The X-Files took the world by storm back in its glory days in the 1990s with stories about aliens and government conspiracies that featured a pair of heroes tasked with delivering long speeches about the impossible and making it all sound plausible. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson brought the acting chops back to rabid audiences for this year's revival, which earned great ratings after 14 years off the air. The actors had an easy time bringing back the killer chemistry, but Duchovny had a hard time with another aspect of reprising Mulder, and it was understandably difficult for Duchovny to get back in the habit of delivering long impossible speeches.
In a way, that was good to do probably the hardest Mulder-like scene right off the bat first. Those facts and figures need to be at your fingertips or else they don't sound right. In fact, you have to say them so fast that people don't now that you're actually not making any sense. That's one of the tricks.
David Duchovny's admission to TVGuide actually makes a lot of sense, considering the big conspiracy rant that he had to deliver in his very first episode back as Fox Mulder. That speech had to combine aspects of the mythology of the first nine seasons with what was set to unfold in the tenth, and Duchovny had to deliver it with all the intensity of man who truly believed that the end of the world was nigh due to a looming invasion of America with alien technology, and not a man who'd spent most of the past decade as Californication's Hank Moody.
Luckily for X-Files fans who were hoping for some vintage Mulder paranoia, David Duchovny nailed his first big conspiracy speech of Season 10. In fact, he so perfectly captured Mulder's old school fanaticism that I wanted to reach through my TV and give poor Scully a hug; Mulder has never been able to talk fast enough to convince Scully that he always makes sense. Just as David Duchovny managed to pull off a throwback Mulder speech, Gillian Anderson managed to bring back her classic "Why is this my life?" expression from whenever Scully has to sit through one of Mulder's especially crazy diatribes. All Mulder and Scully needed to do was have an emotional confrontation in a hallway and the Season 10 premiere could have felt like an episode from the X-Files' golden years.
In all seriousness, The X-Files was a revival that would have flopped if the stars hadn't been able to bring back the magic that made the show so wonderful in its original run. Lightning actually struck twice as David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson slipped back into character as the dynamic duo of Mulder and Scully. The X-Files was only brought back for a run of six episodes, so there's no solid guarantee that we'll get to see more of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Mulder and Scully. Given the insane cliffhanger from the end of the finale, I'd say we deserve at least a follow-up episode or two. Hopefully, Duchovny has a long future of complicated conspiracy speeches ahead of him.
