Thanks to BOTD for allowing me to watch for the 2nd time the much-panned 2008 X-Files movie X-Files I Want To Believe! I know everybody says it sucks, but being a long-term, full-time X-Phile I am incapable of admitting how really horrible it is, so let me just say instead that it would have probably worked better as a filler episode in Season 1 or 2 alongside Shapes and The Jersey Devil, minus the kissing and the wrinkles. Clearly this is a low-budget movie, and I’ve appreciated watching it more now in my computer than I had when I saw it on the big screen. I would have probably enjoyed it much more had I seen it in Betamax. Or, why not, even on a Monday night in RPN 9 with millions of commercials. I remember that I did make predictions in a blog entry on what the movie would be like almost a year before the movie came out, and I got one right: that cliché about Fox Mulder now being a recluse with lots of facial hair. Good points of the movie: more solo Scully scenes and personal issues, that manicured hand of the gay modern Frankenstein was a hoot, Skinner is always fun to watch, and Amanda Peet falling to her death is wonderful. Also, you need to give Scully some credit—the FBI recruited her directly from medical school back in 1992 or so, was an FBI agent from then on until 2002 when the series ended, and by 2008 she is some sort of pediatric neurosurgeon who could do intrathecal stem cell transplantation and her only source… GOOGLE. Yes, you can treat lipid/lysosomal/glycogen storage disease or whatever that Sandhof Disease is using Google. Good final scene with Scully deciding to push through with the OR, though. Bad thing: what, no one, not even the crew, or David or Gillian or anyone from the cast, even asked Chris Carter if Scully hitting the bad guy on the head with a shovel is climactic enough? No one even said, “that’s it?!” ?!?!?!

I know there will never be another X-Files movie, but just in case, here are my proposals which I am now telepathically sending—not to Chris Carter or Frank Spotnitz who should never write or direct an X-Files episode again—but to real directors such as Christopher Nolan or yes, even Brian de Palma who I think can create that confusing, over-arching conspiratorial vibe. The title, of course, would be the catch phrase of the Season 4 episode Teliko: The X-Files: Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate.

1. The movie has just that: a confusing, over-arching conspiratorial vibe with lots of confusing conversations in dark alleys and in the FBI corridors or in parking lots or such, all of which are cleared up at the end of the movie. There is just the right amount of explosions with overhead shots just to give it the big screen feel, but not in the histrionic Mission Impossible 2 way. And the evil bees, bring back those damn alien virus-containing bees.

2. Mulder and Scully are back in the FBI, back in the basement, back in the X-Files, back in the status quo. Through cosmetic surgery they look exactly like they looked during their peak in Season 5. I still think William Mulder should be shot in the head while they are having breakfast as I’ve originally suggested, but since it’s not gonna happen, this is the alternative: While in the basement M&S receive a secret folder containing the supposed whereabouts of their son, William. They go to this secret location—which would involve secret box car trains, of course—only to find William dead, eaten by the el chupacabra. Scully of course gives her Season 8-worthy histrionic breakdown, but that should be it, she would then revert back to her Season 1-3 level of being kebs about everything.

3. Doggett and Reyes should be there. I don’t care what anyone says, I love seasons 8 and 9. They ride a car carrying some new incontrovertible proof about a conspiracy in the FBI or maybe about the existence of extraterrestrials (lagi naman), and the car… explodes!!! So everyone thinks they’re dead, but they resurface by the middle of the movie. I don’t know how they got out, Christopher/Brian, do I have to think of everything?!

4. The new conspiracy is now headed by Marita Covarrubias and Alex Krycek, which was the original plan back when Season 8 was still commencing but which never came to pass. I am now straining to remember what happened to the two of them. Wait, Krycek was shot on the head by Skinner and showed up as a ghost in Season 9. Marita Covarrubias I think is still alive. Yes, she is! One of the few survivors of this show. Truly, not everything dies, Mr. Mulder.

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