatore Mundi, which is the name of a Leonardo da Vinci painting. I went to see a talk by Walter Isacson, who had just written a book about Leonardo da Vinci, and he talked about this painting, which just happened to be going up for auction, and it's called Salvatore Mundi, which means savior of the world. And I thought that that had a uh a kind of double meaning here. We could look at William as the kind of savior of the world. He was the being that the cigarette smoking man because he's immortal wanted to use to start the world a new when he took out all of humanity. But we could also look at Moulder as the Salvatore Mundi because he actually is able to vanquish the cigarette smoking man presumably and uh save the world in his own right.

In the audio commentary for the episode, My Struggle Four, Carter points out the possibilities of either Moulder or William being the savior of the world, to which the tagline Salvatore Mundy is referring. But then in an online interview when asked about the Salvatore Mundy tagline, he also pointed out a third possibility. He said, "For me, there were three parts to that. We have William. We have Moulder, who could be considered to be someone who just saved the world by stalling the cigarette smoking man's plans. Then we have the cigarette smoking man who actually looks at himself as the savior of the world sort of diabolically he was going to save the planet and knew like the devil he believes that he is right."

It's been one possible interpretation of the CSM going back to the very early days of the show that he's either a devil figure or a symbol for the devil or maybe even the actual devil incarnate.

>> Well, the world will go on just in my image instead of God's.

>> You think you can play God?

>> Oh, not God. Certainly. You speak to me of hell.

>> You think I'm the devil, Mr. Skinn?

>> He's been described as the devil, the dark force, the counterbalance.

>> Moulder and Scully basically concealing information.

>> It's suggested that uh Fox Moulder may be the cigarette smoking man's illegitimate son. So all of a sudden we have a a a very personal and possible connection to the devil as it were.

>> That in a way was in a way the launching pad I think for the character and everybody kind of went, "Yeah, this is interesting now. I mean we've established the devil.

>> What are you doing?

>> Sending the devil back to hell.

>> And he is a complete self-interest. He is the uh person uh who we trust least on the XFiles. is the devil, if you will. And uh some people ask if if he'll ever die on the show, and my answer is always uh you can't kill the devil.

>> We can't kill the devil.

Well, like Chris Carter says, the devil doesn't think that he's a bad guy. He thinks that he's the hero of his own story. It's heavily played with in seasons 10 and 11, and even a lot in the earlier seasons that the CSM thinks that he's doing the right thing, even if the right thing happens to be something that serves his own interests. In seasons 10 and 11, they explain more clearly than ever what he's doing and why he thinks that it's the right thing to do. Sure, he might be wiping out humanity, but it seems obvious to him, and it did seem obvious to the aliens, that humanity was well on the way to wiping itself out anyway. So, what CSM sees himself as doing is taking the inevitable and controlling how it plays out so that he can make sure some remnant of humanity survives and so that he can mold what survives into a utopia.

There are people who think that the cigarette smoking man is a bad guy, that he's like the villain. I mean, you can look at these things all different ways. There are moral questions that, you know, what would one do if one knew one was facing the apocalypse? What would you do? Save some people or or just fight and all die in vain? I mean, there is a case to be made for what he's doing.

>> What the hell are you doing?

>> God's work. What else? We're doing God's work. Diana,

>> I didn't set out to destroy the world. Moulder people did. Look at world history. Fox, neither you nor I could save mankind from self-extermination. I just changed the time table.

>> Understand? I protected mankind as long as I could. Mr. Skinner,

>> you're the hero. If it just happens that in that

Utopia he creates, he gets to be immortal and be the lord of the earth, then well, you know, hey, is it so bad that his job has some perks? So, from his point of view, CSM is the savior of the world.

But if, as it seemed in the first nine seasons, William was going to be able to save people from the coming apocalypse, in that way, he would have been the savior of the world.

>> William is my son.

>> I knew that William was not necessarily the biological son of Moulder. I thought he was connected to Moulder in deep emotional, spiritual ways. But the idea that the CSM way back in season 7 actually had something to do with his birth. That was something I had thought about back then and something that I wanted to bring forward. Salvatore Mundy means savior of the world. And we play with this idea that William is the golden child of sorts. This idea that William could be this perfect child. I saw it quite the opposite. I thought of him as, you know, something that owed more to the omen. I saw him as a little criminal.

>> But if you believe that the CSM is the devil and that he created William instead of William being a Christ figure, that would make William the son of the devil or the antichrist, a Damian figure. Like Chris Carter said, if you're looking at it all from CSM's point of view, that he's saving the world from the humans who are destroying it, then if William was what allowed him to carry out his plans, then William would be the savior of the world in that way. Alternately to CSM saving the world with his plague or William helping him with his plan or William helping to save the world from his plan.

The other way you could look at it is that by Moulder shooting the CSM, he stalls the CSM's plans to release the Spartan virus. And in that way, Moulder is actually the savior of the world, just as was implied by the White Buffalo's story and the symbolism in the earlier seasons going way back to season 3. Rather than ignoring the symbols implying that William was the chosen one or a Christ figure, Carter is fully aware of those symbols and playing with them in a way that makes them actually now much deeper and more interesting than they were before. But you might also say it's still a retcon and still undoing things from the first nine seasons to say that CSM made William because back then we thought it was pretty obvious that Moulder was William's father. And you know, hey, back then I thought that too.

>> Agent Scully, isn't it true that you and Moulder were lovers and you got pregnant and had his love child?

Objection.

>> Although it seemed at the time like Moulder being William's father was the only explanation that made any sense. Going back with what we know now, not only does that not seem obvious in retrospect, it actually seems pretty impossible. And the new explanation becomes the only possible one.

>> Moulder and Skully have a child. We were always very vague about how that happened since there was no apparent time or place that child could have been conceived. But it becomes a larger question as we move forward. I knew that William was not necessarily the biological son of Moulder.

>> One of the episodes that benefits most from a rewatch after seasons 10 and 11 is the episode enemy, which I talked about earlier where Skully goes on her road trip with CSM.

>> Dana and I have a history, a very important history that goes back 17 years. The idea that CSM is William's father instead of Moulder might have seemed like a redcon at first, but when you watch this episode again, it becomes so obvious that it seems confusing that people ever bought into any other explanation. This is another of those things that seems like a redcon because a lot of people, myself included at first, never got it, but where in retrospect, Chris Carter was telling us the truth as obviously as he could all along. There's the obvious part of the episode where whatever they do to Skully happens when she passes out and wakes up. Her clothes having been changed and her having been moved from the car to bed. CSM laughs it off at the time and just says that she fell asleep and so they put her to bed. But seriously, I mean, she was sleeping in a car so soundly next to her arch nemesis that she didn't wake up when they carried her across the house and changed her clothes.

>> You drugged me.

>> I did nothing of this sort. And if it was all innocent, then what's with the creepy shot where she's asleep in the car and he puts on his gloves before he does whatever it is that he's about to do to her? Did he need gloves just to put her to bed? For years, people bought the idea that Moulder was William's father. But if CSM wasn't involved somehow, what else could these scenes in Enemy possibly be about? If you look at the story of the episode, there's this elaborate plot where CSM says he needs Skully to help him retrieve a disc, which he says is information that he needs on it for some of the healing technology that he told her they were developing. At the end of the episode, though, after she got him the disc, they show him throwing the disc away in the water. He never needed the disc. It didn't even make sense that he would need the disc to use the technology that he's talking about in the first place because the episode showed that they were already using this technology earlier when they cured a boy of cancer. So, the whole idea that he needed Skully to get this disc is obviously a lie. It was an excuse to get her alone with him on a trip for reasons that, like I said, in retrospect couldn't possibly seem more obvious. William B. Davis, the actor who plays CSM, is the credited writer of the episode in AM Me. So before I assumed that the reason the story of whatever CSM was up to in the episode didn't quite make much sense was just because the point of the episode for Davis when he wrote it was to humanize CSM give him some sympathetic scenes and some time with Skully. And I figured that the story not making a whole lot of sense within the bigger picture of the show's mythology was just due to Davis not having a really strong grasp of the mythology. Like many other episodes where Carter wasn't the credited writer though you can find stories of how heavily he rewrote the script. I think Carter was much more involved in all the little details in all of these episodes than he ever got credit for, including the episodes where he was an accredited writer. Later on in season 11, Carter references Inami specifically when he's talking about William's parentage. So, he's obviously aware of what's in the episode and he thinks that it fits with what he wrote later because he's pointing out the connection. Even aside from that, there are simply way too many things in the episode specifically talking about alien technology to heal people and all of that kind of stuff which would later perfectly align with things Carter would reveal in seasons 10 and 11. There's way too much of all that for it just to be a coincidence. William Davis obviously couldn't have known these things that the show wouldn't reveal for almost 20 more years. So Carter's the person who put all this stuff into the episode. And when you watch it again, it's shocking now how much sense it all suddenly makes in light of what Carter would write in seasons 10 and 11.

>> Many fans, as you touched upon before, they have strong feelings about the finale and you've suggested maybe the fans are not asking the right questions. So, can you tell us a little bit more about that? Can you give us maybe a small piece of that puzzle? What should we be asking? Maybe we should divert our attention elsewhere. What What did we miss?

I'm going to give you one answer to that and it's that everyone assumes that the cigarette smoking man had sex with Scully. And I want everyone to think about that. That that is a an assumption uh that you should question. And you should also know that the cigarette smoking man has lots of access to controls um alien technology. And so there is something in that uh night uh of Scully's life that uh needs to be explained and explored.

The episode enemy also makes sense in terms of the story I was talking about earlier where during seasons 5 through 8, if you read between the lines, you can see how the conspiracy is advancing their superhuman project one step at a time. During these seasons, CSM takes Skully on this trip right after they'd had their successful alien human hybrid test with Cassandra Spender and with Moulder. And right when they're starting to take test subjects back in order to turn them into super soldiers, right at the same time that they now have the technology to make more advanced super soldiers, they're also now able to try what they wanted to create with William. The idea that Moulder was William's father makes sense if you believe that all the foreshadowing about William being special and a savior figure meant that he was supposed to save the world from alien colonization or from the conspiracy. But whatever led you to believe that he was actually here to save the world from the conspiracy rather than to help with what the conspiracy considered its version of saving the world. Remember CSM has always thought that he was the one saving the world. So the question should have been is William a Christ figure or is he an antichrist figure? Is he the son of the devil?

>> Dana, God has given you a miracle. A child that wasn't supposed to be. I need to know if it's really God I have to thank.

>> I thought of him as, you know, something that owed more to the omen.

>> We talked about with Chris and Glenn and all the writers. Nobody wanted William to be this kind of a milk toast. Everything's okay and he's a hero and all that.

>> In early stages, I even posited, well, maybe William murdered this other kid.

>> Chris initially was like, yeah, yeah, let's do something really dark. I think what people don't appreciate and uh he goes all the way back to William's birth or at least his infancy is when he moves that mobile in the very beginning. And what is that? How is that? This kid has a kind of supernatural quality. And I think everyone always attributed that to Scully. Uh that that came from Scully. But it that that was never in my mind that it was something inherited from her. It was something greater and different than that. And uh that's uh how you got the William that you saw in the the series finale.

If William was supposed to be saving the world from the conspiracy, then in seasons eight and nine, there are an awful lot of scenes where it seems oddly like the conspiracy is trying to protect him. Skully naturally assumes that the super soldiers and their allies are out to harm her baby. Since he's her baby and now she suddenly has these super soldiers very interested in him and following her around. She's obviously not going to assume that they're up to something good. It certainly seems like the super soldiers would be opposed to William because we've also seen them killing doctors involved in the project surrounding William's creation and Skully's abduction. But what if they aren't killing these doctors because they're opposed to what the doctors were working on, but rather because with Skully's pregnancy, the doctors had accomplished their purpose in the project and they can now be eliminated like the syndicate could be eliminated after they succeeded with the experiments they were doing on Cassandra Spinder. More than the idea that the super soldiers were killing the doctors because they wanted to stop their work. It makes much more sense that they were killing them because their work was finished and so now they knew too much and the super soldiers were cleaning up the loose ends. It's a clever bait and switch actually because who they're killing makes us infer one thing about their intentions and their purpose, but it could just as easily mean the opposite. As we see, when William is born, the super soldiers make a great effort to find out where the birth is happening and to observe it. But they say that what they want is to make sure that he's born, not to stop him from being born.

>> This baby will be born.

Then after William is born safely, the super soldiers don't make any effort to harm him, but rather they turn around and leave, having apparently accomplished what they were there to do.

>> I was called on last year to protect Agent Scully, who was pregnant and whose life was in danger because of her pregnancy. I drove Agent Scully to a secluded location in Georgia where it was believed she could deliver safely. But we soon discovered we weren't alone. I was attacked and had to defend myself against an asalent who was shot at point blank range, who should have died, but didn't. This asalant was then joined by others like him who surrounded Agent Scully and me and witnessed her as she gave birth to her son.

>> Witnessed her? What do you mean?

>> We were confused as well. But we came to understand that her son was a kind of miracle child. Its birth was all important to these people, these so-called super soldiers.

>> Why would Scully's child be important to aliens? Agent Reyes.

>> We came to learn that Scully was one of a number of random women who had miraculous child births. And these women all had been abducted as part of a government program to secretly manipulate their biology.

>> Program conducted by the Navy.

>> Again, at the time, this all seemed very confusing because we were assuming that William was going to save the world from the conspiracy. And so, the super soldiers and alien collaborators must have been a threat to him, must have wanted to oppose him. But looking back now, it seems obvious that this makes sense. And there's only one way to interpret it, which is that the conspiracy wanted William to be born because he would be a benefit to their plans, not a tool to stop their plans. William was always the culmination of the conspiracy's plans, not something that would interfere with their plans.

>> What about the baby?

>> What are you talking about?

>> She was pregnant.

>> I had an unborn fetus taken from me.

>> But they take the babies before they're born.

>> What about the baby?

>> Surgically removed. I couldn't tell if the fetus was still alive when it was taken from her womb, but they took it, Moulder, to get rid of evidence.

>> What if the baby was still alive? Mold, that car hit her so hard that an adult woman with the benefit of a mature skeletal structure wasn't able to survive the impact. It's highly unlikely that the baby would remain viable.

>> Unlikely for human fetuses. In 1973, the syndicate was convened to assist in a project to colonize the world by creating alien human hybrids. The project was ultimately unsuccessful. I doubt they ever stopped trying. The idea that William was created by CSM in the conspiracy and was a tool to help CSM is the only thing that makes any sense of everything that happens with him in seasons 8 and 9. And when you let go of your assumptions and watch those seasons through that lens, suddenly everything about them starts to make sense. Cryche hated CSM and he wanted to stop his plans in season 8. So what is he trying to do in regards to William? He wants them to prevent the baby from being brought to term.

>> Make sure Skully doesn't come to term.

Krytchek obviously thinks that the best way to hurt the conspiracy is to not let Scully have her baby.

>> All you wanted was to save your own ass.

>> I tried to stop them. Tried to kill Scully's baby to stop them.

When Moulder says Krych only was trying to help himself, Kitech says that he tried to kill Scoly's baby to stop the conspiracy's plan. I mean, again, they're telling us once again right here that William is a good thing for the conspiracy and for their plans of a six extinction, not something that lacked against their plans or stop the coming apocalypse. So, how are we ever surprised to find out that he was created by CSM? It's one of these things I keep bringing up where they told us the truth over and over and people just didn't see it at the time. William was never going to grow up to be a force for good and these seasons wouldn't have made any sense if he did. There are many more examples, but I think I've made the point that the only way William makes sense is if he was made by the project and is there to serve the project's purposes, not to save the world from them.

>> I know they used you to create the child.

>> It's insidious, Skully. Award for pregnant woman paid for by Augustus Golden, the founder of a company with deep ties to the Department of Defense. This could be another phase of the project. There are experiments in eugenics.

>> Is this what you believe happened to me 15 years ago when I got pregnant? When I had my baby? Was I just an incubator?

>> It started decades ago when they decided to combine the alien and human DNA to create hybrids. After the crash at Roswell, our government's interest in alien technology exploded in all directions. And finally, in the 70s, our science caught up to our ambition. Eugenics program was initiated by Dr. Masal Matsumoto using components of alien technology, hybrid DNA.

>> Project Crossroads. I believe that through the smoking man you were an unwitting participant in a eugenics program called project crossroads was spearheaded by Dr. Misau Matsumoto. I believe our son was one of his test subjects.

So then if the conspiracy made William then the question is why did they make William and what is he supposed to accomplish for them? This again only makes sense with the superhuman project that they explain in seasons 10 and 11. We play with this idea that William is the golden child of sorts, that he could in fact be the basis of a new civilization. But

>> what you're talking about is changing the genetic makeup of a population. That's the next step in evolution.

>> Every new species begins with a founders's mutation. One child with the correct combination of DNA could be a start.

I used to have this idea that the reason William was so special is that he would be immune to the purity virus and thus safe from alien colonization. and in that way he would provide a way to save everybody when colonization started. In retrospect, one flaw with this theory is that in the show there were already populations of Native American people and their descendants that are immune to the purity virus. So that ability actually wouldn't have made William so special or unique. Those populations wouldn't necessarily be immune to the Spartan virus, though, which is the immunity William turns out to have, which is actually more valuable to the conspiracy. It's established in seasons 10 and 11 that William's unique biology makes him immune to the Spartan virus. In her visions of the six extinctions, Scully realizes that they need William because his genes could provide a cure for the Spartan virus, and this is what sets them off looking for him in season 11. CSM and others involved in the conspiracy are also looking for him. But he has more that they want than just his immunity. The fact that he's immune to the virus is a result of his alien DNA, but it's only one result. In the way that they say that alien DNA is the key to everything in the XFiles, that it explains all the different kinds of mutants and paranormal activities they've encountered over the years, William is sort of the ultimate XFile. He's telepathic, telekinetic, super strong, invulnerable. He has healing abilities. He has every advantage from the alien DNA that the leads conspiring to create superhumans wanted to give to themselves without the disadvantage of being a part machine super soldier. He is the exact superhuman that they've always wanted to create. This again isn't new to seasons 10 and 11, but was actually hinted at so heavily in earlier seasons that it's amazing that we didn't already see it.

>> Why does everybody want my son?

>> You still don't understand, do you? Your son has what everybody wants. What people would kill.

>> A perfect human child, but with no human frailties.

>> It's the holiest of grails, Dana. It's the cure for all human disease. The beginning of the six extinction was when William was 11 and he started to fully come into his powers, which was 2012. William manifesting his powers was confirmation that he had the abilities the conspiracies sought. After William goes on the run, though, CSM can't start his plan without him. They need him so they can make more like him and make themselves like him. Like Kryek, Spinder, Jeffrey Spinder also hated CSM and wanted to thwart his plans. And he makes an attempt by injecting William with the type of magnetite that is the vulnerability of alien spacecraft and the super soldiers. He thinks that this will remove William's powers, which make him valuable to the conspiracy.

>> It's an unknown metal that you injected into my son.

>> It's a form of magnetite. I took revenge on my father by taking William away from them. by showing that Spinder wants to remove Williams's abilities. Yet again, they're telling us that William's special powers are something to help the conspiracy, not something to thwart it. The fact that Jeffree thinks the magnetite will stop William's powers is also telling. The magnetite is the weakness of the spaceships and the super soldiers because of how it interacts with the metal of which they're comprised. Super soldiers have the same metal and alien technology in their spine as the alien spacecraft, and this seems to be the source of their invulnerability. If there's even a little bit of this metal left, they can regenerate. So this metal obviously is the key component of how they work. The fact that Spender thinks that William should have the same vulnerability to the magnetite as the super soldiers shows that he thinks they were created using related technology. We also know the experiments done on Skully to create William were part of the alien human hybrid projects. So showing clearly that William is a product of both the super soldier technology and the alien human hybrid tests shows again that these were the same project. When Jeffrey injects William, it seems to work to stop his powers for a while. But the difference with William from the super soldiers and alien hybrids and what makes him so valuable and unique is that he's born organically, not created with the metal like the super soldiers are.

>> They put a chip in the back of her neck to monitor her. It was also used to make her pregnant with the first organic version of that same super soldier.

>> Rather than dying and being reconstructed, he's born with his invulnerability. So he doesn't even have the one vulnerability that the super soldiers have, which is to magnetite. Jeffrey thinks that he stopped William's powers, but he didn't. I think that CSM has a version of these regenerative powers like the super soldiers and even Cassandra Spinard do, but William is the gold standard for these powers. He's the test that turned out perfectly. Dealing with the show's religious symbolism is of course important to understanding the hints Carter is giving us about the purpose of William and the purpose of the project. So, it needs to be understood to go into those things. But the ideas about a savior figure and an Armageddon aren't just window dressing or just about that one particular plot issue. The show's religious symbolism is ultimately integral to every other part of the show as well. During the original run of the show, I was of course aware of the obvious themes that were stated plainly like the believer versus skeptic dynamic, the idea of science versus religion and all of that. But I didn't give it that much thought because those are very obvious themes and very broad archetypes and I didn't think there was that much more going on there to understand. In truth though, while those things are stated that way as surface level conflicts, it's because that's only the surface of what the show is doing on those topics. The deeper you go, the more you can see these issues as the key to everything, to use a familiar phrase, everything in the show. Not only on a plot level, but also on thematic levels that become much more meaningful and complicated when you think about them longer. When you get down to it, the entire show, the impending apocalypse, the search for truth, the return of a god who came from the heavens, all of it operates elegantly as analogies for the stories of the Bible in one way, but also for other religious and mythological belief systems as well. Moulder wants to believe in aliens. Skully wants to believe in God. These are both analogies for each other and are both exploring the same concepts from different angles. The idea that the search for aliens can be seen as a metaphor for the search for God is something that the show discusses explicitly many times.

>> Before the exploration of space, of the moon, and the planets, man held that the heavens were the home and province of powerful gods who controlled not just the vast firmament, but the earthly fate of man himself.

>> But for all our knowledge, what no one can say for certain is what or who ignited that original spark. Is there a plan, a purpose, or reason to our existence?

>> We wait for a sign, a revelation. Our eyes turn skyward, ready to accept the truly incredible, to find our destiny written in the stars.

>> There's no God. Marita, what we call God is only alien. I got to do uh something that uh I always like to do, which is to talk about science, real science, um and have Scully talk about it in terms of God and of uh meaning and of uh our lives and of our futures. And that is one of the themes that has also developed in the XFiles over the years is the relationship between searching for aliens and searching for God and how in so many ways they're they're very similar. They ask a lot of the same questions and the answers um uh if you could if you could find those answers they'd have the same kind of profound impact.

>> She believes this business, the abductions and the experiments are due to their plans for us and that we are not simply breeding cows for them as some have suggested, but subjects much like we think of our relationship with God.

>> If it were true, these symbols wouldn't just be words. They'd be the very word of God on the surface of an alien spacecraft.

The search for extraterrestrial life in a lot of ways is the same as the search for God. You're trying to find meaning in the universe, higher power. This was the most explicit attempt we've ever made to try and say, "What if aliens are God?" Scoly, even though she was the scientist, is a Catholic, and Moulder seems to be an atheist. This search for aliens is Moulder's secular faith, and the aliens are kind of his standin for God. And I think this idea that the truth is out there, that's an unattainable goal. The truth is the mystery of the universe.

This idea that the aliens are God or are a symbol for God or that our ideas of God and our religious mythologies are a symbolic way of talking about the aliens, that all is kind of the starting point with these ideas in the show. But the show takes this basic concept that structurally underpins the story and as it goes they do so many deeper things to develop these ideas from that starting point and find meaningful things to say with them. The aliens being God or a metaphor for God is one thing but if the aliens gave us our religious mythology as an allegorical way to understand them and to talk about them then all those other stories have relevant applicability to the show stories as well. The White Buffalo story is used in the show as a way to hint that Native American cultures might have had contact with aliens in the distant past. In the story, the being seen as a god is said to come from the heavens and then returned to the heavens promising to come back to Earth one day. In the show, this story of course could be taken as being a way that Native Americans talked about having been visited by aliens. That concept though that there was ancient contact between aliens and Native American cultures is something that is then used to explain and explore so many points that I've mentioned like the importance of the date 2012 to the show and the connection between the geology of the American Southwest and the crash of the alien ship at Roswell. One of the earlier times in the show that the aliens are very clearly compared to God is in the season 3 finale Takumi in which it's shown in many different ways that the character Jeremiah Smith is meant to resemble a god and to be seen as a god by people because of his healing powers. It was unclear at this point in the show when the episode originally aired how he related to the aliens and alien human hybrids, but they were already showing you that one of the main powers of the aliens and one of the powers that the alien human hybrid projects gives to its test subjects were healing abilities and invulnerability to injury and illness.

>> Roy This actually came out different than I had imagined. I originally imagined the Jeremiah Smith character to be more Christlike, but he came out actually uh with a little bit more arrogance uh some uh condescension to the cigarette smoking man. I realized that the character actually had become more interesting to me in Royis's portrayal.

Again, relevant to this theme is the title of the episode, Tithakumi, which is an Aramaic phrase spoken by Jesus in Mark 5:41 in the Bible. The phrase literally translates as little girl arise and is spoken to a girl who appears to be dead but who Jesus then returns to life. The word totha has a double meaning of either little girl or lamb referring of course to the idea of a lamb of God. But here once again all the way back in season 3 we have the idea of a Christ figure with the ability to bring people back from the dead and all the rest of it. It's all here in the show and the show's spelling it out by explicitly comparing him to Christ. There are numerous other stories in the show about cults who believe the aliens are some kinds of gods. In season 8, there's the cult led by a man by the name of Abselum who is working with Jeremiah Smith and who thinks he's fulfilling some kind of biblical prophecy. Interestingly, Jeremiah Smith is one of the alien human hybrids who is actually working against the project, which is why CSM wanted the alien bounty hunter to kill him back in season 3. Here in season 8, he's collecting people who have undergone experiments to turn them into super soldiers. And with his healing powers, Jeremiah Smith is making sure that they don't undergo that transformation. So this cult is actually working against the project, which makes the name Abselum interesting because Abselum in the Bible is a man who rebelss against God.

>> I am the resurrection and the life. He who believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

In season 9, there's another cult who believes in religious prophecies to do with aliens. After hearing their beliefs, an FBI agent embedded in the group comes to believe that he needs to kill William to stop the coming sex extinction. Another example here of being told that William wasn't there to stop the coming apocalypse, but rather was necessary to enable it.

>> The FBI sent me undercover on a man named Joseph to get inside his cult whose followers believe an alien race will rule the world. One day, God told Jezeo to lead us 1,000 mi north to find a ship buried in the ground. Joseph believes that that ship is a temple which houses the physical manifestation of God. Even in what is mostly a monster of the week episode like Roadrunners in season 8, Skully encounters a cult centered around an alien slug that she found. And the slug through telepathic communication with them has convinced the cult that he's the second coming of Jesus Christ. They're not offering up much defense other than that they're being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

>> They believe they worshiped Christ, that that thing was a second coming.

If aliens were the source of human religions, as the show hints, that makes these stories work on a few different interesting thematic levels. The alien stories in the show closely follow biblical stories about the Armageddon and Christ returning and also stories in other religions. So, you can look at the alien storyline in the show as being an analogy for these things, or you could look at the stories religions tell as being analogies for secret truths about aliens. One reason Christ is important in Christianity is because he's the result of union between God and a human woman, a mortal woman. But being from God means he's able to return from death after he dies. Likewise, William in the show is born from a combination of Skully with alien DNA. the aliens being God in the show and this is hinted at to be the key to his immortality, his ability to return from death. Like God created the world in six days and rested when it was complete on the seventh day. CSM in the show wants to destroy the world or in his view to save it and recreate it into a new world with the sixth extinction and on the seventh day he will have his utopia. It's his inverted version of God's plan, his attempt to play God or to usurp God.

>> Oh, the world will go on just in my image instead of God's.

CSM's Armageddon is an inversion of God's creation of the world. And likewise, his son is the Antichrist or an inversion of Christ. The image Carter chose to end season 11 on is interesting because he shows William, who was just shot in the head, emerging from the water, still alive. Chris Carter has pointed out this scene when he was talking about why he used the tagline Salvatore Mundy. In this episode, he specifically said that William was immortal and that the scene was meant to represent a resurrection. He said, "We have William's immortality and resurrection at the end of the show." That's the final image. William is reborn, immortal, and of course, his emergence from water symbolizes baptism. This is another thing that goes back to the early days of the show and also illustrates again that the various alien human hybrid projects and super soldier projects are all the same thing, the superhuman project. William rising from the water at the end of the show is a quote of something the show did earlier. The first time we saw an alien human hybrid actually in the season 1 episode, The Errol Meyer Flask. In that episode, we don't yet know the abilities the hybrids have until one is shot on a dock just like William is later shot on a dock in season 11. And like William, that hybrid in season 1 goes into the river, which would seem to mean he's dead. But then he emerges still alive, just like William does later, showing that he can survive gunshot wounds and also breathe underwater. The symbolism of the water here is important. Like I said earlier, water is used to represent Moulder returning to the land of the living in season 3. The image of alien human hybrids, super soldiers, and superhumans being able to breathe underwater is returned to again and again throughout the show.

>> She fell in the pool and nobody noticed. Molly was underwater for at least 10 minutes. She should have been dead. I never told anyone else this. Not only was she alive, she was breathing in the water. They were alive, Skully. Underwater.

>> I can breathe underwater.

All these scenes are baptisms, deaths, and resurrections, pointing to the symbolic meanings of these superpowers created by the project and hinting at the true goal of the project to create immortal superhumans. It's also important that the way the super soldiers are created is by the person who's being transformed, being medically dead, and then shedding his old skin and being reborn as a new immortal being. More death and rebirth, more resurrection.

>> I am the resurrection and the life sayaith the Lord.

This issue of death and resurrection is also why in season 7 it's shown that the CSM is sick and it seems like he's dying.

>> What are you dying of?

>> Cerebral inflammation consequence of brain surgery I had in the fall. The doctors give me just a few months.

In the beginning of season 7, they do the operation on CSM to give him the alien abilities that have been unlocked in Moulder. You're turning him into a zombie.

>> Only part of you is dying. Rise out of your bed and come with me. Arise.

>> You're not Christ.

>> There's no way for you to cheat death except by disappearing.

>> Fact remains, he's become our savior.

>> We're forcing the next step in evolution to save man. We're doing God's work, Diana. Without this immunity, everyone would die. This knowledge is God's blessing.

Then after they do this procedure to CSM to give him Moulder's ability in enemy, CSM says that he's dying. In season 8, they later also reveal that during the same period and following the same medical procedure, Moulder also thought that he was dying, going so far as to get a tombstone made for himself. And in flashbacks in the episode, The Gift, secretly investigating a case of somebody who was thought to have the powers to cure people of terminal illnesses, which he thought he might be able to use to cure himself. They think what he has is killing him, but in actuality, he's never been more alive.

So, following what was done to them in the beginning of season 7, both Moulder and CSM seemed to be dying. Moulder would seem to be fully dead when he was returned after being abducted. What was actually happening to both of them though was that they were being given superhuman powers with alien technology. But to go through that process, they have to first medically die and be reborn. More death and resurrections, more Christ analogies. But if you understand what was happening to Moulder at this time was that they were trying to turn him into a super soldier even though that ended up not happening. And you understand that what was happening to CSM at this point was a version of the same process. Then the fact that CSM had what appeared to be a terminal illness in Enemy is the hint that explains how he was able to survive what happened to him in the season 9 finale. He had already gone through a process to get superhuman regenerative powers. and his return after being incinerated isn't to cheat anymore because they had already shown that he was going through this process. If the aliens are God, God's messengers or emissaries to humans are often different types of angels. And the show repeatedly refers to alien human hybrids or the people creating them in these terms.

>> You're looking at God's work. Jason's life owes to his grace and exalts his name in the highest. Praise the Lord.

>> Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

>> And you say that you saw angels Yes.

>> May I ask what they look like?

>> They look like men.

Again, in the episode enemy, the boy at the beginning of the episode has cancer, which he says was then miraculously cured by angels. His father says the cure was God's work. The scene that the boy describes as a visitation from angels, though, is deliberately shown to resemble the earlier scenes of alien abductions in the show. Much like the White Buffalo story, the boy says that they came from the sky in a ball of light. When the boy sees the light, he raises his arms in another crucifixion pose. Again, underscoring that what some people in the show consider to be alien abductions are actually being carried out by human conspirators. The figures which emerge from the light look like humans, and the boy later says that the angels that cured him looked like men. It's interesting here that the purpose of the perceived angelic visitation is to cure him of cancer. The father says that it's God who gave the boy his illness and so it's God that has to cure it. Which is making the story point about why they won't let the boy get medical treatment because they have religious beliefs that preclude it. But it also could be a hint that the same project that would cure his cancer is also the project that gave the cancer to him as a test. God gave him cancer. God has to take it away. If this is what happened, it would be the same thing that the same project did to Scully earlier in the show, giving her cancer and then curing it. Either way, the episode is playing an interesting way here with the show's themes about science and religion. The boy's father won't accept a a cure that he thought came from man and not from religion. But he accepts the boy being cured when it's delivered with the trappings of an angelic visitation. It's dealing with the interesting line between science and religion and how the two can overlap and how what we consider to be one or the other is subjective to our experience. Much like how the whole show is blurring the lines between God and aliens and the similarity between Moulders's faith in aliens and Skully's faith in Catholicism and so on. All of those themes. But to go back to the cancer issue, of course, it also ties back here to the goal of the project being to create humans without frailties and Cassandra Spender statements that the aliens are great healers who will cure all illnesses. But cancer specifically is a theme that the show deals with repeatedly. The biggest example of course being Skully's cancer. In the episode Momento my which like I talked about earlier focuses on Skully's cancer. There's an interesting speech where she compares cancer to demonic possession.

>> This is the evil of cancer that it starts as an invader but soon becomes one with the invaded forcing you to destroy it but only at the risk of destroying yourself. It is science's demon possession. my treatments, science's attempt at exorcism.

The analogy of cancer being science's demon possession is is again an interesting play on how science and religion are two different explanations for similar things. In this case, a foreign entity invading somebody's body.

As the voiceover says, you know, it's like uh cancer is medicine's demon possession. It's this thing that takes over your body, sort of turns your body against itself. But I think the reason that the show keeps using cancer as a symbol is that its main antagonist, its devil figure in the show, is of course called the cancer man. I think this is why Carter liked him so much as a symbol. The irony of this man who's in pursuit of eternal life, also constantly chain smoking cigarettes which could kill him. It's about how in life we're always living with the possibility of death. We're always in the shadow of death. And the CSM's efforts to stop that is his unnatural defiance of God's plan. He has the hubris to tempt death and still demand to live forever. But back to the analogy of the agents of this alien human project being referred to as angels. It's brought up in the show more than once.

>> I am my angel of mercy.

>> Dr. Joseph Mangalin, the Nazi angel of death.

>> Death came to take my men, but not me. I was left as a witness to a vision. Angels from heaven. Behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, and a brightness was about it. And out of the midst came the likeness of four living creatures, and they had the likeness of a man. The Bible describing giants who walked the earth. Who'd believe it? Only the faithful. And we who have seen them, these super soldiers, the true sons of God.

In this episode from season 9, Providence, the characters he sees here that he interprets as angels are obviously meant to be earlier versions of the super soldiers, which is what allows them to survive the gunfire in this scene. The Bible quote here is interesting for a few other reasons as well. Though the quote is from Ezekiel uh 14, and in the full quote, Ezekiel is describing his vision of cherubim specifically. This has important ties to an earlier episode. Another episode that I consider to be sort of a backdoor mythology episode with more significance than I originally realized is the season 5 episode All Souls. Firstly, the title of the episode All Souls is a reference to the biblical idea of the battle for all souls, which is the coming Armageddon in which God and the

The devil will fight for the souls of all mankind. In this show, of course, that's the six extinction. And it's interesting to see that same conflict referenced in the title of this episode.

There is a war raging, where now a battle is being waged, a struggle for heaven and earth. The episode specifically deals with girls who were born with some unusual birth defects who are now in this episode being killed for reasons that at first are unknown. Investigating the case, Skully encounters a being who seems to have four different faces. The faces of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. When she tells a priest about this, he tells her that what she saw was a seraph, a type of angel. The priest is actually wrong here, though, although whether the writers of the episode did that deliberately is an open question. The type of being with four faces that Skully saw is an angel that's part of Christian mythology, but it's actually a cherubim, not a seraphim. There are several types of angels in Christian mythology, and they're all very different from one another, which turns out to be relevant here, which is why I'm making the distinction. I'm guessing that the reason the episode says seraphim rather than cherubim is that in popular culture, cherubs are most commonly depicted as being chubby little baby angels. And when people hear the name, that's what they think of. This is actually inaccurate to biblical descriptions of where cherubim are imposing beings with four heads who attend the throne of God. But most people don't know that. So if the episode had described what Skully had seen as cherubim, it probably would just have confused people who wouldn't understand why what Skully saw didn't look like what they think cherubs are supposed to look like. For that reason, I'm guessing they just substituted seraphim, which are another type of angel, but an angel with a very different appearance and a very different role in the angelic hierarchy. I'm just pointing out the distinction here because it's relevant that what Skully sees in All Souls is actually the same type of angel that the man believes he sees later in the episode Providence, and the fact of there being four of them is relevant to biblical cherubim being creatures with four heads and so on.

The explanation that the episode All Souls gives for the girls with birth defects that Skully is investigating is that they could be Nephilim, which are another type of being from Christian mythology. The Nephilim have various physical descriptions and various explanations for what they are and where they come from. So, it's open to interpretation as far as the biblical description goes. And the episode All Souls isn't too close to any of the biblical descriptions of them anyway. But the relevant part here is that it's explained in the episode that they're children produced by a union between a human and an angel. And this is the reason that they're being killed in the episode because they're unnatural and they weren't meant to be. The idea that Nephilim are created by a union between an angel and a human is accurate to one possible biblical interpretation of them.

But the reason I think that all this is important to the bigger picture of the show is that when Skully is investigating the Nephilim, she begins to have visions of her daughter Emily. Emily was created unnaturally without Skully's knowledge by men in the project using her OA that they had harvested. And ultimately, it's revealed that Emily is unhealthy and not able to survive, and Skully has to let her die. She was an unnatural creation who wasn't meant to be, wasn't meant to live. The visions of Emily in All Souls leads Skully to come to the same realization about the girls that she believes are Nephilim, that they were unnatural creations that weren't meant to live. And so she realizes that she has to let them die.

Who are the men who would create a life whose only hope is to die? In the episodes where Skully finds Emily and finds out that Emily is probably going to die, she is distraught, understandably, and wonders what kind of men could be behind these experiments that create a child that they know is probably going to die. The question has some irony though, as of course God created Christ specifically for the purpose of him dying. And God creates all of us with the knowledge that we will die. Memento mori again, they're hinting here at the idea that the conspirators behind these projects are playing God. CSM also kills his own son, Jeffrey Spender, just like God would kill his own son. And eventually CSM also tries to kill his other son, Mulder.

"You shoot your own firstborn son."

"Shot my secondborn son once."

In the episode All Souls, making this parallel between Emily's inevitable death and the unnatural Nephilim, also, in retrospect, foreshadows William. William, of course, like the Nephilim, being a product of the union between a human and a god or an angel, you could say, between Skully and alien DNA, to put it another way. The episode being called All Souls also foreshadows that Skully would have a child that would have an important role in the battle for all souls.

The other interesting thing here though is that if the Nephilim and Emily were meant to foreshadow William, they also foreshadow the eventual revelation in seasons 10 and 11 that William is the unnatural product of an experiment and that he wasn't meant to be.

"He wasn't meant to be."

"William was an experiment model."

"This child was not meant to be."

"They have the souls of angels, but they weren't meant to be. They're deformed, tormented."

Like many other things that I've pointed out, this is telling us pretty heavily many years before seasons 10 and 11. Things that surprised us when they were revealed in those seasons, but that in retrospect really shouldn't have been surprises. William was never meant to be the child of Mulder and Skully or somebody who was going to fight on their side. He was always going to be, through no fault of his own, an unnatural creation made for the wrong reasons.

There's even another episode of the show which doesn't seem like a mythology episode at all, but it does play with similar ideas yet again. In the episode "Terms of Endearment" in season 6, the episode is about a demon who is marrying and impregnating women only to kill the babies. It turns out that the reason that he's killing them is because what he wants is a normal life and a normal baby that isn't a demon like he is. Again, this returns to the theme of a supernatural being having a baby with a mortal woman and the result of that union being a baby that comes out unnatural and deformed.

"Imagine all a woman's hopes and dreams for her child and then nature turns so cruel."

"What must a mother go through?"

"Apparently not much in this case if she just throw it out with the trash."

"I, I guess I was just projecting on myself."

"Why is there a history of genetic abnormalities in your family?"

"No. Well, just find yourself a man with a spotless genetic makeup and a really high tolerance for being second guessed and start pumping out the little Uber Skullies."

The religious symbolism in the show is used frequently in regards to both the alien human hybrids we see and the super soldiers we see. This is another way of showing us once again that these were all the same project. In the season 1 episode I mentioned earlier, "Eve," the Eves are another early experiment with superhumans or super soldiers. And of course, their name has obvious biblical significance.

"We're very bright. We Eves. He runs in the family."

"Where are the others? The Adams and the Eves."

"You're such a special little girl, Cindy."

"You're a very special boy, Gibson."

"A very special child."

"He's a very special boy."

Underscoring the connection, in season 9, the super soldier Shannon McMahon uses the same language, saying that super soldiers like her were Adam and Eve of their kind.

"Well, Roar and I were drafted right out of Bravo Company together. We were Adam and Eve."

This underscores the connection and it also hints at the idea that the results of these experiments were the first in a new race of humans with superpowers. It additionally again plays on the theme that the people conducting these experiments were playing God, trying to make their own Adams and Eves in this case. And the theme returns again in season 10 when Mulder and Skully find a clinic with children who have extreme mutations and birth defects. It's heavily hinted that these children might have been part of the same experiments that Skully was a part of and which created William. And of course, since it's all the same program, the boy at the clinic who Skully speaks to is once again named Adam.

"Adam."

"You have a visitor."

"Hi, Adam."

Like in all these examples, the second X-Files movie in particular is helped if you view it trying to understand the show's religious themes. I remember being disappointed with the second movie when it came out, but like with seasons 10 and 11, my opinion has changed a lot with further reflection. When you read Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz or the director Rob Bowman talk about the first X-Files movie, they talk a lot about how they thought people would expect that an X-Files movie deliver something bigger than what they could get on the TV show. So they felt pressure to put on a large-scale spectacle. With the second movie though, Chris Carter took basically the opposite approach, opting to do a small-scale horror story, basically an expanded monster of the week episode. Combined with the fact that they were extremely secretive about the movie up until release, most people who went to see it didn't really know what to expect and whatever they were expecting, it probably wasn't a very quiet movie about a couple of gay Russians making two-headed dogs out in a cabin.

"So, you want people talking about the show as early as possible. It's a lesson I learned also in making the second movie. Uh, if you keep things too secretive and too under wraps, you can actually shoot yourself in the foot."

But in retrospect, rather than spectacle, what Carter was trying to do here was something that was more meaningful in terms of the show's themes and something that meant something to him personally. He had something to say, and the movie has many beautiful little moments talking about these themes.

"It's solid ice."

"No, it's dirty glass."

This moment here in particular is one where you have to get the religious reference in order to know what's going on. "Skully, what does he mean like through dirty glass? Agent Drum says it's solid ice. And Mulder says, 'No, it's dirty glass.' But it is literally solid ice. So what's Mulder's point?" It's a reference to an earlier line in the movie, but it's also another biblical reference. This time based on 1 Corinthians 13:12. The quote goes, "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known." The original wording is ambiguous and the words for glass and darkly can mean glass or a mirror or a dim reflection or a cloudy reflection or an image obscured by the glass through which you're seeing it. The phrase is commonly used to talk about trying to see reality with imperfect vision. It's taken to mean that we try to see God, but that with our human senses we can only get an imperfect glimpse of him as if seeing him through dirty glass or a poor reflection in a mirror.

"I see a face. I see eyes staring out. Who is it?"

"It's unclear. Like through dirty glass."

In the movie, Father Joe is having visions of the killers and their victims, but he only gets unclear flashes that don't tell him everything. And he describes it as being like seeing them through dirty glass. This is what Mulder is referring to, and Ice explains in a literal way what looked like dirty glass in Father Joe's vision. But specifically using the phrase dirty glass to allude to the biblical passage makes the ice and the unclear visions into a metaphor for what the movie is really about: the struggle to understand God and to see him in his plan.

"It's sturdy glass. It's dirty glass."

The whole movie is snowbound with Mulder and Skully trying to solve the mystery while evidence is being buried around them in layers of snow and ice. Father Joe cries tears of blood when he's having his visions. Similar to the character in the episode "Providence," who cries tears of blood when he sees the super soldiers, which he considers to be a vision of angels. The idea of tears of blood also has biblical significance going back to the Gethsemane story when Christ was said to sweat blood metaphorically or otherwise. In The X-Files, both of these characters cry tears of blood when they believe they're having visions from God telling them their purpose in life. And you can connect that back to the episode title "Gethsemane," which was a point where Mulder was questioning his belief in aliens in his quest or his purpose in life.

The movie also makes repeated use of the Bible passage from Proverbs 25:2.

"Proverbs 25:2."

"What?"

"God's glory to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings to search out a matter."

"Proverbs 25:2."

This is the theme of the entire show right here: the quest to seek out the truth. If aliens are a god on the show, then it's the truth that they've concealed that Mulder is seeking. And saying to seek out that truth is the glory of kings is saying that trying to understand truth in the world and the truth of God's plan is the highest possible human endeavor we can engage in during our lives here. The idea of the truth being concealed by God and us searching to be able to see it or understand it is something that's subtly reinforced by Father Joe struggling to see and understand his visions as though he's looking at them through dirty glass. The struggle to seek out the hidden truths about aliens or God is Mulder's quest and the impetus for the entire show.

"It's sturdy glass. It's sturdy glass. It's sturdy glass."

There, The X-Files is filled with all sorts of inside detail, all sorts of things. Uh, uh, one of them has become quite well-known now, which is the clock reading 11:21, which is my wife's birthday, November 21st.

"Do you mind if I ask your birth date?"

"November 21st, 1948."

"X file number 11214893."

"11:21 p.m."

"Case number DP112148."

"The package ID number is DDP 112148."

"So you'll see those numbers and they will be meaningful. And then we had the 1013 on the door. And that was my kind of my first introduction to the little notes and secrets that Chris and Frank would build into the show."

"The numbers on the license plates have a meaning. We did some research."

"If you find a license plate and Google the first three letters and conspiracy, you'll probably find out what conspiracy we attach to it."

"I'm interested in numbers. They are important to me and certain combinations of numbers are important to me. Security Council resolution 1013."

"All units got a 1013."

"1013."

"File DF101364."

"Nothing under Idaho plate CC1356."

"John Doe number 101356."

"What's the code? 101 33 1."

"1056."

In what sometimes is a continuation of the show's religious themes, Carter has also always said that he's interested in numerology and the symbolism of numbers, which you could probably guess if you know that he wrote and directed the season 9 episode "Improbable."

"This whole idea for this episode is about numbers and the significance of numbers in our lives. It starts here on the card table where the players are being dealt a hand each, which is a sort of the idea is that we're all dealt hands, genetic hands, and maybe even numerological hands that give us basically the tools with which we deal or use for our lives. So this is the idea is that there is free will and there is fate, and fate is somewhat determined by our genetics. But how much is it determined by our genetics is the question. To do this the way I wanted to do it, which is I wanted to deal with some of the ideas that I was reading about, which is the idea that the world is probabilistic, that it can be statistically determined what is going to happen in the world if you in fact go about the proper equation. This episode is about patterns also, and pattern recognition, about the things that we don't see in life because we either don't open our eyes to them or we don't have the perspective, the ability to see through the trees, if you will, to the beauty of the patterns and the numbers in life. You'll see the number of tools on the table is significant, as is another piece of evidence here. You'll see the curls on her forehead form the important numbers 666. There's another six which matched back to the dominoes. Skully finds a tape is stopped at 666. So everything's interconnected."

You start to see why Carter's preoccupation with numbers is relevant to the themes of the show when you listen to him talk about the significance of numbers in "Improbable." He sees numbers as representing patterns and structures, the underlying structures that give meanings to and explanations for the reasons why things are the way they are in the universe around us. He talks about how searching for these numbers, or more broadly for patterns, is in a way what science and religion have in common. They're both searching for explanations behind things, for the answers to the big mysteries of how the universe works and why it works the way it does. The numbers games that he's playing with are what unify the two main themes of the show, science and religion, both of which he sees as the search for God.

The show often deals in twos or in pairs of things that are oppositional or complimentary or both: Mulder and Scully, religion and science, aliens and humans, God and the devil, and so on. And Scully is the last name of Vince Scully, who was the voice of the Dodgers. And when you're a kid growing up in Los Angeles, like I was, also the voice of God.

Carter has said many times that the name Scully is based on Vince Scully, a sports caster. And he said that the name is a pun because when you grew up listening to Scully and becoming intimately attached to his voice, Vince Scully was to you then the voice of God. Scully on The X-Files is the voice of God or the religious point of view. If Scully represents the point of view of God, it makes a certain kind of sense that William, the child who could either be the Christ or the Antichrist, has Scully for his mother and the CSM or the devil for his father.

While there are all these pairs of twos in the show, Christian symbology is also very concerned with the Trinity or with threes. So, the show often takes these dichotomies and triangulates them. And a lot of things in the show come in threes. In Christianity, you have the Father, the Son, and then also the Holy Spirit. William's mother and father are Skully and the CSM, but it's also played with that Mulder, who's possibly another Christ figure, could be his father, too. Two possible fathers and one son.

It's worth noting that when Mulder is dead and buried in season 8, before he's dug back up and resurrected, the show specifically says that he was buried for 3 months. Again, 3 days being how long Christ was dead between his death and resurrection, and also how long Mulder was dead, symbolically or otherwise, after he was trapped in the boxcar in the episode "Anastasia." The show plays with duality and oppositional figures and pairs. And so Mulder dies and is resurrected twice during the show: once for three days and once for three months. Three and three or 33. The number 33 has symbolic significance in many different traditions. But specifically in Christianity, 33 is the age Christ was when he died.

Now, if you want to hear something really cool, you can look at Mulder's birthday and do a little bit of math. Mulder was born on October 13th, 1961. And the episode where he dies in the boxcar, "Anastasia," takes place in early 1995, meaning that when Mulder died in that episode, he was 33. You can't tell me that that's just a coincidence. If you think about this, the whole timeline of the show, Mulder's backstory and everything had to be arranged so that he would be 33, be this particular age at this point in the story. There is nothing accidental about these numbers.

Mulder's birthday of October 13th also is not a coincidence. October 13th is also Chris Carter's birthday. Not only that, on the year Mulder was born, 1961, October 13th also happened to be a Friday the 13th. It makes sense for spooky Mulder, right? Also not a coincidence is that in the episode "One Son," they show the date that the Syndicate were said to have arranged a deal with aliens to turn over their family members to be abducted. And that date was October 13th, 1973, which would have been Mulder's 12th birthday. The only story the Bible tells about Jesus between his birth and his ministry happens to be when he's 12 years old and he's left at home while his parents go to the Passover festival. That's an interesting coincidence since Passover is when God came to collect the firstborn sons of houses not marked by Israelites with lamb's blood. Lamb's blood in Christianity, of course, prefiguring the sacrifice of Jesus, and the idea of God coming to take children, of course, having a parallel in the exiles to the children of the conspiracy members being taken. In Mulder's case, while he and his sister were left at home by his parents, like Jesus was left at home in the Bible story, Mulder though is spared, or you could say passed over because of the sacrifice of his father, the blood of his father, choosing to give them Samantha instead.

The abduction of Mulder's sister Samantha happened on November 27th, 1973. 27, of course, being 3 cubed or three threes or 3 to the 3rd power. November 27th is also the 331st day of the year. And after November 27th, there are 34 more days in the year, or 33 more days in the year if you subtract out Christmas. I mean, don't try to tell me that Carter set the first date on Mulder's 12th birthday and the second date here on a day which can be immediately associated with three different 33s, and that he just happened to do all of that by accident. These numbers are obviously not accidental. He's obviously giving a great deal of thought to them. So once you start looking for 33s, you'll of course find more in the show. JTT033.

In the season 11 episode, this is the one I was talking about earlier, which is about a tech firm offering people immortality by replicating their consciousness in a computer server. When Mulder and Skully start following a trail of clues left for them by somebody associated with Langley, one of the three lone gunmen, the first thing that they find is a 33. There's a clue referencing the 32nd and 34th presidents, leading them to realize that 33 is the remaining number. So then they realize they have to go up three rows and over three rows in the cemetery they were led to to find a headstone with the next clue. Three and three leads them to the grave of [ __ ] where they find that there's a code hidden behind a cross. When they eventually find the building of the firm with the servers, it's located at 33 Church Street. And remember, the point of this episode is it's about a firm offering to resurrect people and give them life eternal. The significance of the number 33 here isn't subtle.

If you want something else really interesting with the number 33, one reason why it's significant in mythologies aside from the Christ story is that there also happen to be 33 vertebrae in the human spine. And so the number is sometimes seen as representing consciousness or enlightenment or spiritual ascendance. And where have we seen something else about spines in The X-Files, right?

"Looks kind of like a vertebra."

The idea that the project and the conspirators are working on tampering with people's spines is something that Carter returns to again and again from the early days of the show. And something being implanted in somebody's spine is what ties together all the different parts of the project: the alien human hybrids, the bounty hunters, Emily, Skully, the super soldiers, the soldiers from "Sleepless," all of them. He keeps returning to the symbol of the back of the neck, their spinal columns. It's what physically connects our brains or our consciousness to the rest of our bodies and to the physical world. It's what makes the super soldiers immortal, and it's represented by the same number that signifies the resurrection of Christ.

Furthering the theme of threes, you could also say that Mulder actually died and was resurrected three times if you count what happened to him in the "Six Days" episodes, which also trade heavily in crucifixion imagery. Like I pointed out earlier, when Mulder is undergoing a medical procedure after rubbings from the spacecraft unlocked alien abilities in his brain, he's posed with his arms spread out like he's on a cross and even has a crown of thorns and a halo behind his head. The illusions go even further than that, though. When Mulder is lying there unconscious, Diana Fowl is in the room with him and she touches the side of his face. It's a very particular image and they return to the image several times. The image is reminiscent of a common theme in depictions of the deposition of Christ or the lamentation of Christ that show Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary touching his face like this after he's been crucified. You could say I'm reading too much into it if it wasn't for all the other Christ imagery that's already in the scene and the fact that it's not the only time that the episode does this. They show Diana Fowl touching his face like this a few times, but in the same episode, they also make a point of repeating the same gesture with both Scully and with Mulder's mom.

At the deposition of Christ, the point after the crucifixion when Christ's body was removed from the cross, the event is said to have been witnessed by several key biblical figures, including the three Marys. The New Testament in the Bible mentions several women named Mary, but specifically there are supposed to have been three of them that were there present at the crucifixion and resurrection: there's Mary Magdalene, there's the Virgin Mary, and there are different interpretations about who the third Mary was. But the point is that in the show, Carter goes out of his way to have three women all touching Mulder's face in the same way. So, I think it's fairly obvious that they're meant to be analogists to these three Marys.

There are debates about the story of Mary Magdalene in the Bible, but one possible story that's been given for her is that she was a reformed prostitute that Christ befriended and taught. Other people around them thought that she wasn't worthy, but Christ could only see the good in her. I'm bringing this up because in the show, Diana is kind of portrayed as a temptress or a rival for Scully, Scully being the pure and chaste one and even having a virgin birth with Emily. And while other characters are suspicious of Fowl, Mulder always defends her and he can only see the good in her. So you could say that Scully and Fowl are maybe the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene in this context, which is again important to the idea of Scully being the mother to a savior figure. Diana and Dana even almost have the same name again to show that they're different versions of a similar concept.

In addition to repeating the shots of them touching Mulder's face, when Skully sees him on the table, she cries over him. And it's when her tears hit his face that he wakes up or returns to life. This is more biblical symbolism, as the tears of Mary are meant to be a symbol both of her sorrow over Christ's death and her joy at his resurrection, death and rebirth. This is the kind of thing you can tell is deliberate because these moments are so mannered and carefully placed. To film that moment, it had to be written into the script that she would cry and that a tear would hit his face and that that's the moment when he would wake up. It's not just something that would happen spontaneously when they're filming the scene.

I could talk almost as much about the Virgin Mary symbolism with Scully as I could talk about the Jesus symbolism with Mulder, because there's a lot of it. Later on, Skully would work at a hospital named Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital. The phrase Our Lady of Sorrows, specifically referring to the Virgin Mary, and one of her seven sorrows being the crucifixion of Christ. When referred to as Our Lady of Sorrows, the Virgin Mary is usually shown in tears. And she can also be referred to as Our Lady of Tears, referring to the tears she cried over Christ when he was crucified, which is what Chris Carter is referencing with Skully's tears when she sees Mulder crucified. So having these three women in Mulder's life here made analogous to the three Marys underscores the Christ symbolism of what's happening in the episode. There are the three wise men at Christ's birth, the three Marys at his death and resurrection. So Chris Carter must have liked the threes and the possible symbolism of the male and female figures.

"I hope you see the poetry in this."

In the episode, Mulder has unlocked alien powers in his brain, or powers from God, which could allow him to become the savior of the world. By Jesus's death, he saves the human race. As in this episode, the genetic material they took from Mulder is meant to save the human race from the coming apocalypse. Mulder is dying for the sins of mankind here. The sins that CSM says is why mankind deserves to be wiped out.

"We're forcing the next step in evolution to save man. We're doing God's work, Diana."

The medical procedure they're doing is meant to take the alien abilities Mulder has and give them to the CSM, possibly killing Mulder in the process. The CSM is trying to take over the Christ role, the savior role. He sees himself as the savior of the world.

"I'll carry on for Mulder from here."

After CSM is on the table like Mulder, he takes Fye's hand like Mary holds Jesus's hand in crucifixion imagery. As Mulder's new abilities are being transferred to the CSM, the Jesus symbolism is also partly transferred to him here. The show is again playing with the idea of who is the savior figure in the show's mythology and who views themselves as that figure. The ideas of threes or of trinities here and the different interpretations of who is going to be the savior figure come back to the Carter quote that I already mentioned before where he said that there were three possible interpretations of who could be the Salvatore Mundi, the savior of the world.

The idea of threes is used also several times here in the show to explore the theme of fathers and sons. In Christianity, like I said, the trinity is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Mulder is one of three, having two possible fathers, and the question is to which he will be loyal. CSM as the architect of the worst aspects of the project, while Mulder's other father was a reluctant participant who hoped that one day Mulder would be able to expose and end the project.

"Your father chose hope over selfishness. Hope, the only future he had, his children. His hope for you was that you would uncover the truth about the project, that you would stop it, that you would fight the future."

It could be a bigger question where all humans in a way have two fathers or two aspects: dark or light, or good or evil, or God or the devil. And the question of free will is which one of the two that they'll choose. Again, dealing with the idea of dualities or pairs. While Mulder has two fathers, he's also one of two possible Christ figures. And if William is his mirror, it makes sense that they also play with the idea of William having two different possible fathers, either Mulder or the CSM. So William and his two possible fathers are another possible trinity. Mulder and William and the question of whether they're descended from God or the devil being represented by two threes, another 33.

There is even a pair of mythology episodes called "Two Fathers" and "One Son" that explores this idea from a few different angles. While the titles of the episodes would seem to be about Mulder and his two possible fathers on a story level and possibly some other meanings on a symbolic level, on the audio commentary for the episode "One Son," Frank Spotnitz talks about how they were also thinking about the theme of fathers and sons in a different way with the CSM being a father or a father figure to three possible sons. The three sons being another trinity or triant.

"Another idea that was in this two-parter and part of the reason it's called 'Two Fathers and One Son.' The two fathers obviously are Bill Mulder and Cigarette Smoking Man. But who is the one son? Jeffrey Spender is the biological son of Cigarette Smoking Man and Cassandra Spender. Krychek is not biologically anybody's son, but he aspired to be Cigarette Smoking Man's protege. He was son-like to him and wanted to be his heir, if you will. And Mulder. It was always unclear whether he was biologically Cigarette Smoking Man's son or Bill Mulder's son because we found out earlier that Cigarette Smoking Man had had an affair with Mulder's mother. So he could be Cigarette Smoking Man's illegitimate son. But in any event, there are these three young men: Mulder, Jeffrey Spender, and Alex Krychek, who are all vying, if you will, to be the one son. And Krychek has been rejected by Cigarette Smoking Man, who doesn't consider him a worthy successor. Spender is turning away from Cigarette Smoking Man, and we'll see the tragic results of that at the end of this episode. And that leaves Mulder. He is the one son left standing."

In this interpretation, the episode is called "One Son" even though there are three potential sons because it's about the choice of which of the three sons CSM is going to decide to keep with him when he chooses who will survive the six extinction.

"We wanted the same thing, brother."

He ultimately chooses Mulder, which you could say is why they were later trying to turn Mulder into a super soldier, so that he would have a version of the superhuman powers that would allow him to survive the plague and live on with the rest of the chosen few. Like I talked about earlier, and as when CSM said he did the tests on Cassandra Spender to save her, the abductions of Mulder and Skully and the tests on them hardly seem altruistic, but in a way they were done to save them because in his own twisted way, this was CSM's own chosen family that he wanted to take with him into the new utopia.

Again, coming back to the question people always raise about why the conspirators didn't just kill Mulder if he was exposing their secrets. There's the explanation I brought up earlier, which is that by spreading the alien colonization story, he was actually spreading their cover story, not their true purpose. But the other explanation of why they let Mulder live is that CSM wanted him to live, which is something you see in the show again and again. Actually, CSM chose Mulder and Skully to be a part of his group that would survive with him and live after the six extinction. Like I've talked about earlier, in his own twisted way, he thought he was saving people, just saving the people that he deemed worthy and which he thought would have a benefit for him.

"He loves Mulder."

"You may not believe this, but I really want to save your life."

This was also my pet theory before about why out of all the women in the world in season 2, they would suddenly need to kidnap Skully and do these experiments on her. It's the same reason members of the project gave up their own family members to be experimented on. Because the experiments were hoped to be a way to make them into superhumans that could survive the plague and live on afterwards. It worked with Skully, which is why in season 10, in her vision of the sixth extinction, her alien DNA allows her to be immune to the Spartan virus. The fact that Mulder wasn't successfully turned into a super soldier and the experiments on him weren't completed is the reason that in that vision, he still gets sick when she doesn't.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of people complain about the motivations of Krychek's character not making sense. But the issue of the CSM having three potential sons and choosing Mulder also makes sense of Krychek's motivations at several points in the show and Spender's motivations later on as well. If you look at it now, Krychek's motivations seem fairly clear. In the earlier episodes, he is CSM's protege or lackey. And depending on how much exactly he knew about the project, he was obviously hoping that if he served CSM, he would be among the chosen few that would survive the Spartan virus or alien colonization, if that's what he was told was happening. He messed up a few times, though, and the CSM ultimately rejected him. So he took what he knew and tried to parlay that inside information into a job working with the Russian conspirators who were working on a vaccine. After that, since he now knows about the coming six extinction and also knows that CSM doesn't plan to save him from it, he wants to stop it and is now working against CSM. Which is why in season 7, Krychek, along with Marita, tries to kill CSM, pushing him down a flight of stairs. This is when the CSM seemed to be ill and dying already. And when they pushed him down the stairs, that would have seemed like more than enough to kill him. So they left him for dead. What they didn't know then was that the reason he seemed to be dying was because he was acquiring early superhuman powers that would allow him to be reborn.

Even though Krychek believes that CSM is dead, it still seems like the plan extinction is coming, abetted by the super soldiers, and Krychek knows that William will be important to the plan, which is why he wants to kill William.

"Make sure Skully doesn't come to term."

It makes Krychek seem like a bad guy, of course, at that point, obviously, since he's trying to kill Skully's baby, and he was always acting in his own self-interest to an extent. But now that we know what William actually was, it wasn't so selfish of Krychek that he didn't want William to be born. Like I pointed out earlier, he even tried to tell Mulder that the reason he wanted to get rid of William was to stop the conspirator's plans.

"I tried to stop them. Tried to kill Skully's baby to stop them."

It adds a bit of a tragic element to Krychek's death that when Skinner killed him, he was actually trying to stop the conspiracy, just like they were.

"Sorry if I hurt your feelings. Don't you get off copying this attitude. I mean, you don't know the first thing about me."

"I'm not here to kill you, Mulder. I'm here to help you."

CSM's three potential sons, Mulder, Krychek, and Spender, are just one of the sets of threes in the show. But going back to the theme of numbers, it's all part of what Carter was saying in the episode "Improbable" that if you can recognize the patterns, you can understand God's plan for the universe, or God's game. And if you can figure out the rules, you can understand the game. Or, in other words, understand the big picture of the universe, which in the analogy Carter is using here is all God's game.

"The checkers was the final game here in the series of games that God gets to play. And using the red and the black, you'll see here that the checkers are more than just a game that God can win every time. But God is trying to provide an element, a clue, as he does for us, to try to help Scully and Reyes win the game. This is a sort of an idea that of Scully recognizing the red and the black, and he had to do it without overexplaining it."

Carter makes a big deal of the symbolism of the red and the black in the game of checkers here. And there's also an episode of the show called "The Red and the Black." The episode is named after the book by the French writer Stendhal, wherein the two colors, red and black, in the title are usually taken to be symbolic of the religious and the secular and the conflict between them. The title can also be used, though, as a reference to a French card game which is also called Red and Black. In which case, it could be a reference to the theme of the book about the character Julien Sorel's fate being decided by chance and luck, like a board game. This ties to the meaning of the board game in the episode "Improbable" and also back to the themes of God and science and religion in The X-Files mythology story.

"God does not play dice with the universe, nor does he play checkers." The quote that God does not play dice with the universe ties into Carter's theme about the universe being God's game. And the quote is also paraphrasing a famous quote from Einstein and used to mean that the universe should follow observable rules, even if we haven't yet observed them. When Einstein said it, he was talking about ideas like quantum entanglement, which would seem to break the laws of physics by showing that in some situations, it seems like objects or information can travel at faster-than-light speed, which Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance." These kinds of quantum phenomena are commonly called spooky physics in reference to this quote. Interesting in the context of The X-Files with Mulder's nickname being Spooky Mulder. Of course, again, this is the kind of thing where you could say that the reference with calling Mulder Spooky probably wasn't intentional. And yet, in the first episode, when we're introduced to the nickname Spooky, we're also told that Skully's thesis was called "Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation." Mulder has a nickname after something Einstein said, and Skully's credentials were that she was challenging Einstein.

"There are two schools of thought. The idea that there are forces outside of the forces of science, the laws of science, and the Einsteinian idea that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. The new physics says in fact there may be things that travel faster than the speed of light. And if that is the case, that is the unknown variant and could be perhaps what God is, that which cannot be explained by current science."

This is another example showing that however subtextual it was, these themes were obviously on Carter's mind from the very beginning, and he didn't forget them later on either. In season 10, when he introduces a pair of new younger FBI agents that are meant to be a synip of Mulder and Skully, he even names the Skully one Einstein.

"Special Agent Einstein."

"I claim a distant relation if that's what you're referring to."

The many allusions to different religious or mythological stories and all the number games that Carter is playing are fun puzzles to try to figure out and can be illuminating hints to story points that aren't often explicitly spelled out. But just like how in the episode "Improbable," the number games are a metaphor for something much bigger. All these symbols can be more than just games and are frequently profoundly meaningful. This being The X-Files, a show often about space and aliens. While Mulder following a star to find Scully while she's giving birth is an obvious allusion to the star in the story of the birth of Jesus. In the context of the show, the star becomes a multifaceted symbol that has several other meanings as well.

"Or are the tragic young born again when the world's not looking? I want to believe so badly in a truth beyond our own, hidden and obscured from all but the most sensitive eyes. In the endless procession of souls, in what cannot and will not be destroyed. I want to believe we are unaware of God's eternal recompense and sadness. That we cannot see his truth. That that which is born still lives and cannot be buried in the cold earth, but only waits to be born again at God's behest, where in ancient starlight we lay pose."

"The walk-ins, old souls looking for new homes. Your sister's among them."

"You can see them. Yes."

But sometimes it's very difficult because they live in the starlight.

I never stopped to think that the light is billions of years old by the time we see it from the beginning of time, right past us into the future. Nothing is ancient in the universe. Maybe they are soul skully. Traveling through time as starlight, looking for homes.

The idea that the walk-ins live in starlight was another thing I didn't think about that much during the show's original run because, well, it seemed like a nice enough image. And I do like the episodes dealing with the fate of Molder's sister. As a burgeoning young agnostic at the time, the whole thing of "we live in starlight" just kind of seemed to me like hippie speak. And I didn't really think it meant all that much of anything.

As I've got older though, it's learning more about science, not about religion, that actually made me understand that this concept is more profound than I realized at the time. I once had a talk with Moulder about starlight, how it's billions of years old. Stars that are now long dead, whose light is still traveling through time. We won't die that light. Maybe that's the only thing that never does. He said that's where souls reside.

Skully sums it up nicely when she returns to the idea in season 8 and talks about how although a star might have died billions of years ago, the light it created is still traveling through the galaxy. The star might be long gone, but we can see it now in front of us just as it was billions of years before it died. Likewise, while a person may die, the impression that they created, the mark that they left on the world doesn't go away. And that's one sense in which we do live forever.

You can talk about that in terms of light or of a soul or of any number of other ways of trying to describe it. But in the sense that time and space are relative and that everything is interrelated and everything has an effect on everything that comes after it. You don't have to believe in religion or even in any spiritual ideas to believe that we do go on after our death in a real, scientifically quantifiable way. Using a more spiritual idea of walk-ins or ghosts to relate this scientifically observable concept of light existing after the celestial body which created it and using it as a metaphor to talk about ideas of both memory and death is actually subtle and nuanced and profound. I was the one who was wrong to think that it was just a pretty image and just hippie speak.

There's also another layer here having to do with time and the age of starlight and relativity as well. The first episode of the two-parter dealing with Samantha's fate is named "S.R. 819," which is taken from the title of a philosophical text by Heidegger and it translates literally as "Being and Time." All the different ideas from the book which could be relevant to the episode are too much of a tangent to go into completely here but generally speaking the idea is that our concept of the world is relative to our position within it, meaning that our existence and our perception of it is bracketed by the time before we were born and the time after we die. So we look at things in a temporal way relative to the portion of existence which we can experience.

Our experience of time is central to our conception of death because we know the universe through our experience of it. We think of time as being relative to before and after we have died and we think that we exist in one and that we don't exist in the other. But that's our subjective experience. And we know scientifically that time is relative. Time changes based on location and gravity and physical factors. So while our consciousness might not be experiencing what happened yesterday any longer, that doesn't mean that yesterday has disappeared. While it's not being observed by our particular consciousness any longer, that doesn't mean that yesterday has gone anywhere. It's just not observable to us. But it's there in the same place that it always was.

This is another way of looking at the concept that while a star might have died billions of years ago, when we observe its light, we can be still looking at it billions of years before it died. In the same way, just because we aren't experiencing the point in time in which someone was alive anymore, that doesn't mean that that point in time has vanished. So, that's another way of expressing that in an observable sense, people never really die.

It's also another thing that in the show goes back to the early seasons after Moulder dies in "Anasazi." They show him in some unspecified form of an afterlife speaking with Deep Throat and his father, two characters who at that point in the show had already died. Of course, the show is ambiguous as to whether this scene is a hallucination or a dream or a real visitation. But Deep Throat in the scene has some interesting things to say to Moulder about time. "I was first struck by the absence of time, having depended on it so completely as a measure of myself and my life." During Moulder's death or near-death experience, Deep Throat here in season 3 is basically explaining to him the concepts of being and time, which would later be addressed again in the episodes which would finally give closure on the fate of Moulder's sister.

The idea is that after death, we still exist, but the difference is that our existence is no longer defined by time because we're existing outside of our temporal experience of it. This is another version of what is being expressed by saying that Moulder's sister and the other walk-ins live in starlight. It also is another expression going back to the early days of the show of a theme of the show being the quest for immortality and what exactly that means. The afterlife realm in which Moulder sees Deep Throat and his father, either intentionally or in a nice bit of synchronicity with the starlight idea, is shown as Moulder floating out in the stars. Given how carefully thought out you discover these themes are when you examine them closely, I'm betting the synchronicity here is intentional.

The idea that the show explains of death being existing outside of time is also interesting in that they repeatedly return to the idea of lost time being an element of the abduction experiences that people attribute to aliens. It's also worth noting here that the time they lose in abductions is 9 minutes. 9 being three threes. Another 33.

"What time do you have?"

"10:56."

"We lost 9 minutes."

"Is that a watch?"

"Yeah."

"What does it read?"

"8:01."

"This one. What are they listing as the time of the crash?"

"Uh, 7:52 p.m."

"Just 9 minutes difference."

"That's got to be a mistake."

"9 minutes. Go. Do you remember the last time you were missing 9 minutes?"

The abductions can be seen as analogies for near-death experiences in other ways with characters traveling into the white light and so on. But it also underscores the symbolism of the aliens being God, which would make the abductions being people having contact with God or in a way traveling to the afterlife and then returning. They even play with crucifixion imagery again in the way that the characters during the test are shown to be tied to a table with their arms spread in a similar way to how Moulder was put on a table during his medical procedure with the CSM.

So, if these abductions are in some way an analogy for a near-death experience or visiting God or the afterlife, then characters losing time when they're abducted also fits nicely with what Deep Throat says to Moulder about the absence of time after death. Of course, it's not aliens that are actually abducting them, but humans staging the abductions to look alien, but they're still using alien technology and the trappings of what a real visit from aliens would look like. And so, the analogy to a near-death experience or a visit from God continues the theme of the conspirators playing God.

"I was busy in the Nevada desert dissecting, reverse engineering, and playing God with life forms, the stuff of science fiction."

"And you say that you saw angels?"

"Yes."

"May I ask what they look like?"

"They look like men."

"What the hell are you doing?"

"God's work. What else?"

"You're looking at God's work."

In the same scene where Moulder sees Deep Throat presumably in some sort of vision or afterlife, Deep Throat also tells Moulder that he shouldn't die because he still has battles to fight.

"Go back. Do not look into the abyss and let the abyss look into you. Awaken the sleep of reason and fight the monsters within and without."

He tells Moulder that he has to return to life because he still has to fight the monsters within and without. The idea of him being on a quest to fight monsters is an interesting way to phrase it, in a show where Moulder was often chasing after what were referred to as monsters of the week. This line from Deep Throat is quoted again in the show. Also, interestingly, in the first two episodes of season 8 after Moulder is abducted in season 7. In these episodes, Moulder is gone and they don't know if he's alive, but they're hoping that he'll return just like they were hoping he'd return in the earlier episodes where he had his first death and resurrection. And these two episodes in season 8 were called "Within" and "Without."

The idea that Moulder couldn't give up and wouldn't give up because he still had monsters out there that he had to fight and demons that he needed to vanquish is another theme to which the show will return many more times. So, like I said earlier, and as should be obvious by now, I'm spending so much time talking about the show's religious symbolism because it's not just a side note, even though that's how I did used to think of it. It's actually what underlies the whole show. It's the key to everything, as the characters would say.

"The tests revealed something peculiar in an area of the brain that we are only beginning to understand. An area of the temporal lobe that neurophysicists are calling the God module."

"I hope I'm not going to hear that this kid is the next Christ child."

The religious symbolism in the show is what ties all of it together and what makes all of it actually mean something. Whether it was originally an intentional decision or not, I'm sure that Carter eventually noticed that even the letter X in the title of the show fits his theme. An X, of course, being a cross.

I'm not a Christian myself, but I was raised Christian and I did Sunday school and confirmation classes and all of that stuff. And even though I don't believe it's literally true anymore, I've still always liked mythology and had a deep interest in it. And I've done a lot of research on it since. So these things are all still really interesting to me. But even if you're not a Christian or don't have an interest in learning about the mythology, you don't have to have the same views as somebody to appreciate when they've made great art expressing those views. It's very limiting the way some people only want to watch art that parrots back to them the same ideas that they already have.

Some of the most important artists to my life have been Christians. Bob Dylan is Christian. Anne Rice was a Christian. And anyway, like I keep saying, Chris Carter is sometimes using Christian symbology, but he's doing it to express ideas that he knows are also universal to many other religions and mythologies. And he explores many of those as well. So, what he's doing is never exclusionary. Great art is expressing ideas and asking questions, but it's not browbeating you, and it doesn't tell you what you have to think. So there's no reason that you need to have the same beliefs as the author in order to appreciate its sincerity or its craftsmanship. And in the case of The X-Files, there's no reason you have to subscribe to one particular belief system to still agree with many of the beautiful ideas about life and belief and truth and our world that Chris Carter is exploring.

These ideas in the show are also important to understanding why the things Chris Carter revealed about the show's mythology in seasons 10 and 11 about the whole idea of superhumans and all of that not only don't contradict the show's mythology and the show's continuity and story as we knew it in the first nine seasons, but they also fit in a deep and meaningful way with the show's themes and symbolism and metaphorical and spiritual meanings. The whole quest for immortality, the ideas of eternal life or resurrection after death don't just fit with the show's mythology and story. It's actually unavoidably at the center of the show's mythology everywhere you look. Far from being a retcon, these ideas are intrinsic to the show, both on a story level and also intrinsic to the show's religious and philosophical themes. When you understand this, it's amazing how well all the threads in the show finally all come together.

"We knew we wanted that continuity, though. We we try very hard to um reward loyal and fanatical viewers by uh respecting uh the continuity. And indeed there are many many episodes of The X-Files where we have to watch for years to see something get paid off. If you were to sit and watch all the mythology episodes back to back, you'd see how many ideas and images and and um thoughts that were mentioned one year come back two or three years later. It's it's very common. It's not unusual. And I think that's part of what has encouraged the sort of diehard following we have because if you are a fanatic, if you really follow the details, you will be rewarded because there are so many things that carry forward from the pilot to uh the present day."

The plot elements of The X-Files and the mysteries and puzzles are great fun and endlessly entertaining and there's something that I've enjoyed for three decades now. But what makes it all resonate and what makes it great art in the end is that all of it actually does mean something.

"You said something to me the other night in the snow."

"Yes, I said don't give up."

"I need to know why you said that."

"I haven't the fittest idea."

"Uh, one of the messages comes from the second movie, 'Don't Give Up.' I think that's uh something I want to say to people that actually came I uh there there was a religious scholar named Houston Smith who uh was really highly regarded in his field and I got a chance to see him speak one evening and he talked at length about mythology and and uh religion and it was just such an interesting talk. He was such a engaging speaker and someone at the end of the night said they asked a question that just made me cringe which was how would you sum up your philosophy in a sentence and I thought oh my gosh this guy has just spent all this time you know going in depth things and it's the comp the complexity of the world that he lived in and uh but he takes the question in stride and he gets this twinkle in his eye he's an elderly man by this point. Uh, and he gets this look in his eye and he says, 'Don't give up.' And I thought, you know, that's actually it could be cliché. It could be overused, but I I think that it is um, you know, it's the secret. It is uh u, you know, it is something to live by."

"Uh, it's Moulder and Scully have never given up on each other."

"And I have another that came up the first day Chris and I met to talk about this. Um Chris was talking about a lecture he went to and..."

"...the 'don't give up' which you know I don't think any of us had any idea that would end up being the heart of this movie at that point but..."

"...that's the secret. Uh, don't give up."

"I think whatever you do..."

"...don't give up."

"Don't give up."

"Don't give up on this one."

"Don't give up."

"We can't give up. I think I'd give up so easily."

"I I give up. Moulder."

"You give up."

"Might as well give up. You can't give up on her."

"Never give up."

"But you only fail if you give up. And I know you. You can't give up."

"Don't give up, do you?"

"Don't give up on me."

"Well, I'm not giving up."

"Don't give up."

"Surrender. Give up."

"Don't give up on the bigger picture. You really don't give up, do you?"

Like I said earlier, like many fans, when seasons 10 and 11 of X-Files came out, I felt disappointed by them. In retrospect, I can clearly see the flawed reasoning that led to that reaction. If you were interested in the show's mythology, it seemed obvious for many years that the show was all building up toward a big alien invasion that was supposed to happen in 2012. Carter also talked for years about how they wanted to keep doing a series of movies after the TV show. So, we all just assumed that there would be a movie that would come out in 2012 that would finally show the invasion. It all made sense. A big budget movie would allow them to do a full-scale alien invasion movie that they would have had trouble doing on a TV budget. And the timing would be great to keep excitement for the show going a decade after it was no longer on TV. But then the second movie happened and regardless of whether or not she liked that movie, it wasn't a success at the box office. So, this meant that Fox suddenly wasn't interested in doing more X-Files movies.

"On the show, it had been set up that, you know, the Alien Invasion was going to happen in December 2012. And everyone was like, well, if we're going to get a third movie, it needs to happen soon because if the world ending, what's going to happen then? For us, it was like that challenge. Can we make this third movie happening before that deadline? We come up with campaigns every other month on Twitter or sending postcards to the studio to let people know that the X-Files was there and that they wanted the third movie to happen."

So because of that, four years later, 2012 came and went without an X-Files movie. And it seemed like whatever plans they had had for the show just weren't going to materialize. In 2016, when they finally got plans together to continue the series with a new limited run of TV episodes, it was a looming question of how they would deal with the show's mythology given that 2012 had come and gone. So then the show happened and the major twist in the mythology was that surprise, there never had been any plans for an alien invasion at all. That was all just a lie. It seemed obvious enough what had happened when you watched that. They'd missed the 2012 deadline and so they just decided to retcon away the whole alien invasion storyline. This was disappointing if you were a fan of the mythology part of the show because you had assumed that looming alien invasion was the whole story that you'd been following for over 20 years at that point. And it seemed like now they were just going to skip it and not deal with it.

As I think I've shown by now though in the video, the idea that it doesn't fit with the previous mythology to say that there was no imminent alien colonization is actually just wrong. It fits a whole lot better than I or most other people realized at the time. But it does also conveniently deal with the fact that they had missed 2012 if an alien invasion movie in 2012 had been their original plan. So which was it? Well, I mean, not being able to read Chris Carter's mind, I can only guess by what people have said publicly. But based on the many things I've already gone into in this video, I think it's impossible that the new explanation works this well, if at least some of it hadn't been part of his plan for a long time.

One interesting thing about Chris Carter is how coy he is with revealing his thoughts about the mythology of the show when he talks about the show. He doesn't want to spell things out for you, and he doesn't want to give away things that he'll use in the future. Even though I've shown many examples proving that he does in fact have long-term plans and many secrets that he sat on for decades before ever revealing them. He wants to give you the pieces, but he wants to allow you to put the puzzle together for yourself.

"It's a puzzle, but the pieces are there for us to put together."

"Part of what makes these stories good, too, is trusting the audience to connect the ideas. you lay them out and uh know the audience will have the intelligence to to connect them themselves. I think people are grateful to you when you respect their intelligence, which is what we we try to do."

"It wasn't a show for dummies. It was a thinking man's show. You had to sit down and give this some real thought and you had to pay attention. If you didn't pay attention, you'd get lost. And I think that was part of the charm of the show. At the end of each episode, I was asked by the person who sort of watched over us at the network if I could tie up each episode each week with a bow in a sense that I could explain the paranormal phenomena that I could tell people that this was real and this is why it was real. And it was just a crazy idea. And I kept saying the interesting part about this for me was going to be uh telling stories where you left people wondering at the end and with the possibility that it could be real, but never ever stating that this is in fact the truth. We would always plot stories with one or two or three options for the audience to chew on. You never show the audience something that was definitive in situations like that which kept not only kept the mystery going um which you know ironically is how the real world is. You read the newspaper and it's subject to interpretation."

"I think that's really one of the hallmarks of the show now is that it doesn't pander."

And when Carter reveals certain secrets, it's interesting to go back and look at his old interviews and see that he's usually never contradicted himself even when there were decades between the interview and the reveal. One example I noticed is an interview done way back around the time of season 3 where he's talking about Jeremiah Smith and he says that "we believe him to be an alien."

"Uh the Roy Finnis character who was named Jeremiah Smith who plays what we believe to be an alien."

At the time it seemed obvious enough to everybody that Jeremiah Smith and the Alien Bounty Hunters were all aliens. We even called them the Alien Bounty Hunters. It was their unofficial name. But it wasn't until quite a while later that I came to believe that the show was telling us that they were actually alien-human hybrids created by humans without the participation of aliens. Actually, I think I made a pretty good case in this video that that's the only explanation for them that makes any sense. But everybody called them aliens for years and most people still do. Yet, in this old interview clip over 20 years ago now, notice how Carter is careful to say that "we believe Jeremiah Smith to be an alien," but he doesn't actually say that he is an alien.

You'll find in most and maybe all of the interviews with Carter, going back to the very beginning of the show, he almost never says anything that directly contradicts the things that he would reveal much later in seasons 10 and 11. Other people working on the show, like Frank Spotnitz, who co-wrote many of the show's mythology episodes, seem to have different ideas at times, but usually not Carter.

"There are uh gray aliens that we've seen, or maybe not seen. We we've hinted at them. Scully has even seen some of these, but we don't know if they're aliens."

In a lot of interviews and on the show's audio commentary, Spotnitz seemed pretty clear that there was an alien invasion coming in the show's storyline. And he seemed up until at least around 2008 when the second movie came out to be under the impression that they were going to do an alien invasion movie in 2012. But just because Carter didn't share all of his ideas with everybody working on the show, it doesn't mean that he didn't have those ideas. Spotnitz has also said stuff like this interesting interview clip from the mythology DVD set dealing with the super soldiers.

"By season nine, Scully had seen so much that a pretty far out idea ended up being the real-world possibility for what was going on, alternate to the idea of there really being aliens. And that idea was that the government was creating a genetically altered army of super soldiers. And that was the direction the show was going in in season 9, which, you know, ultimately ended up being our final season. And and so that storyline never kind of flowered as fully as it as it would have had there been a season 10. But that was uh the most convincing alternative we could think of to account for what Scully had seen. Our intention was to resolve the baby storyline, exit Moulder and Scully from the series. We knew we had Gillian only through season 9. If there had been a season 10, there would be no Moulder or Scully in The X-Files. And then move into a period where aliens were not the central focus of the series. I think we all felt that the alien storyline, the mythology, the conspiracy had really gone on long enough and played itself out and that there was another type of uh ongoing storyline to play."

I mean, here's Spotnitz way back in the day saying that when they were working on seasons 8 and 9, Carter had already told him that if they did a season 10, the twist that Carter was planning was to reveal that the super soldiers weren't made by aliens, but rather made by the human conspirators. At the time, they ended up not making a season 10. So, Spotnitz talks about this idea like it was an abandoned storyline. But here, Carter was way back then already planning that season 10 would reveal that the aliens weren't behind at least part of the conspiracy. It turned out that it took them another 14 years to make season 10. But when season 10 finally did come out, the twist of the season was exactly what Carter had already told Spotnitz he wanted to do way back in the day.

Aside from just the issue of who made the super soldiers, back then, Carter was already telling Spotnitz that he felt like the alien invasion story was played out and he wanted to explore other angles. It goes back even further than that, though. If you read interviews from the very early days of the show, I'm talking about like the first couple of seasons. Other writers on the show say frequently that Carter told them to pull back on the alien aspects and that he didn't want the show to become too sci-fi.

"When I created The X-Files, uh I knew that I wanted to depart as quickly as possible from the UFO extraterrestrial uh storyline because I knew that the story couldn't uh the stories couldn't sustain themselves or the series couldn't sustain itself just by telling that kind of story."

"I sort of resisted the label of science fiction early on. I always thought of the show as more speculative science. The Irène Myer flask uh which is the season hinder for uh for year 1 uh was something that I had thought about all year long. I think that it was an episode that uh really I feel established uh a mythology what the government may be up to, how they may be in cahoots with the aliens. Uh for me it was the result of a year-long learning experience and I think that it may have been really the uh signature mythology episode not only a uh a sign to the audience of what we were capable of but uh certainly uh a realization for me of where we could take the show uh if we uh explored uh these different u avenues of government conspiracy and turn it into more than just uh flying saucers. it became about mankind and and about um um uh science and the misuse of it."

He said many times that he thought the show was only as scary as it was believable. And while he was interested in the alien aspects of the show, he knew that that could seem like a stretch for a lot of people.

"Even though there's monsters and aliens and all that, Chris always wants it to be that could happen. Even though people are clamoring for answers, I think that they would be disappointed because these are the kind of issues that are interesting in that they're not resolved. Once you say, 'Yes, there are aliens. Yes, this man who smokes a lot of cigarettes is the devil incarnate.' You know, it becomes ridiculous. So, it's much better for a television show to raise questions and to raise theories."

He thought what was much more believable and therefore more scary was the idea of moneyed interests and corrupt people within our own governments plotting for selfish purposes that weren't in the interests of the rest of the population. He talked about this in in detail in the commentary on the first X-Files movie.

"So what we are seeing is really the uh result of the predictions I think about the military-industrial complex about global politics being shaped by uh not necessarily um the good of the people but by moneyed interest and I I think that it is uh allegorical in that way with what we're seeing in the uh uh in the in the world today."

"And that was one of the big themes of the show was finding things that that were scary and real."

So, I mean, did he have it planned the whole time that alien colonization was a lie in the show? We can't really know that because whether he did or didn't, he wouldn't have gone around saying a major twist like that before it was revealed in the show. But what we do know is that it fits very well with what had gone before. And the reason it fits so well is because it had always been part of his conception of the show that a very plausible conspiracy of men was more scary and more interesting to him than a more science fiction idea of collaboration with aliens. And we know that he had at least as early as seasons 8 and 9 talked about this specifically with Spotnitz and said that he thought the alien storyline was played out.

What I always imagined the 2012 Alien Invasion movie to be was basically a full-scale alien invasion movie along the lines of Independence Day or something like that. And then I thought that of course William would return at some point and somehow have some kind of special powers that saved everybody. Looking back though, that seems like it would have been much too straightforward to appeal to Chris Carter. We can tell from the scene of Moulder pissing on an Independence Day poster in the first X-Files movie what Carter thought of that very kind of obvious type of alien invasion movie. If he had done a straightforward movie like that, I mean, what would have been the point? It wouldn't have told us anything that we didn't already know from the first nine seasons of the show. He obviously would have wanted to put some kind of spin on it. It also wouldn't have fit at all with many of the things that I've pointed out in seasons 8 and 9, for William to to have turned out to be a benevolent savior. And as I've gone into with William's origins and what he represents thematically and in the religious symbolism of the show, it wouldn't have fit at all with the deeper themes of what the show has always been about.

So yeah, I do believe that they would have liked to have done a big X-Files movie in 2012 if they had been able to. And I do believe that when they couldn't, plans probably did change to some degree.

"When I met with Chris, he had a game planned in terms of where this show was going to be over the course of so many years."

"Chris from the very beginning had an idea about what the end of the show was, where it was all going, but he was smart enough to be flexible about the path the mythology would take over the life of the series. So that if you had a new idea, if something broke in the news or you found it in a magazine or newspaper, if an actor ended up being wonderful, the mythology could go in a different direction and still have that sort of floating destination out on the horizon. I think that some of their plans about 2012 must have shifted, but on anything you work on for this long, plans are going to shift. That doesn't mean that there never were any plans or that the important parts of the plans were abandoned. I think that the plans for the movie probably shifted, but I also don't think they ever would have done a straightforward alien invasion movie, like the kind of thing people like myself included were expecting. With the movie budget, they might have done more big apocalyptic scenes with spaceships flying into cities and things like that. But they already laid the groundwork for how this would have fit with the idea that the aliens weren't colonizing. The ships would have actually been ARVs built by humans using alien technology. This goes back to the very beginning of the show where they've established again and again and again that in the show's mythology, our military is flying these kinds of ships that they've been developing in secret. Even in the show when CSM has a vision of watching an alien invasion out his window, if you look, the ships are the triangle-shaped ships that we've seen on the show in human military bases, not alien spacecraft. So, in that way, the movie could have still shown the beginnings of a big takeover like that that would have appeared to be extraterrestrial, which is what they did in a form in the season 10 finale. But then, I think that just like the show would eventually do, the movie would have revealed who was really behind the invasion. And I think it would have played out much like it eventually does in the show. Some details might have changed for practical reasons, but in all the important ways, I think that seasons 10 and 11 were the story Chris Carter always intended to tell. You know, I started a story 25 years ago and I wanted to finish that story."

"Pretty much everything about seasons 10 and 11 people found objectionable was also inevitable if you go back and think about it. People complained about Reyes joining the CSM. But I thought it was interesting going back that the very first time we ever see her on the show, they show her smoking a cigarette and trying to hide it. I mean, is this just like a little humorous character moment or was it actually some kind of a hint? Someone had mentioned to me that I smoke cigarettes that cigarette smoking man had also smoked. One of the nice things for me this episode is that I get to work with Bill the cigarette smoking man. And that's actually a nice little tie-in because in my first episode on the show I smoked Morleys. I was quitting."

"I mean given the symbolic significance of smoking and cigarettes in the show does it seem that it could have not had some kind of significance?"

"But I am dying for a cigarette."

I'm not saying that Reyes was always secretly evil or that she was working with CSM from the beginning or anything like that, but the idea that she would eventually join forces with the CSM isn't really as black and white as her just turning out to be evil.

"She has a character choice to make and it is a big choice. You know, we can't judge our characters, but I don't know if she makes the right decision. I think ultimately as it plays out perhaps she is making a selfish decision, a survival decision. And you know when you think about what you would do..."

"...spare your life..."

"...what would you do if the human race is about to be depopulated by a virus..."

"...it's not without conflict that I, Annabeth, approach playing Monica Reyes knowing that she may be complicit with CSM. To many, she's crossed over to the dark side. I disagree. She's still with Cigarette Smoking Man for a reason. We don't know that reason."

"I feel like she's playing chess and she is..."

"...to me personally playing both sides of the game. Given what she knows, it might have seemed like the only reasonable option. She probably thinks it's the only way to survive. And maybe by aligning herself with him, she could save some other people also. It's not about her turning evil. It's about her trying to find the best way to deal with the situation in which she's already been morally compromised against her own will."

In season 6, in episode 1, "The Unnatural," when Moulder thinks the colonization is imminent, he also contemplates taking the CSM's offer and joining him, too. If he knows everybody else is going to die anyway, and there's no way of stopping it, then what's the purpose of him dying also if he doesn't have to?

People thought the reveal at the beginning of season 11 that the last episode of season 10 had been Scully's vision was a cheat. But when you look back, this also seems inevitable. I mean, how else could Carter have planned to get out of what they did at the end of season 10? The next season obviously wasn't going to be in a post-apocalyptic world where everybody except for CSM's chosen were dead. And if they open season 11 with the invasion suddenly being stopped somehow, then where would they go with the rest of the season?

In the season finale of season 10, we basically saw what looked like the end of the world with Scully staring up at a spaceship and people wondered how we were going to come back. The question was how to get her off the bridge. And I think we have a really dramatic solution. He did tell me as he was writing episode 6 last season that he was toying with the idea of doing an "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" kind of story. And if you don't know what that is, Google it. He left what we felt was a very clear indication of what he was planning by making the camera go into Scully's eye before all the craziness started to happen. The zoom in on Scully's eye at the end of the episode seemed like a pretty clear hint that the episode is happening from her point of view. But there's more foreshadowing than that. Carter has said that the inspiration for the episode was the story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which is a story where it's revealed at the end that the story of a man escaping execution was actually all the fantasy that he had in his final moments and that he hadn't escaped at all. A heavy hint of this influence on the story is that Carter chooses to end the episode on a bridge.

Chris Carter has already talked before about how one of his original ideas for the season 9 finale was to do a whole hour that was then revealed to be Moulder's dream sequence or vision, but that he was talked out of this idea. So what he did with Scully in season 10 was actually another idea that he'd had in mind for quite a while since back during the show's original run. So I think that whether he liked it or not, it was definitely planned before season 11.

Another reason it's not a cheat is that the whole thing wasn't as simple as just saying it was all just Scully's dream. There's a specific story reason that she was having these visions, which is that her son William had a psychic connection with her and she was seeing his visions of his future that he was having as he was growing older and coming into his powers. His visions were apocalyptic.

"The pandemic was spreading across America. Hospitals were overwhelmed. People were panicking. A vaccine was needed. One that had to be created with a combination of human and alien DNA. And Jackson himself was the key. It ends with a UFO hovering over the 14th Street Bridge."

It's not like Scully's vision just came out of nowhere. The show explained why she would be able to see these things. And on top of that, the idea of her having a psychic connection with William goes back even further in the show. Back in season 5, the reason that Scully finds Emily is that she gets similar psychic messages from her that tell Scully where to look when Emily needs help. So the idea that her children have telepathic abilities like Gibson Praise because of the tests that were done to her is well established on the show as well as the idea that they would be in contact with her in this way and that she would be able to hear some of their thoughts and know when they were in distress. Her getting these visions from William isn't a cheat when the show has already hinted at it two decades earlier.

Another problem people had was that the season 11 finale seemed to unceremoniously off several major characters in a way that people thought wasn't good enough as a sendoff for those characters. But people seem to forget that the show has long been dealing with the idea that several of these characters have probably achieved a kind of immortality.

"And then cigarette smoking man stops her and makes her go forward. Skinner shoots her in the forehead and then the car runs Skinner over. So yeah, both Monica and Skinner are dead in like a [ __ ] matter of seconds. Fun fact, you don't have to kill everybody to be a good writer. Pro tip, Chris Carter."

"From the finale, a few questions were asked. Is is Skitter alive? Is Reyes alive? Is CSM alive? Or is we already think he's immortal? That those were part of the same question."

I'm going to say that my answer is maybe for all three of those characters. For the CSM, of course, this is the fourth time that the show has seemed to kill him off. And Carter has said in reference to the character, both that you can't kill the devil and that CSM has regenerative abilities now that explain how he survived what happened to him in season 9. So CSM is not dead after this episode. He's injured and Moulder delayed his plans by injuring him. And he was also set back by William getting away, but there's really no reason to think a little thing like getting shot and thrown in the water would have killed him here.

An interesting detail with what happened to Monica Reyes is that they originally had the gunshot more in the center of her head and they digitally moved it to the side of her head to make it less clear whether it would have been a fatal injury. And of course, there's the fact that one of the points of her alliance with CSM was that she would probably have been given a version of the immortality that CSM and Scully have. So maybe she died, but it's certainly not conclusive. And as for Skinner, it looks like he was hit by a car and probably knocked out, but he's actually the least injured of any of them. And an interesting detail in his case is that he was shown to have survived the season 11 finale in the X-Files Official Archives book that came out in 2020. Normally tie-in books and comics and that kind of thing aren't canon with X-Files, but in this case, the book's author, Paul Terry, was in contact with Carter, and the whole book makes an extreme effort to treat the show's continuity seriously. And through early drafts of scripts and things like that, and through interviewing Carter and the show's writers, the book reveals many details which weren't actually in the show, but that were what Carter and the writers intended and are what they consider canon. So, in the case of Skinner, I'd say that this book basically confirms that Carter didn't intend for Skinner to be dead at all.

The show doing fake deaths and leaving you questioning the fate of the characters is hardly anything new. And like I said, in the case of CSM, this is the fourth time that the show has done it. Fans being upset over these characters appearing to die is them being upset over something that the show has been doing since the very early days. And in this case, with three characters who all very likely survived the episode. This particular episode.

Even focused on the theme of characters surviving their seeming deaths, with William showing that he's still alive in the final shot after being shot in the head. If you needed a bigger hint that the other characters could possibly do the same. When they sent the script to me, there was a note from Chris, uh, on there saying, "No one ever really dies in X-Files."

"Nobody really dies on the X-Files."

"I thought you were going to say, 'Nobody really dies on X-Files.'"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, we were going to go back to that."

"I've said that before, right?"

"Yeah. Few times."

"Of course, another big problem people had with season 11 was the reveal in the final minutes of the last episode that Scully was pregnant again. But like with all these other things, not only does this seem inevitable, it also seems like the only thematically appropriate thing. If you were paying attention well enough, which I wasn't the first time I watched this, Scully's second pregnancy shouldn't have even been a surprise at all. For one thing, going back earlier in the season to the episode 'Plus One,' which Chris Carter wrote, the episode goes out of its way to show you when Scully's child was conceived by having a scene with Mulder and Scully in adjoining motel rooms where they very clearly end up sharing a room together and having sex."

"I had set out to write the first and last episodes, and then I realized there was something I wanted to do that dealt with Mulder and Scully's story. So, I took it upon myself to write episode 3 to deal with Mulder and Scully's relationship in a way that pushes the show into where we will end up in the season finale."

"You might not have thought that Scully would get pregnant from this, given that in the show she's supposed to be infertile because of the experiments that were done to her, but she's gotten pregnant after supposedly being infertile before. This second pregnancy isn't even her first miracle baby, so it shouldn't be too much of a shock. But if that didn't establish the possibility already, Carter gave us still more hints. The motel where Mulder and Scully get it on is called the St. Rachel Motel. St. Rachel being a patron saint of the Infernal. I mean, like several things I've talked about now, this is one of those things that seemed like a surprise at the time, but when you go back, Carter was screaming it at you from the rooftops all along. I mean, the name of the episode is even 'Plus One' if you didn't get the St. Rachel thing. But oh, we all know that women get more fertile as they age. So naturally, if she and Mulder bang a few times on screen, she should logically be pregnant after that."

"The bigger question is why Carter would want Scully to be pregnant again and what the purpose of the reveal was."

"And the big point, which you know, I was delivering it was all a plan. And it was all, uh, veiled and, uh, um, complicated and get to the end and no one got the ending. And, uh, I've already talked to you about this, that, uh, I, I laid it out there but no one got the ending. It's a big, it's a huge ending."

"Yeah. But, uh, Scully, uh, reveals that she's pregnant and, uh, it was, you know, I had, uh, a lot of haters."

"Yeah."

"For that. Anyway, uh, I had a big idea and I put it right there front and center, um, for people to make the connection that no one, literally no one made. And you know what it is? Cuz I told you, he's taken an alien embryo out. So there, there's now an alien embryo on the table."

"Some fans were already upset during season 11 by Mulder turning out to not be William's father, even though I think I've shown that in retrospect, we can see that this was inevitable. But because of this, people wanted confirmation that Mulder really was the father this time. And they asked Carter about it. He seemed to confirm it again, but with a caveat. Carter told the Hollywood Reporter that he did intend the scenes in the episode 'Plus One' to be providing a point when Mulder and Scully could have conceived the baby, saying, 'I certainly laid the groundwork for the possibility that something could have been consummated beyond the consummation of the moment.' That was all done imagining the finale and where that child might have been conceived. In the same interview, they then asked him to confirm that it was Mulder and Scully's kid. And Carter said, 'I will confirm it is their child, but I will also confirm Scully has alien DNA.' This is the important caveat that I was mentioning. The fact of Scully's alien DNA being important to the new pregnancy."

"Are you saying she has alien DNA?"

"And I've sequenced my own genome because of my history and because we have a child together."

"Scully, what do you say?"

"Alien DNA is what I have, and alien DNA is all that can save us. Without alien DNA, you don't stand a chance against the Spartan virus."

"He needs stem cells in him right now."

"Stem cells from who?"

"We have a child together. That child will be protected by his inheritance and my alien DNA."

"Although Carter told the Hollywood Reporter the baby was Mulder and Scully's in 2018, a few years later, he phrased it slightly differently on a panel discussion."

"So, you know, this is a theme for us. We love. But when did you decide this was going to be the case?"

"But did you know already?"

"Well, you know, we speak about immortality, immortal, immortality. We speak David's porn addictions. We, we speak about immortality several times in the show and, uh, you know, it played into the series finale in a way that is very important and, uh, the, uh, as I'm sure most people know here, uh, Scully admits or tells Mulder about her pregnancy in the, uh, the final episode and that became very controversial. I mean, a lot of people, I mean, Avi Kahada, her, she closed her website down, her blog, and, uh, Gillian got very angry at me and it's like, uh, I wasn't, uh, sure why that was. But, um, if you follow Scully's, uh, maternity, if you will, with Emily and with William, and why does anyone think that this pregnancy is anything other than science fiction? Uh, this is a science fiction show. That pregnancy is, it's spelled out actually at the beginning of the episode, uh, where 'The Truth Is Out There' is, is something else and it is what I had in mind. So, I just want to go on record to say, um, it's, it's not necessarily Mulder and Scully's child."

"It just opened up your..."

"Yeah, it works. I think what he's saying here though is basically the same as what he was saying earlier, which is that the baby was conceived by Mulder and Scully, but that there's another sci-fi element to how it was conceived, which is Scully's alien DNA from the experiments that were done to her. It's not as simple as just being Mulder and Scully having a normal baby. This should be obvious from Scully's age and the fact that she was already supposed to be infertile and yet still got pregnant again somehow. Something about the alien technology was involved in the new pregnancy. In the same panel discussion though, Carter gives his clearest hint about what the meaning of the baby is for him. He says that he set up the answer to the question with the tagline in the opening credits of the episode. The tagline he's talking about is the one I've already been talking about in some detail, 'Salvator Mundi.' So, when he says that that tagline is his explanation of Scully's pregnancy, he's saying what the baby is: the savior of the world. He also says to look at Scully's other children for hints about the nature of this pregnancy. And of course, Emily and William were both heavily compared to Jesus. Emily, the virgin birth Scully discovers on Christmas, and William with the star in the sky, and all the other symbolism I've already talked about, but they both turned out to not be saviors because they were unnatural experiments that weren't meant to be..."

"...a child that wasn't supposed to be. Carter is saying that Scully's new pregnancy is like the others in that it's partly caused by the experiments done to her, which is why he points out in interviews that her alien DNA is a factor and that there's a sci-fi element to the pregnancy beyond a normal pregnancy. And he also points to the 'Salvator Mundi' tagline as what he describes as being the hint he was giving you about this baby's nature. To return to the theme of threes, this is Scully's third baby. And although the other two were hinted at as being Christ figures in different ways, this one could actually be the real thing. I think the point of Scully's new pregnancy could be that he was naturally conceived between her and Mulder. And so Scully having alien DNA and Mulder also having the alien abilities he displayed in season 7, their child would be naturally immune to the Spartan virus and be able to survive. They thought William was a miracle child, but he was a fake, a fraud, and his powers were unnatural and dangerous."

"William was an experiment."

"Mulder..."

"What are you talking about? He was an idea born in a laboratory."

"But because Scully's second child was conceived naturally and out of love, he could be a real miracle from God or from Scully's alien DNA if you want to go there and treat the aliens as God as opposed to being a false miracle from the CSM who could be seen as the devil. Her second baby could conceivably have the immunity that they need to save everybody, but without all the freakish scary abilities that William has. It's spelled out actually at the beginning of the episode, uh, where 'The Truth Is Out There' is, is something else and it is what I had in mind."

"Aside from whatever you take it to mean in a symbolic way, I think Carter also thought that giving her a second child was a way that he could make up for having her lose William. I've already covered extensively why William was always destined to be more of an antichrist than a Christ, and writing him in any other way in seasons 10 and 11 would have been the real retcon. It just doesn't work at all with the mythology as previously established. But Carter was also always aware that the fans had grown attached to the idea that Scully and Mulder had a child together. And revealing that that child was probably evil and CSM was probably his father, he knew was going to be unpleasant for many people. So giving her another child was a way of softening the revelation and not having the possibility of motherhood stolen away from her yet again. Having a chance to start over again with a new baby would also make up for the loss she'd felt at having missed out on William's childhood. This time she could have that dream. And it wouldn't be a lie like it would have been if she had kept William."

"We've stolen a child from Mulder and Scully. So I thought the most natural thing in the world was to give them something miraculously once again."

"That's impossible."

"That they could share as their own. I thought that was a fitting end not just to this season but perhaps to the X-Files with Mulder and Scully in it. If I'm right about what Scully's new pregnancy will result in, what Carter is doing here with Scully's new pregnancy is exactly what many fans thought the first pregnancy was. And what my headcanon about William was that he was conceived by Mulder and Scully and that because of the experiments that had been done to her and the things Mulder had been exposed to, he was going to be able to have abilities which would make him a savior figure able to save the world from the coming apocalypse. Ironically, with the new pregnancy, Carter could be giving fans exactly what they had hoped for with William, and exactly what they were mad seemed to have been taken away when William's true nature was revealed. And yet, even when Carter is giving the fans exactly what they hoped for, they still end up being pissed off about it. But the unfortunate reality is that with the distorted way that a lot of fans consume these things now, there was no way for him to write it that would possibly have both been true to the show he had created and also not pissed off a lot of the fans. I've talked a lot in my Star Wars videos about how the problem Star Wars fans had with the prequels is that they were only thinking about what they wanted to see and not trying to understand what it was that George Lucas actually wanted to make. And I've since realized that when I initially had a negative reaction to the 10th and 11th seasons of the X-Files, I was doing exactly the same thing. Between the original Star Wars trilogy and the prequels, fans had a lot of time to imagine what they would like the prequels to be and to fill in the blanks in the story that the original trilogy hadn't explained yet with their own headcanon of what they'd like to see. So, when they got Lucas's version of events and not the one that they'd come up with on their own, they felt cheated. Something similar happened with the X-Files. With 14 years between seasons 9 and 10, I became very accustomed to what I thought I knew with my own explanations that I had worked out about the show's mythology. There were also several years there where it seemed like the show was probably finished and we wouldn't ever get any more X-Files. And while I always loved the show, it wasn't really on my radar anymore since it seemed like it was over. It was a finished series and as completed as it ever would be. And so by the time the 10th season came around, there were some of the older episodes that I hadn't even watched for almost 20 years. There's a particular kind of enthusiasm that people have right now for this coming back that feels like it's different than it would be even if they found out that there was another film. And I'm sure that you know a lot of that is that people like things to be the same. You know that if we are melancholic about something or if we are reminiscing about something from the past that we would probably choose that if we were going to have it again, the popsicle or the, in this case, TV show, that it is pretty identical to what it is that we've seen before. So there's a lot of nostalgia attached to it."

"I want to remember how it was. I want to remember how it all was. [ __ ] back in the day going."

"So, my incomplete memories of the early episodes combined with my own sometimes incorrect headcanon to create a version of the show that just didn't match up with what the show actually was to Carter or what he wanted to do with the show in the future. But, when his version didn't match up with mine, I made the mistake many arrogant fans make of assuming that my presumptions must have been correct and that he must have been the one who messed up. This is what I'd like to apologize to him for. I, like a lot of people with the show, fell into the fanboy trap of thinking that I knew a piece of art better than the person that created it. When you look at even just a fraction of the things that I've talked about in this video, like the subtle religious symbolism or the complicated games that Chris Carter was playing with numbers and dates, it becomes obvious to what an incredibly deep degree Carter has thought through all of the little details of the show. And it's absurd and embarrassing to admit that at one point I thought that I knew this show better than he did. Chris Carter and other people working on the show paid attention to minute details of the show, probably more than has ever been done with almost any other TV show that's ever been made. Fans of the show have long complained about things that they considered mistakes and said that they showed that the people working on the show didn't care about continuity. I remember back in the day people complaining about how the outgoing message on Mulder's answering machine changed every time you heard it. And they use this as evidence that people working on the show weren't paying attention as much as they were and just didn't care. I mean, of course, this is nonsense because there's no reason Mulder couldn't record a new outgoing message for his answering machine. The complaint doesn't even make sense. To work on this video, I got a hold of as many books on the X-Files as I could that I thought might have some kind of interesting information. And I bought this book called 'Monsters of the Week' because it was supposed to cover all 11 seasons, and there are very few X-Files books that deal with all 11 seasons. So, I thought it might have some useful insight and analysis and an effort to understand the show's big picture. Almost as soon as you start reading this book though, in the book's introductions, the authors start talking about how they like the show in spite of its mythology, which they plainly state right off the bat they feel long ago became incoherent and stop making sense. They just smugly state this as though it's an accepted fact. I suppose the reason that they're smug about it is because many X-Files fans do treat this as an accepted fact. A lot of people don't like to acknowledge that just because they don't understand something, that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. If they don't understand something, of course, the more comforting explanation is that the problem is with the thing that they don't understand rather than being with their comprehension of it. I had already bought the book though, so I kept going with it. And I started to read their episode reviews. By the season 2 finale, 'Anastasia,' they were already complaining that the show should have stopped introducing new elements to the mythology and instead by that point should have started focusing on giving answers and wrapping everything up. I mean, that's incredible to me. With 'Anastasia,' the show's mythology had barely started. I mean, in fact, in a lot of ways, you could even view 'Anastasia' as the show's first real mythology episode. It kicks off a three-parter that would start to really show the show's ambition. Before that, the mythology was only these vague hints that there was something big going on. I mean, what did we really know about the mythology prior to that point? Basically, we just knew that there were probably aliens who had visited Earth and that there was a conspiracy to cover it up. The conspiracy was also doing some kind of experiments on alien-human hybrids, but we didn't know much of anything about what the hybrids could do, what they were for, or anything at all about them. Basically, all that we knew at that point was just that the show had something to do with aliens. 'Anastasia' is the episode that suddenly kicked the show into a much bigger world. It was where the show was just getting started. And yet, the authors of this 'Monsters of the Week' book thought that this was where the show should have started wrapping things up. So, I mean, making this show here, Chris Carter was trying to make something that truly respected the intelligence of his audience and carefully building up mysteries and storylines by planting clues in the show's very early seasons that he knew full well he couldn't fully pay off until at least 2012. He was trying to make something that not only made perfect sense on a story level and was going to be the most elaborate and entertaining puzzle in the history of TV, but also something that was deeply meaningful and personal to him on a spiritual level. A story that was actually about something and something that he had a deep desire to explore and express."

"I mean, it's like it's the most beautiful, intricate work of art."

"And then the thanks he gets for this is that you have fans of the show saying that they quit making any effort to understand what he was doing back in 1995. And these same fans have the nerve to go write a guide book to the show as though they're some kinds of experts. Part of the problem here is that because the show had so many different writers and so many different styles of episodes, it seems almost like it's an anthology show. So, a lot of fans and myself included again at one point didn't really have the idea of Chris Carter as being an auteur creator that had a hand in everything you saw. I knew that he created the show and I knew he wrote a lot of episodes, but when it seemed like season 10 was suddenly contradicting a lot of the old mythology, I arrogantly thought that he probably just didn't remember all of the trivia as well as I did. The truth is though, even though you might not realize it at first, the X-Files is as personal and auteur-driven a piece of art as has ever been produced in the TV medium. One of the first things I started to realize when I was researching this video is that Carter had a hand in absolutely everything you see in the show. It's not that he wasn't open to collaboration. Carter let other writers have a lot of latitude, and many of their distinct voices shown through in the wide variety of different types of episodes that the show did over the years. But if something didn't fit with his big picture, Carter never let it through. He wasn't afraid to rewrite other people's scripts, even when they had a guest writer as famous as Stephen King. Famously, half or even less of Stephen King's original story for his episode remains in the episode that was actually aired. Chris Carter wasn't a control freak. He let other writers like Darren Morgan do things that even other people working on the show thought seemed totally out of bounds. Carter was always interested in hearing the input of other writers and testing what he referred to as the elasticity of the show and its ability to do all different types of stories and genres. Carter even encouraged this kind of thing. He loved pushing the boundaries of the show. But he also had very clear ideas about the characters and the mythology. And if something didn't fit, it didn't fit. When you read interviews with other writers who worked on the show, one thing you'll see again and again is when they're asked about particular things in their episodes, including episodes where Carter isn't accredited writer, is that they all keep saying over and over, 'Oh, that idea was from Chris.' They say it constantly. Chris Carter was editing and contributing to every single script. And often what he contributed was the entire premise for the script that the writer used or the script's most important and original scenes and ideas."

"That's just the way it went. You know, there's an awful lot of rewriting of scripts on X-Files without taking credit. I, I can't tell you how many Chris rewrote and later years Vince rewrote without putting his name on it."

"I keep talking about the episode 'Sleepless' being a backdoor mythology episode that heavily hints at the ideas about super soldiers that came up later. And you might say, 'How could this be evidence of Carter's long-range plans when Carter didn't write that episode? The episode's only credited writer is Howard Gordon.' But then you go and read Howard Gordon talking about the episode and he says that it actually was originally his idea to just do an episode about people who didn't sleep and that the whole idea of those people being part of a government project to create super soldiers in Vietnam, that idea actually came from Carter. When you learn about the development of the episodes, you'll learn that just because Chris Carter's name isn't on them as the writer doesn't mean that a lot of it wasn't his ideas. And if it's an idea like the super soldiers in 'Sleepless' that fits so well with Carter's big picture, you'll almost always find out that the idea actually did come from him."

"The mythology episodes are really Chris episodes. We don't break those stories in the writer room."

"Well, Chris knows the material in his bones. He has a real clear vision of this world of the X-Files."

"Mulder and Scully are in my head. My heart's in my blood, really. And to be honest with you, I don't know that any one of us really knew what happened. I think Chris Carter is the only one. I think it's all locked in his head."

"Yeah, it's, uh, the truth is in there."

"And the fact that so much of the show did all come from one person is the reason that it all holds together so well and has such a coherent point of view. With seasons 10 and 11, nobody else could have come into a show that's been going on for almost 25 years at that point and do a giant twist like what Chris Carter did. The twist that alien colonization, what we thought was the show's whole premise, was actually a lie. Nobody else could have done that and have it all work out so well. It works because it fits with what Carter had been thinking about since the very early days of the show. The ideas that he had about conspiracies of men and his religious ideas about immortality and God and aliens, but you would have to be him to know any of that. And like I said a little earlier, the show isn't only popular just because of its monsters or because of its mysteries and conspiracies, although those things are great. I remember the other shows on the Fox lot. I think they looked down at us. They thought we were this kind of dumb show about monsters and aliens. Hey,"

"It all depends on how they edit it together."

"And for us, it was like, 'No, we're going to make this really smart. This is going to be about something, and we're going to really reach and try and make this a show that isn't something you just watch once and forget about.' Whether or not people spend a lot of time consciously thinking about it, though, the reason the show resonates with them is because it's not just a genre entertainment product. It's because all those things are in service of ideas that actually mean something. And the only reason it can mean something is because it has an auteur behind it with a vision and something he wants to say and who understands it and knows the thinking behind it. Who knows the reasons it was all created in the first place and who is also molding it into something that expresses these things that are important to him and that were important to him when the show started. It's because the meaning and the message of the show is built into it from its inception. It's all personal to me. It tells a story. And, uh, while it's, uh, not anything I like to talk about, uh, I think it's something that everyone can appreciate that there's some deep meaning to me in the piece, in the words, in the imagery, uh, in the materials. It's not just the artist, uh, that, um, created it. It's a person with deep personal experiences, grievances, uh, loves, um, narratives in their life that led to that point. And so, um, while you might appreciate that it's just a kind of, uh, unexpected piece of art, it has a tremendous amount of meaning behind it. So I think it came from a creative place rather than a business place."

"Even though the other people who have worked on the show can understand their part of it and understand that part better than anybody, they can obviously never understand the big picture as well as Chris Carter can simply because they aren't Chris Carter."

"I don't even remember my backstory so well. Did I go to Oxford? These are things I don't remember. What's all the Scully immortal stuff? What is that stuff?"

"Somebody asked me if Scully was immortal. I, I didn't understand what the question was. I think it has something to do with, um, William."

"If Guy's story were true."

"Oh, cuz now you've been your DNA is different. Oh."

"No. Or maybe something to do with something else. Somebody told me recently."

"You want to come home with me?"

"I know that just like the fans, Gillian Anderson has had her problems season 11 of the show. And I love Gillian Anderson and she's entitled to have whatever opinions she wants to have on the show and especially whatever opinions she wants to have on Dana Scully. But that doesn't mean that she's an expert on the show's mythology and trivia, though. In that clip that I just showed from the season 10 commentary, it's clear that neither she nor David Duchovny remembered the scene where Clyde Bruckman tells Scully that she's not going to die. And I mean, that's a pretty major scene from maybe the show's most highly regarded episode. They're both pretty vague about whether or not Scully is even immortal. So, I can safely assume that they're definitely not up on all the stuff about superhumans and the minutia about the project trying to make people immortal superhumans and all that stuff. The exact thing that they're vague on here, Scully's immortality, is something that Carter has pointed to as being important to understanding Scully's pregnancy, which seems to be a major part of what Gillian Anderson was mad about. But Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny are actors on the show, not fans of the show. When they aren't working, they aren't re-watching episodes and memorizing the dialogue, and that's fine. They don't need to do that to play their parts, and it's not their job. Scully wouldn't even know a lot of those details either, and she certainly wouldn't know everything that's going on in Chris Carter's head. So, there's no reason that the actor playing her would need to know those things. But the point is that the negative reaction to many of the things Carter did in seasons 10 and 11, even including reactions from people like Gillian Anderson, not to mention my own initial negative reaction, isn't because those people know more about the show than Carter. It's because it's a complicated show with over 30 years of history, and nobody else beside Carter could possibly know it as well as he does. And even the obsessive fans who think that they know better than Carter often don't know as much as they think they do."

"Pro tip, Chris Carter. They know the parts of the show that they personally have taken interest in, but they often have large blind spots. If you go to the X-Files wiki, you can start to find mistakes almost immediately, especially about the later seasons. In the wiki's explanation of the alien colonization story, it now says that alien colonization was the plan, but this it somehow failed. And then after that, the CSM engineered the Spartan virus. But this isn't actually what the show says about the Spartan virus at all. The whole point of the Spartan virus is that it was always the plan and that the aliens never were going to colonize. But the fans writing the wiki were married to the idea that the show was about alien colonization. So rather than accept that that's now been revealed to have never been the case, they create this new explanation that tries to keep their old headcanon in spite of the new revelations, ignoring what the show actually told us."

"Why is William such an [ __ ]? You are the son of Dana Catherine Scully and Fox Mulder. I don't give a [ __ ] what they say."

"Only understanding what you want something to be and not trying to understand what it actually is is a surefire way to misunderstand any piece of art you engage with."

"If you're an X-Files fan, like a hardcore X-Files fan, you're an X-Phile. And then within the community, there are different kinds of Philes. Um, so there's the people that support Mulder and Scully together and those are the shippers because they support the relationship between them. And then there's also the Nuromos that don't like the romance. And of course, everyone wants to know are Mulder and Scully together as a couple or not."

"You're out of luck."

"Sorry, babe. As your friend and as a physician, you are on dangerous ground here."

"The idea of Mulder and Scully having separated, was not very well taken by everyone. It was like someone had dropped an H-bomb on the fandom."

"I didn't want it to be just about sex. Mulder and Scully is not about sex. As much as fans may want a sex scene or whatever, it's like their relationship's way beyond that."

"We split them up. We did that because it made sense to the characters. It is based on Mulder's hopes and Mulder's dashed hopes that it might be difficult for Scully to remain in that relationship in any kind of healthy emotional way. So, we played with that."

"A, of course, to give myself a little credit, even though I initially didn't appreciate seasons 10 and 11, I still thought it was Carter's show and he should be able to do what he wants with it. I never thought that just because Carter didn't do what I wanted him to do that the show should be taken away from him and handed off to some hired hand who would make fan service. That's exactly the reaction many fans have had though."

"Fans always bring up when people [ __ ] on him that he created them and yeah, he created them and that's amazing. Time has shown that he's really incapable of carrying on their legacy in a way that's appropriate and respectful. Also, disclaimer, I've cried part of my makeup off. So, uh, if I look a [ __ ] mess, it's cuz I am. X-Files series finale. My struggle for Chris Carter. Lord, give me strength. Typical 'My Struggle.' The episode starts off with a useless monologue. You know what? No. Do you even know who your parents are? I think that about sums it up. I watched the finale with a few people from the fandom. Jules said, and I quote, 'Blessed sperm and egg could not have created this piece of shit.' You know what? No. Go [ __ ] yourself. I've read a variety of fantastic fanfiction where they figure out this William situation in a much more beautiful way than this pile of [ __ ]. No one cares. And I'm like already done. So, let me just say that. Scully tells Mulder to go after William and she holds this like gravity to her acting when she tells him. She's like, 'If Scully's going to cry, I'm going to cry.' I don't harp on David's acting because it's very hit and miss. It's just like this [ __ ] side little plots that like took up time. Needless. It's needless. Like, did any of it matter in the end? No. And exist for the sole purpose that Chris Carter thinks they're interesting when they're not. Kind of gross again. Like, William, you suck. And William blows everybody up with his mind. And that just makes me so [ __ ] angry. She's a 54-year-old woman who's barren, but you know, they [ __ ] twice on screen, so naturally she should be pregnant. But again, it's just pathetic writing. It doesn't make [ __ ] sense. You should have respected your actors, respected your fans, and given us a proper ending. Your fans deserved better, Chris, that didn't use recycled [ __ ] and a bunch of easy, quick, emotional, provocative plot points. I love you guys so much. I love the X-Files so much."

"Have you been taking your meds? All those freaks on the internet and all that, you know, going, 'Oh, yeah. I can put it on tonight.' [Laughter] All those guys who wear weatherproof clothes in their bedroom, you know, wait for night to fall. I love you. Every one of you, I love you. I didn't mean it as an insult. [Laughter] It's a, a sickness in our culture now how people think of art as just a product and artists as just interchangeable employees. People think you can just order up Moran Rice stories or pay some TV network people to do what Tolkien did and that it'll be just the same. They only care about what they receive on the consumer end from what they see as a product."

"And the great thing about fandoms is that there's always going to be creators. There's always going to be fan videos. There's always going to be fanfics. On that note, I have opened a storefront."

"They have no interest in where it came from or why it was made in the first place. But the why, the reason that these things exist, the thoughts the unique individual who made them is attempting to express in his art. That's the only reason that the art means anything or is worth anything in the first place. You can't just order up more Moran Rice stories and hire anybody to write them as the AMC shows have gone to great lengths to prove. I just put a spell on you."

"You also can't just hire some random people to write more Tolkien stories either, as Amazon is currently in the process of spending a billion dollars to definitively illustrate. Stories, the ones that are worthwhile anyway, are part of the people that create them. They're not a [ __ ] Grubhub order. These things mean something because the person that who made them was expressing something. They weren't just writing fanfiction about what happens next to the characters. What happens to the characters only matters because of what it represents, both to the characters and to the artist who created them. The fact that the fans think it's the job of a serious creator to do whatever the fans want to see, not to be true to what the art really means to him, is the reason that we never got to see an X-Files season 12. I initially didn't like season 11, but I also wasn't out there throwing a fit about it. The fact that some fans had such a viciously negative reaction to it is the reason why the show is now being stolen from Chris Carter and turned into an assembly line product rather than a meaningful personal expression."

"Now it just makes me so [ __ ] angry. Whether Ryan Coogler is a talented filmmaker or not is beside the point that he can't possibly know the show as well as Chris Carter knows it because he didn't make it. Anything that anybody does with the show without Carter's involvement is simply fanfiction. And I don't care whether the fanfiction is well done or not by some commercial criteria of product craftsmanship. No matter what it is, it won't really be X-Files."

"A couple times in recent interviews, Chris Carter has been making a point to ask people to think about what the hidden meaning is in the final shot of season 11. He says that nobody has guessed it yet."

"And me, I'm a diehard, so you know, I'm still waiting for season 12. That, you know, probably isn't gonna happen, but..."

"Never say never."

"That's right. I believe..."

"Yeah, there's more stories to tell."

"There are more stories to tell. And, uh, I'll leave you with this. Uh, why is William smiling when he comes out of the water at the end of that episode? H..."

"And can you tell us why he was smiling at the end?"

"I asked that question from the expos at the exposeration interview. That's a, that's a good question. Why is he smiling at? What did he get? What did he, um, u, what did he succeed at and what was his plan all along and what would be, uh, some of his intentions by in that hotel room telling Mulder, the motel room telling Mulder, uh, that emphatically that he is not his father? Who's saving who there? Just questions for us."

"He's asking people what William accomplished in the episode that he would be happy about. There are a few interesting things about what happens to William that I think are relevant. First, it's important to point out that when CSM shoots him, what happens isn't just that William survives the gunshot without being injured. It's that he dies and is then resurrected. Chris Carter has specifically talked about this being a resurrection. They also make repeated mention of the fact that CSM is killing his own firstborn son. The symbolism here, I think, is obvious. In order to save the world, God sacrificed his own firstborn son, and Jesus's death and resurrection saved humanity. You shoot your own firstborn son."

"As far as the question of what William accomplished though, William says several times in the episode that now that he realizes what will happen if CSM finds him alive, the apocalypse that will ensue, he'd rather die than live in the world that CSM is planning."

"I can't live like this. This is going to be my life. I, I, I don't want to live."

"He even specifically talks about killing himself by jumping into water."

"I could die. I could jump off a bridge."

"He also talks about there possibly being a way he can stop the future that he saw."

"Look, I don't want to live in that world."

"In the episode 'Ghoulie,' if you read the story William wrote about a coming man-made apocalypse, he also mentions in that story that he thinks there might be a way to stop it. So, I think it's obvious enough here that William wants to die because he thinks that will stop CSM's plans to kill everybody else with the Spartan virus. The question is how specifically William dying stops the extinction if he's still going to be resurrected after he dies. I think in part it's because his death allows Mulder to shoot the CSM and stall the CSM's plans. CSM planned to kill Mulder that night because he thought that Mulder would kill him. Mr. Y and Erica Price seem to believe that Mulder is the only one who can kill the CSM, which is what they're trying to get him to do throughout season 11. When Carter is asking people to think about what William accomplishes in the last episode, he also points out the things that William says to Mulder. And he asks about out of the two of them, Mulder and William, who's protecting who. William in the episode obviously seems to think that he's doing what he's doing to save Mulder. He tells Mulder that in his vision, Mulder dies too."

"Cuz you died too."

"What's interesting here is that when CSM shoots William, William is in the form of Mulder. CSM was planning to kill Mulder, and that's who the CSM thinks that he killed. I think in the end of the episode, William realizes that in his vision that he was seeing when he saw CSM shooting Mulder, he was actually seeing the CSM shooting him, William, in the form of Mulder. And that's what William actually wanted to happen. He took Mulder's place and he died so that Mulder could live. And he died to stop the future he saw in his visions like he wanted to."

"The boy would rather die first."

"William's murder by CSM is actually William's suicide because it's what he wanted to have happen to stop the extinction. And by tricking the CSM into killing him as Mulder's doppelganger instead of killing Mulder, the CSM killed William. And William took Mulder's place."

"He shot me."

"The idea that either William or Mulder has to die, but that they both can't live together actually goes back to season 9."

"Mulder must die. Mulder or your son?"

"In some ways, it even goes back further than season 9 to the idea that CSM can only have one son. It's either Mulder or William. But in the season 9 episode 'Providence,' the FBI agent that infiltrated the UFO cult explains that there's more to the Armageddon prophecy from the aliens than just the fact that a savior figure will come."

"God spoke to him of a miracle child, a future savior, coveted by forces of good and evil. Joseph believes your son is this child."

"Why does he want to kill him?"

"He doesn't. He wants to protect him. Joseph believes your son will follow in his father's paths and try to stop the alien's return unless his father was to be killed. That is the prophecy. He explains that the reason why some parties want to kill Mulder is because the prophecy says that if he lives and raises William, William will follow him in trying to stop the project and William won't fulfill his destiny of helping the project. The FBI sent me undercover on a man named Joseph to get inside his cult whose followers believe an alien race will rule the world."

"Another interesting bit here is that when they talk about the Armageddon in the prophecy, they say that it says that humanity will be replaced by an alien race, which of course before we took to mean alien colonization as we understood it during the first nine seasons of the show. But if you think about it, this is another thing that makes perfect sense with seasons 10 and..."

11 too. When the prophecy says that humans will be replaced by an alien race, that's exactly what CSM is still planning to do by replacing humans with the new species of superhumans, which are alien human hybrids, an alien race. It's just that if you didn't know the goal of the project, you'd assume that the alien race replacing humans in the prophecy must be actual aliens coming to live here. It's not. It never was. It's a race of alien human hybrids, which we were shown in the show all the time going back to the first season.

So because of the prophecy, people on the project who wanted it to go forward thought that either Moulder or William must die because if both live then William would stop the project. Obviously they would have preferred to kill Moulder instead of killing William because if William lives without Moulder then he'll be the key that they need to go forward.

When I thought about it I realized this also answered another issue I had with the second movie and with the revival seasons. I wondered before why Moulder had to go into hiding in season 9 because they were out to kill him and and then Moulder and Skully were on the run at the end of season 9. But then after that in the second movie in the revival seasons, the determination to kill him just seemed to kind of dry up. But then I realized the reason that they wanted to kill him was because they thought it would end the project and ruin William's usefulness to them if Moulder was reunited with William. But after Skully gave William up for adoption and Moulder had no way of finding William, this wouldn't have been an issue anymore. The reason they had for trying to kill Moulder went away when William was adopted.

This is also why in season 11, William doesn't want to be reunited with Moulder. When Chris Carter asks between Moulder and William in the last episode, who's saving who, Moulder thinks that he's trying to save William, but William is trying to keep Moulder away from him because he knows that if they're reunited, then the project will want to kill Moulder again. "It's >> not safe for you here. Okay, you should go."

When Chris Carter asks about Moulder and William in the last episode of season 11, who's saving who? He also points out that William tries to get Moulder to see that he's not William's father. "Your >> mother has those same visions. >> Why don't you see them?" William wants Moulder to go and leave him alone because he's seen in his visions that after they're reunited, Moulder is killed. He doesn't realize yet that he's seeing a vision of himself being killed in the form of Moulder. So, I think that's what William accomplished in the end of the episode to answer Carter's question. He both died to stop the project that needed him, which was his goal. And he also took Moulder's place in the vision showing that Moulder was going to die, allowing Moulder to live and stop the CSM.

Whether Moulder could actually kill the CSM is an open question because it seems like the CSM is for the most part immortal. But like I mentioned earlier, CSM seems to think that Moulder can kill him and Mr. Y and Erica Price seem to think so too. So I think there's probably another piece here that we don't quite know yet.

Either way though, as to the prophecy, Carter has also hinted heavily that Skully's new baby is the Salvatore Mundy, the savior from the prophecy. So the fact that William's sacrifice allowed Moulder to live means that Moulder can raise his child and fulfill the part of the prophecy saying that if the savior is raised by his father, he will follow his father and be able to stop the foretold Armageddon. So in that way, William's death will stop his visions from coming true like he wanted.

The other interesting part here though is that it's still murky which part of the prophecy applies to which characters. If William wasn't the savior, then you could say that all the stuff about either the father or the son dying doesn't apply to him and Moulder. If Moulder was the savior, it also fits with the prophecy of the son following his father to stop the Armageddon. Because they explained a few times that Bill Moulder's hope for his son was that he would follow him and stop the Armageddon. Or if Scully's new baby is a savior, then it seems weird that the Jesus imagery is applied so heavily to William with him being sacrificed by his father, dying, and being resurrected to save mankind from their sins and all of that.

This is all actually part and parcel of the storytelling philosophy of the whole show, though. Like John Shyen said in the clip that I showed earlier, they would never just give you one answer, but rather they would give you several possibilities and let you chew over which you thought the truth was. It's also part of almost all stories featuring a prophecy that the prophecy could have more than one possible interpretation. And how it plays out depends partly on how people read it.

Again, this comes back to Carter's statement from the improbable audio commentary that we all have a destiny and a genetic hand that we're dealt, but we also have free will and we choose what to do with that hand. William was created as an antichrist figure to bring about the Armageddon, but he also has some aspects of the Savior's story because when he saw the future that they would create with him, he decided he'd rather sacrifice himself and die to stop it.

Carter also said to look at how Skully's new pregnancy fits with the previous children she's had on the show. I think it's worth noting that her new pregnancy is her third child, which brings us back to the show's frequent theme of threes. As far as the Christian imagery dealing with Christ and his savior, it's interesting that all three of Skully's children have been hinted at as Christ figures. Emily being a virgin birth and the parallel being drawn explicitly with the stained glass window that they show when she died and also William and Skully's third child with all the many other examples that I've shown. In Christianity, the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are basically three aspects of the same being. So, does it make sense that Skully's three children are all different parts of the same prophecy? that they each accomplish one aspect of being the savior.

If you pay attention to the numbers, Carter is also playing a complicated game with threes and by extensions with nines and 27s all throughout the last two seasons and in season 11 especially. The file cabinet in Moulder's house has a 333 on it. His address is >> 227700 Wallace Road. Spender's apartment building is named the 209. When Moulder and Skully arrive at the motel where they conceive Skully's third child, it's 11:21 again, but also you'll notice that they're in room three. William is even William III if you think about it because Skully also had a brother and a father both named William. "Not three times. >> 33rd, three and three. Three bodies. Three up, three down, three over. >> And the majority of European men could be traced back to just three individuals."

I mentioned earlier how they gave a lot of attention to Skully's license plate in season 10. And in season 11, Moulder also has an interesting license plate that they give a lot of attention to. The most famous number Chris Carter puts into the XFiles is his wife's birthday, 11:21, because that goes back to the pilot episode. The second most famous number after that is probably 10:13, his own birthday. But he does a lot more with those numbers than just putting those exact numbers on clocks. He does a lot of variations on them for different situations. His wife was born in 1948, so sometimes there are also 48s or an 1148 instead of an 1121. or sometimes there's an 112 or a one 121 when he wants it to just be three digits. Carter's birth year is 1956. So sometimes instead of a 1013 there are 1056 or something like the folder on Moulder's computer desktop in season 10 that has 1956 on it. Williams case file number is also 3356. So from these kinds of variations that Carter does, I'm assuming that Moulder's license plate with 1131 in it is probably a variation on 1121 to tie in with the theme of threes. Three plus three 1's being two threes, another 33. Replacing a two with a three is also interesting as there are lots of 23s on the show. February 23rd, 1964 being Skully's birthday. ">> You were born February 23rd. >> There are a lot of 64s in the show as well."

There's another theme going through season 11 with the symbolic meaning for the number three. For most of the season, Skully is in contact with William through dreams or visions that he has and that he's sharing with her telepathically. In episode Ghoulie, when she's in a state of sleep paralysis, where she's sensing William's presence and sharing some of his visions, she talks about this being a third state of awareness between the two states of consciousness. People normally consider being either awake or being asleep. ">> Most people believe there are two states of consciousness, sleep and wakefulness. But there is a third state, hypnogogia."

This is an ongoing theme in this season, the question of what is real and what is a dream and how we know when we're awake and how we know if what we're seeing is real. A lot of the episodes are about visions or seeing things that aren't real. ">> Real is a subjective judgment. If you believe them to be real, then they're real to you."

In the first episode of season 11, when Skully describes her visions to her doctor, her doctor puts this theme out there in the forefront, saying that reality is subjective and that if her visions felt real, then they were real to her. They return to the theme in the episode This Langley realizes he's in a simulation. And there are several lines in there talking about the idea that we don't know for sure whether our reality is a simulation or not as well. ">> But I'm not real though. That right? You are real and I'm not."

The theme is more specifically tied to William, though. In the last episode of this season, when they're searching for William, they show a billboard saying, "Have you seen this man?" The question obviously seems pertinent to the fact that in the episode all the characters are searching for somebody, but it's also returning to a theme that was woven subtly, almost subliminally, throughout the whole season. The man on the poster is from a meme and is supposed to be a man many people claimed to have seen in their dreams. And the image was inserted into shots throughout the entire season before being shown more prominently in the season's final episode. The idea that many people could all be encountering the same person in our dreams plays with the idea that we all share a collective unconscious and that where our consciousness goes when we dream could be in some way a real tangible place that exists in some way outside of our mind or is shared and visited by many minds. This obviously ties into the idea of how Skull is able to share dreams with William and see things that he sees.

Also interesting with the theme of reality and dreams and also the ongoing game of important numbers like 11:21 and 10:13 on the show, often appearing on clocks. In the episode Ghoulie, right after Skully's vision, when she describes herself as being in a third state of consciousness, when she's in the XFile's office describing her vision to Moulder, if you check the time on the clock on the wall, it's not a real time. The minute hand points to 40 minutes, but the hour hand points to 9, not to 9:40. This seems to question whether the scene is in reality or whether it's in a dream. Like when you look at a clock in a dream and the numbers are jumbled and don't make sense. Of course, it could also just mean that the clock in their office was broken. It's not really proof of anything, but they're definitely playing with you here.

All this stuff with the number three in the revival seasons, though, is just the tip of the iceberg with numbers in the show. I'm going into that number because I already brought it up earlier and it's important with the number 33 and the savior theme and all of that, but there are a lot of other number games happening in the revival seasons as well. And there are continuations of numbers games that already were being played on the show for years.

More than threes, William is especially associated with the number seven. While the number on the motel door where Moulder and Skully conceived their new baby was a three, the number on the motel door where Moulder finds William is a seven. Chris Carter really wants you to notice this one because he gives the seven at least four different clear close-ups. In the Bible, of course, the number seven means several things, some of which I went into earlier, but it's also specifically associated in the book of Revelation with Armageddon. First, there are the seven seals, which represent judgments from God and which are each broken by a lamb. The lamb of course representing Christ. ">> Two shakes of a lamb's tail. Doc, >> when the seventh seal is broken, that basically signals the start of Armageddon, which is announced by seven angels sounding seven trumpets." Moulder even quotes this pertinent Bible verse in a season 10 episode, which is also written by Carter. ">> And I saw the seven angels that stood before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. Revelations 8:2, a herald of end times."

The first four seals each unleash one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The first of the four horsemen is the antichrist, who will arrive with the pretense of bringing peace, but who is actually bent on conquering the world. something like CSM saying the purpose of William and the Spartan virus is to save the world when their actual purpose is to conquer it so that he can reign over it. It's important to the whole concept of the Antichrist that at first he'll appear to be somebody good or a possible savior before his true purpose is revealed and people realize that he's dangerous. He's a false prophet, what Jesus warned about and called a wolf in sheep's clothing in his sermon on the mount. In season 11 of the show, William has a book in his room called A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. and even as a painting of a wolf on his wall, if you still didn't get the connection. ">> How many religions warn of false prophets?"

This obviously fits neatly with the analogy of William being the Antichrist who's helping the devil conquer the world and of CSM being the devil. The Antichrist of the Bible is even supposed to ride in on a white horse, which could remind one of a white buffalo were one looking for commonalities between these stories. The second and third seals then unleash war and famine, people being enslaved and having to spend their lives working just to earn food. Carter wouldn't be the first person to see analogies here in current world events. And then the fourth seal unleashes a plague which in the XFiles is the Spartan virus.

Bringing together the sevens and the threes in the book of Revelation, there are three sets of seven judgments from God that comprise the Armageddon. There are seven seals and the seven trumpets and then the seven BS. In the XFiles, a seven with a three is an idea that goes way back, back to season two, at least November 27th, 1973 is the date that Samantha was abducted. In season 3, the Japanese doctors brought to America after World War II to work on the alien human hybrid project. The same project that operated on Skully and Train Cars to create William and who were part of Project Crossroads, which is referenced in season 11, were part of unit 731, like I talked about earlier, 7:31. That's another 7 with a three.

In the last episode of season 9, the morning after Moulder is sentenced to death, there's a time stamp showing that it's 7:12 a.m. Depending on the cultural tradition, a red sky at dawn can either be seen as a bad omen or as a sign of a new beginning and hope for the future. So, I think this red sunset shot that Carter lingers on here is evocative. But for the issue of the numbers that I'm talking about here, 712 is another 73. one and two making three of course but this is also the episode where they establish explicitly in dialogue for the first time the meaning of the year 2012 in the show. So to have a 12 here is important as well. They're telling you that 12 is the apocalypse. This is another way to bring these different concepts together. ">> 7 hours through three states."

You see a lot of sets of three sevens throughout the show and also 73s because of the three sets of seven judgments from God in the book of Revelation. But all these numbers have different meanings in different contexts. So Carter also ties it into the 12 in the 2012 concept based on the Mayan calendar. ">> You are going to 1213 37th place."

If you pause the screen and read the stories William wrote for his website in the episode Ghoully, they're all pretty interesting. There's lots of talk about a coming plague and an apocalypse and several mentions of a figure he's seen in his dreams and visions that he thinks is the devil. He calls him the devil. This is likely CSM, who he later says was part of his visions. All the numbers and dates in the stories are interesting, too. Of course, on February 23rd, 2018, which you'll remember, February 23rd, the Skully's birthday, William uploaded a story about visions he had been having of a woman with red hair. Of particular interest here, though, is the story that they give the biggest close-up shot to. It's called Dream Disease Apocalypse, and it gives some details of Williams visions of the six extinction. The first interesting thing about it is the date that it was written, December 22nd, 2017. There's the seven again, of course, and also 2011, which is another remix of 102 or 11:21, but also another three. So, another seven with the three here. You'll remember also that the date that the show said was the start of the planned Armageddon was December 21st, 2012. So, December 22nd here is the day after that, the day after December 21st, the first day of the end of the world. It's also 3 days before Christmas. So, you get yet another three here to go with the seven or two threes with the seven. Another 33.

I'm sure there will be people that would debate how much of this stuff is intentional and how much of it is kind of a reach, but I think you can see clear signs when something might just be a coincidence and when it's too improbable for it to have happened by accident. In the season 10 episode Founders Mutation, it deals with a company that was probably involved in the eugenics experiments that created William. And there are a whole lot of numbers that could possibly mean something. But in a scene where there's a computer screen flashing all kinds of numbers, how do you know which are intentional messages and which are things that will just randomly pop up eventually if you throw enough numbers on a screen? Is it significant that there's a 264 in a batch of phone numbers? February 1964 is Skully's birthday, so a 64 could mean something or maybe not. Adding the two though, that means that it's her birthday month and year, so the fact of it being a coincidence gets less likely with each number that corresponds to something important. There's also an 1173 on the screen. November of 1973 being the month uh and year when Samantha was abducted. There's also a 27 in the line below it. The 27th of November being the day Samantha was abducted. Is it a coincidence that that's on the same screen as Skully's birthday? I mean, it could be, I guess, but with how many numbers we know are being used deliberately, how likely does it seem to accidentally have the month and year for both of those events on the same screen? There's also a 964, which is a nine with Skully's birthday. There's a T7 and a 307. Still more threes with sevens. There's a 23 of 27, which is another 27. And also again, 23 is Skully's birthday being referenced here. That's the third time her birthday pops up on the screen. There's a 982 on the screen as well. 9 being something I've talked about a lot. And Revelations 82 being the verse Moulder quotes about the seven angels with seven trumpets. And 82 is being used at several other points in the show.

Most of these numbers I'm mentioning are just numbers on a screen that aren't really being pointed out to you. But the character in the scene accessing the file also types in his user number and his user number is 3313. So do you think that yet another 33 and Chris Carter's birthday are just a coincidence? Also, what about one of the other sheets that pops up on the screen? It has a 26 in its header and it's almost entirely covered in threes. And then when the same character with the 3313 ID types in his password, his password is 77737s. Or what about the fact that Sveta, who is part of the eugenics experiments to create alien human hybrids, when she's killed, her car's speedometer is at 26 mi. And then in the very next episode of the show, when the character Agnes, who was also pregnant with the baby from the same experiments, when she's killed, the police mark her body's location with a 26. And the fact that the police car they show in that same scene is marked with a 27, ">> February 26th, 1991." What about the fact that in season 11, they also make a point of telling you that Skully's badge number also has a 26 in it? "XF-071261."

There's also another one I thought I'd mention that isn't specifically about numbers, but it's another interesting detail about the hotel where Moulder and Skully conceive their third child. They make a point of mentioning several times in the episode that it takes place in Henrio County, Virginia. I'd never heard of the place, so I looked it up. What jumped out to me was the name of the county that it directly borders, which is named Guchand County. The name jumped out at me because I'd also just looked up that county since it was another county I had never heard of before that was prominently featured in the XFiles. In that case, it was in the episode enemy where it's where the boy with cancer lives when the beings he believes to be angels come to cure him. These two fairly obscure places most people haven't heard of are almost the same place. They're direct neighbors. And Carter doesn't make a point of naming them both for no reason. The technology that cured the boy's cancer is obviously related to the same technology that later on enabled a 54year-old infertile woman to get pregnant. ">> It has to be a coincidence. >> No, it's not."

Your mileage may vary with this stuff, but at some point in here, we get well past plausibly claiming that most of this stuff isn't deliberate. And then when you know it's deliberate, you can find really interesting things by looking for the meanings. For one example, in season 10, on the desktop of Molder's computer, there's a file that's just labeled with the number 278398. There are a few things here that could be in this number that could be significant. The number 27 jumps out at you, but it turns out that this is almost certainly a reference to a section of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is designated B278398. For one thing, the string of numbers seems too long to be a coincidence. But then if you look up what that segment of the Dead Sea Scrolls is about, it's from the book of Isaiah, which is an Old Testament book that deals with the prophecy of a coming Messiah and also the end of Babylon. The fall of Babylon is also mentioned in the book of revelation and pertinent to the exfiles. The episode prior to this one which was also written by Chris Carter is called Babylon and is the same episode where Moulder quotes the Bible verse about the seven angels of the Armageddon. So yeah, this is no coincidence.

Like I said, the stuff I'm mentioning here is really only the tip of the iceberg and you could go into a lot more. Of course, the reason this reference to Isaiah is interesting is because the show is also full of references to Bible verses, some of which I've pointed out before. One specifically worth mentioning in the revival seasons is that the verse in Revelation where the seventh seal is broken is 81. And the revival seasons are also full of constant 81s. This signifies the unleashing of Armageddon. And of course 8 + 1 is another nine.

I could keep going, but the point I'm trying to make is how rich the show is with this kind of information and all these little hints and secrets and how important these things are to understanding it and how much the deeper secret meanings of these things is only known to Chris Carter. I mean, do you think that Ryan Cougler knows what 278398 means? Do you think any of the fans making snotty videos about how Carter should be taken off the show? Now, from the information we're given, I could put together my own theories I've been talking about and my guesses about what it all means and what the answers are to the unanswered questions that Carter has hinted at. And I do think I can make some pretty good theories, and I have strong opinions about which ones do and don't make sense. But without Carter explaining the missing pieces that only he knows, all they are is theories. If you want to know why William is smiling in that final shot, the only way you'll ever really know is if Chris Carter tells you. ">> You You don't know. Chris Carter knows."

If I wanted fanfiction, I could write it myself. But your own guess at the ending of somebody else's story isn't the same thing as finding out the real ending that was intended by the author. If they do a reboot without Carter, even if they got the plot elements and the mythology right, which they can't by definition because nobody knows the parts of the story that only exist inside Chris Carter's head, but even if they, you know, adhered to continuity as best they could, no matter what they do with the show's story, it will still betray the show's real purpose, which is the exploration of these deeper thematic levels that I've spent half this video talking about. All these symbols and all these number games that run through everything in the show that are the backbone of everything in the show really, they're personal to Chris Carter. These numbers are his birthday. They're his wife's birthday. These number games are him telling the story of his life. Any artist that spends decades building an imaginary world like this. What they're really writing is their own autobiography. ">> I have always thought of mold and skull as kind of equal parts of myself and so I'm writing about things that interest me."

That's why it's totally asinine to think that somebody else could just come in and make an XFiles show like he could or for fans to think that they know what to do with the characters in the story better than he does. that their fanfiction is just as valid as his version or that it even means anything at all. Their fanfiction that they make is about what they want, but they lack the maturity and the understanding of how art works to get that it's not about them. An artist makes art because he has something that he wants to express or explore. And that expression is what he has to give to the audience and what you as the audience are receiving when you find something meaningful within his art. You're supposed to watch art to be in communion with other people. To receive a message from an artist's mind to yours, not to demand that some soulless entertainment production entity just tell you about yourself and your own desires by showing you what you already knew you wanted when you started watching. That's a pointless experience because it doesn't tell you anything that you didn't know already. And it's a solopistic lack of interest in understanding art and in understanding other people that makes people think that that's all art is supposed to be doing.

If they do a reboot of the show without Carter, it can either ignore all of the mythology and the themes of the show that are the show's entire purpose, or if it does try to deal with some of those themes, it won't be anything more meaningful than an AI program that's imitating speech patterns without knowing the meaning of any of the words. Because the intention and the purpose of those words lay only with the man whose show has now been stolen from him to appease fans who think that they know what to do with it better than he does. And if you care at all about the show beyond some aliens and monsters and cheap jump scares, if the show ever actually meant anything to you, or if you thought that anything that I've spoken about in this video was interesting at all, then that's a damn shame.

">> You know, here's uh let me say something about William. People made all these assumptions and I know some people were really upset about it. Uh but people made lots of assumptions and I I always thought there would be more XFiles episodes. I didn't think that last one was going to be the last. I thought there were always more stories to tell. So, uh I would have answered a lot of those questions, satisfied a lot more people with what came after uh two episode 218. I think that I would have flashed forward. I mean, I have some ideas, but uh I don't know if we'll ever get to u to ever see them. Uh I think Jolian has moved off to obviously bigger and uh different things in her own career. So, u we'll see. Don't give up on the bigger picture."

">> That was good. All of it from top to toe. That was good. >> Good. >> Jillian likes. Let's move on. I like that one."