B.o.B.'s Conspiracy Tweets Semi-Predicted the Plot of Last Night's Revamp of The X-Files

The frantic, rather convoluted plot: the X-Files are long-shuttered, and Scully and Mulder have essentially ended their personal and professional relationship—until Assistant Director Skinner calls Scully at her job helping children born with anotia (unformed external ear), looking for a reclusive Mulder to go investigate a new thing that is NOT an X-File, but is X-Files-adjacent.

That thing is a right-wing conservative nutcracker named Tad O’Malley (also funny!) who claims to have evidence that aliens were drawn to earth after the H-Bomb to try to save us from ourselves, and that the crash in Roswell was one occasion during which our evil government was able to harness the advanced technology of said aliens. Mulder meets and immediately takes to O’Malley, particularly after he introduces him to a secret compound housing a man-made replica of an alien vehicle shaped like a liquid silver paper airplane. And once O’Malley introduces Mulder to Sveta, a woman who says she’s been abducted—and impregnated—numerous times, Mulder is totally convinced, probably because he’s spent too much time inside the MindQuad.

The abductors, though, are not aliens—they’re the government using alien technology to control the people and ultimately take over the world. Mulder tries explaining this to Scully, who’s been skeptical ever since she describes her work to O’Malley and he makes the convenient remark that her patients look not unlike aliens (BOTH RUDE, AND BONKERS). At this point his argument becomes completely confusing, and the only thing that even remotely makes sense is his historical evidence of a vast government conspiracy being the Tuskegee experiments—the 40 years during which the US Public Health Service purposely infected unknowing black people with syphilis—which makes it easy to believe in a vast government conspiracy about anything, whether on television or in real life. (B.o.B. might be kind of right?) “I figured it out,” insists Mulder. “It all makes complete sense. All these years we’ve been deceived!”

“I don’t know what you mean!” stage-whispers Scully, and again it feels implausible that the writers didn’t purposely inject this wildness with a bit of absurdity, because we certainly don’t either. Even a bit.

At best, that line was a self-aware acknowledgement that The X-Files has never been keen on clarity, if we’re being honest, and it petered out as must-see television somewhere around 1997 or so, during its fifth season (and I’m being quite generous). What happens after this painfully plotted epigraph to a coda that didn’t necessarily need to be written? In an ideal world, The X-Files—now open again at the behest of a very busted-looking Cigarette Smoking Man—will take this opportunity to revert to the monster-of-the-week rubric that defined its first, and best seasons. But we’ve already delved too deep into this conspiracy to reasonably emerge unscathed by the incoherent rantings of lone wolf Mulder—and after a test that may have revealed some errant DNA in Sveta’s blood, something mysterious which also mirrors that of Scully’s—this train’s too full-throttle to jump off now. If it pains you to watch, perhaps you can find another show you like in the Finder Spyder.

Images via screenshot/Fox.