Whistling noises. “Doo doo doo doo doo doo…”
Come on. You heard it.
Whenever I hear that whistle, I picture Mulder about to open a door nobody in their right mind would touch, with Scully admonishing him on why it’s a terrible idea. He’s opening it anyway. He never listens.
God, I love these two.
The X-Files could scare the hell out of me one week and have me laughing at something completely ridiculous the next. Sometimes it managed both in the same episode. Even when it gave me nightmares as a kid, I’d be back for more.
Chris Carter brought The X-Files to Fox in September 1993, giving us an FBI basement office, an unreasonable number of flashlights, and two agents who could disagree about pretty much anything. And the funny thing about that theme song: Composer Mark Snow accidentally triggered the theme’s repeating piano motif while working with a delay effect. For the whistle, he used the “Whistling Joe” preset from the Emu Proteus/2. Snow told NPR in 2016 that his wife Glynn also recorded a whistle part, which he layered with the synth.
I first wrote this article, for our AltWire’s Shows We Loved series in 2021. Five years later, I’m revisiting it in lieu of the recently greenlit Ryan Coogler reboot. I can’t wait to follow the new group of agents into another creepy little town.
Mulder and Scully Are What Made The Weirdness Work
Mulder’s obsession starts with the disappearance of his sister Samantha. He believes she was abducted by aliens, a conviction that drives his investigations and frequently gets him into trouble. Duchovny knows exactly how far to push the character’s sincerity before slipping in a deadpan joke. The sunflower seeds, the questionable adult-video collection, the complete inability to leave a bizarre lead alone: Mulder should be exhausting company. Somehow, he’s somebody you want to follow into the next dark basement.
Scully is the harder role. Assigned to assess Mulder’s work, she could easily have become the character whose job was to tell him he was wrong every week. Anderson makes her curiosity just as important as her skepticism. Scully has scientific training, but she also has grief, faith, and questions that don’t fit neatly into a report.
“Beyond the Sea,” from the first season, gets that balance exactly right. Shortly after Scully’s father dies, convicted killer Luther Lee Boggs claims to possess psychic knowledge that could help solve a kidnapping. Scully begins to consider that he might be telling the truth. Mulder, usually the first person willing to entertain the paranormal, doubts him. For once, she’s the believer and he’s the skeptic. Anderson makes the reversal feel painful and completely believable because Scully has something personal at stake.
Their relationship deepens because neither agent stays fixed in the role established by the pilot. They argue. They get things wrong. They cover for one another, sometimes at considerable personal cost. Their affection grows out of years of shared disasters, not a requirement that every television partnership eventually become romantic.
The later seasons had capable new agents in John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish). They had a difficult assignment, though. Mulder and Scully had spent years developing a language of looks, silences, and mutual exasperation. That chemistry was hard to replace.
Some Weeks You Got Nightmares. Other Weeks You Got Luke Wilson.
Never watched The X-Files? First of all, how? Second, here’s how it works.
The series alternated between ongoing conspiracy stories and standalone investigations often called “monster of the week” episodes. Those standalone cases might involve a mutant, a supposed psychic, a creature hiding in the sewer, or somebody whose idea of normal human behavior was deeply concerning.
Take “Squeeze,” which introduces Eugene Victor Tooms, a killer capable of contorting his body into impossibly tight spaces. The premise sounds ridiculous written down. Onscreen, the idea that your locked door won’t necessarily keep him out is dreadful. He returned in “Tooms,” which certainly didn’t help anyone sleep easier.
Then there’s “Home.” Mulder and Scully investigate the death of an infant in rural Pennsylvania and discover the violent, incestuous Peacock family. The truth about the brothers’ mother is far worse than the agents initially suspect. The opening alone is enough to make some viewers question their entertainment choices. Fox kept the episode out of its regular repeat rotation for years, then aired it again on Halloween in 1999. It remains the show’s only episode to have received a TV-MA rating.
But the same series also gave us “Bad Blood,” a fifth-season comedy in which Mulder and Scully recount the same vampire investigation with radically different memories. Luke Wilson plays the local sheriff. In Scully’s version, he’s handsome and charming. In Mulder’s, he has ridiculous buck teeth. Every little change says something about how these agents see themselves and each other.
“Bad Blood” could only have been this funny after years of watching Mulder and Scully bicker. “Home” barely needs their history at all.
The Conspiracy Was Fun. It Also Needed a Whiteboard.
Mulder’s search for Samantha led through shadowy government operations, alien experiments, and the Syndicate. William B. Davis’s Cigarette Smoking Man became the face of a conspiracy that could bury evidence as quickly as Mulder found it.
Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) was especially useful here. Was he protecting the agents, following orders, or playing a longer game? Having someone in authority whose allegiance wasn’t always clear kept even the FBI offices feeling unsafe.
The mythology gave every missing document and whispered conversation a sense of consequence. Even when the answers grew more complicated, I wanted to know what was waiting around the next corner. By the later seasons, though, keeping track of the reversals had become its own investigation. Samantha’s story, addressed in Season 7’s “Closure,” was supposed to provide an emotional center, yet the conspiracy around it had collected more twists than any single revelation could untangle.
I can forgive a mystery for refusing to explain itself. I have a harder time with one that keeps changing the explanation. You could adore Mulder and Scully and still want somebody to sit Chris Carter down with a very large whiteboard.
I keep returning to the self-contained episodes. They aren’t homework. You can watch a terrible little town reveal its secrets, or see Scully quietly demolish one of Mulder’s theories, without untangling three seasons of alien politics first. Even the apparent solution can look suspicious. Should you trust it? Usually, you shouldn’t.
Season Eight Could Have Been the Perfect Goodbye
The first theatrical film, Fight the Future, arrived in 1998. Three years later, the Season 8 finale, “Existence,” gave Mulder and Scully something that had become almost unimaginable: a moment of peace. William had been born. Mulder was there with Scully and their son, and the two shared a kiss. Doggett and Reyes were in place to continue the work. After years of abductions, near-deaths, and government conspiracies, the people at the center of it all finally had something resembling a happy ending.
Did “Existence” explain every alien mystery? Of course not. This is The X-Files. But emotionally, it felt like a good place to turn off the flashlight. I’d have been happy if the series had ended right there.
Season 9 still has moments worth watching, and I wouldn’t erase it from the show’s history. I just don’t think it needed to keep reopening a story that had found such a satisfying place to stop. The original run finally ended in 2002. By then, that lovely Season 8 goodbye was already in the rearview mirror.
The Rest of the X-Files Universe
The Lone Gunmen, the short-lived 2001 spinoff built around Mulder’s favorite conspiracy theorists, had wonderful characters and a tricky premise. They were often funniest when they burst into someone else’s investigation, delivered an outrageous theory, and left. Making them carry their own show changed that rhythm.
I have more time for Millennium, Carter’s grim 1996–1999 series starring Lance Henriksen as Frank Black, a former FBI profiler working with the mysterious Millennium Group. Its bleak, apocalyptic atmosphere deserved a wider audience, and it holds up on its own terms.
The second film, I Want to Believe, arrived in 2008 and has had an unexpected second chance. In August 2026, Carter released a darker, shorter cut subtitled Vrach Frankenshteyn. He told TheWrap that the original film had been reshaped after objections to its more disturbing material. Nearly two decades later, he finally got to revisit it.
The Revival Remembered the Fun, But Totally Disrespected Scully
When The X-Files returned in 2016 and again in 2018, I wanted to love it without reservations. And there really were moments that made me grin like an idiot. In Season 10’s “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” the man who’d spent decades hunting the unexplained couldn’t operate his smartphone camera well enough to photograph a creature standing practically in front of him. He even managed to film his own screaming face. Scully’s reaction was priceless.
Mr. Chuckleteeth in “Familiar” was genuinely creepy, the sort of grinning nightmare I’d happily put alongside some of the original series’ better monsters. And in “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” Mulder’s indignant “I’m Fox freaking Mulder, you punks!” was a glorious reminder that Duchovny could still play the character’s wounded pride for laughs.
Watching Mulder struggle with his phone reminded me how much I’d missed these characters. I wish the revival had shown Scully the same affection.
William is where it lost me. Season 9 had already put Scully through the agony of giving her son up for adoption to protect him. The revival had years of emotional history to work with. Instead, Season 11 had the Cigarette Smoking Man claim he’d engineered William’s conception through an intervention performed on Scully without her consent. Whether you believe a word that man says is another question. Making the possibility of yet another violation of Scully’s body into a grand plot twist was bad enough.
The finale made it worse. After Mulder and Scully believe William has been killed, Scully suddenly distances herself from the boy she’d spent years mourning and searching for, with the story reframing him as an experiment. Then comes the revelation that she’s pregnant again. It feels as though years of her grief can be swept aside by supplying another baby. Great job Chris Carter. Even decades on, Scully, once again, becomes a human plot device. Gross.
That’s the part I can’t excuse. This is Dana Scully, a scientist, a physician, an FBI agent, and one of the most capable people the series ever put on screen. She’s also a mother whose choices and losses deserved to be handled gently. Anderson plays the material with everything she has, but even a great performance can’t make that treatment of her character feel earned.
Anderson said she was initially offered half of Duchovny’s pay for the 2016 revival, despite an earlier fight for parity. She and Duchovny ultimately received equal pay. The initial offer was still astonishing.
What Ryan Coogler’s X-Files Needs to Get Right
On October 13, 2026, Hulu officially ordered Ryan Coogler’s reimagining of The X-Files to series. Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel will play two contrasting FBI agents investigating unexplained phenomena. Coogler wrote and directed the pilot. Jennifer Yale is the showrunner, Chris Carter is an executive producer, while Ludwig Göransson provided the pilot’s score. There’s no announced premiere date yet.
Anderson hasn’t ruled out returning in some capacity. Speaking on Today in 2024, she praised Coogler and said, “I’m not saying no.” She also floated the possibility of a small appearance. No appearance by either original lead has been confirmed in the series announcement.
I’ll be curious about the music almost as much as the cases. Mark Snow died in July 2025 at 78. Göransson has a tough act to follow. Snow’s theme could make an otherwise ordinary stretch of woods feel deeply unsafe. But copying that sound wouldn’t be enough. Coogler’s series needs its own atmosphere, and the actors need a relationship with enough friction and warmth to hold the stranger ideas together.
I don’t need a new Mulder and Scully impersonation. Give me investigators who disagree for good reasons, cases I can’t shake, and a conspiracy that remembers its own rules. I watched the revival turn Scully’s years of grief into setup for one more twist. I hope Coogler lets his characters’ choices stick.
Why We Still Love The X-Files
While I have my misgivings over the reboot, I still love what those first nine seasons gave us. There are so many scenes I’d happily revisit, even knowing exactly what waits at the end of the hallway. Mulder with his sunflower seeds. Scully barely containing an eye roll. Another strange case, another argument, and somehow a little more trust between them by the credits.
That’s the X-Files I want to remember.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, that ridiculous whistle is stuck in my head again.
Check out the next entry in our series, here: One Tree Hill.
