Review: The X-Files Vol. 1 – The Agents, The Bureau and The Syndicate

Happy New Year, everyone! Time to start looking forward to everything coming in 2016, including the brand-new The X-Files miniseries set to start in (checks imdb) twelve days?! Good grief, I’m way behind on my fangirling here.

It’s been more than thirteen years since the last episode aired (seven since the second movie. Which I haven’t seen yet. Don’t judge.) so even the most dedicated fan might want to reacquaint themselves with the details about the adventures of Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. If you’re like me you may have a few old magazines you can flip through in order to find your favorite interviews. Or you could get a copy of The X-Files Vol. 1: The Agents, The Bureau and The Syndicate, due out in stores this week; 178 pages compiling the best features, interviews and profiles from The Official X-Files Magazine.

I’ve been a fan of show since the beginning (well, almost. My younger sis had to give me the heads-up that there was this show about alien abductions and government conspiracies, and it was really good), and after twenty-two years it’s hard to remember a time before The X-Files became so embedded in modern culture. The show inspired many sci-fi and supernatural themed shows in the nineties (Roswell and Charmed, anyone?) although none of them had quite the staying power of The X-files. (Loved me some Millennium though, but I think that was mostly because I like Lance Henriksen a lot.) And when the husband of a friend of mine was accepted into the FBI, apparently his first thought wasn’t having to find an apartment in D.C, it was “I have to go get a trench coat!”

This first volume is just the start of the exploration into the series, giving a close look at the cast, the creators, and even a little bit of the history of the FBI itself just to round things out.

The X-FilesEvery character gets a profile, and the actor portraying them has an interview as well, so this volume covers everyone from from Fox Mulder to Marita Covarrubias (Laurie Holden, who The Walking Dead fans will remember her as the actress who played Andrea).

In addition to the actors and characters, the volume has a ton of fun tidbits about the show. There’s a series guide with a summary of every one of the episodes (I started to write down my favorites, but there’s just not enough space to list them all.) We get a photo tour of the interior of Scully and Mulder’s apartments with explanations for some of the more interesting items (apparently the candy in the jar on Scully’s desk was pineapple-flavored, instead of something tastier that the crew members might help themselves to) and, most importantly, an entire article about the tantalizing relationship between Mulder and Scully.

The two main characters had an insane amount of chemistry, especially for two people who didn’t even kiss until the seventh season. Show creator Chris Carter was reluctant to have them actually act on that chemistry (got to keep the fans coming back for more), so the years of “will they or won’t they” tension resulted in one of the most amazing multi-layered unbreakable bonds that I’d seen on TV before or since. Mulder and Scully weren’t just partners, they were soulmates. I shipped the hell out of these two, so I especially enjoyed “The Shipper News” article, which lists every instance throughout the series that drove all the ‘shippers nuts.

The articles are like a time-capsule from the days when the show was on. There are tons of pictures of our favorite actors/characters in their prime, each one inspiring a little “Hey, I remember that!” moment. Remember when we didn’t know what happened to Mulder’s sister? Remember when they first cast Robert Patrick as Agent Scully’s new partner? Remember that brief period of time when Director Skinner wasn’t on Mulder and Scully’s side, and we thought that Krycek totally was?

I worried that there might not be enough material for a 178-page book, much less the multiple issues that Titan Comics has planned. I think what we see in this first volume is just the tip of the iceberg though. After all, we’ve got to cover nine years, 202 episodes, and 2 big-screen movies. Not bad for a series that no one even knew would make it through its first season.