Articles on "The X-Files"

Fear not X-Files fans — the sci-fi series is in no danger of expiring from the Fox lineup any time soon.

Gillian Anderson has extended her contract to keep Scully-ing for another year. The skeptical redhead's tour of duty was set to end with the upcoming 2000-01 season, but new negotiations are keeping her on paranormal patrol until 2002, Entertainment Weekly reports.

Readying for the inevitable departure of David "I'm So Out of There" Duchovny, who'll be around for only 11 of 20 episodes this season, series creator Chris Carter has brought on actor Robert Patrick, who's reportedly signed a multiyear deal of his own.

But, according to USA Today, deals or no, a ninth season of The X-Files will depend on how the once top-rated show will fare in the ratings this season.

The new season of The X-Files kicks off in early November.

Carter also tells EW that he still wants to churn out more X-Files movies. "I have high hopes still that the TV series will become a movie series. In order for that to be so, you can't just let The X-Files fade away."

Speaking to fans at the recent San Diego comic book convention, Carter also addressed the issue of how Scully got pregnant when we never saw her having sex. He says that one of this season's episodes will find our erstwhile agents in the bedroom. "We're going to break all the barriers of what you can do on prime-time," boasts Carter.

Sorry — we're still switching to Sex and the City at 9 p.m. — no matter how steamy The X-Files gets.

TORONTO - Fox Television has hired Robert Patrick as Gillian Anderson's new partner in the TV sci-fi drama series The X-Files.

Patrick will fill in as David Duchovny reduces his involvement in the show.

Patrick will play a sceptical new associate that Scully, Anderson's character, is forced to work with following the disappearance of Duchovny's Mulder character on what appeared to be an alien spaceship at the end of the last season.

Duchovny signed up for a new season of The X-Files in May at the 11th hour after legal wrangles and other contentious issues.

He wanted to scale back his appearances to pursue other projects.

Duchovny is expected to appear in just over half of the 20 episodes scheduled to be produced next season, with most of his screen time coming in the first half.

THE X-FILES. Sunday night at 9, Fox. or six seasons, David Duchovny's Mulder has been going crazy on "The X-Files" because of his unanswered questions about extraterrestrials. As the Fox series begins its seventh season, Sunday night at 9, things are drastically different.

Now Mulder is going crazy because his questions have been answered. Instead of knowing too little, he knows too much — so much, in a literal sense, that his brain is straining and dying from the overload.

In other words, Mulder is in real danger of being a fatal victim of what David Letterman likes to describe as "too much information."

Unfortunately, Sunday's season opener, written by series creator Chris Carter, doesn't provide the information necessary to place the latest "X-Files" revelations in any meaningful context.

It's the second of a three-part story — part one being last season's finale and part three being next week's episode.

So without that third part, which Fox didn't provide for critics, assessing this latest story arc of "The X-Files" is like reviewing "The Hound of the Baskervilles" or "The Sixth Sense" without experiencing their climaxes.

Who knows, right now, if all this melding of ancient prophecy and religions, and the extraterrestrial equivalents of the Rosetta Stone, will make sense once Carter is through with it? Much less if it will somehow dovetail with, and make room for, the already established labyrinthine "X-Files" mythologies, which encompass everything from deadly bees and and black oil to alien embryos and giant buried spacecraft.

All that is fair to conclude, at this point, is that Carter, undistracted this season by making and selling a big-budget "X-Files" movie (as he was last year), still finds ways to energize and explore this particular genre.

Duchovny, whose Mulder is all stressed up with no place to go, is handed one terrific scene in Sunday's season premiere — a scene that is powerfully potent visually, yet gains no less power because of the quietly aggressive way Duchovny plays it. (It has to do with an advanced ESP test Mulder takes, then retakes, with startling results.)

Meanwhile Gillian Anderson's Scully, trying literally to piece together the message atop a recently unearthed beached spacecraft off West Africa's Ivory Coast, has her own tests to undertake.

Hers, though, are more physical than mental, and require her to wield a machete and deal with such biblical plagues as swarming locusts and bloody or boiling seas — all to comprehend and protect what could be the most meaningful archeological artifact on Earth.

What will happen? I have no idea — but the good news, and the best sign, is that I can't wait to find out.

Seven seasons into a supernatural mystery series, that in itself is quite a compliment.

Month’s Full of Heroics for Mulder & Scully

Here's the rest of the November lineup:

NOV. 14: The concluding episode of the trilogy is written by executive producer Chris Carter and David Duchovny. Will all be revealed? Hardly. There's a whole season to go. Mulder disappears from the hospital and Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) gets involved in a big way.

NOV. 21: Mulder is back in action, more or less, helping Scully investigate a series of murders that leads to a new suspect, who kills to feed his habit. Hint: the show's titled "Hungry."

NOV 28: The word is this is the moment fans have been waiting for: While unraveling what's described as a mystery of apocalyptic proportions (in other words, a typical case), Scully and Mulder apparently kiss. Of course, the world will be destroyed, if our heroes can't stop the millennium plot. And not just the world as we know it, the whole shebang. Is it for real or just a cheap dream sequence? Is anything for real in "The X-Files"?

Original Publication Date: 11/05/1999

The Smooch Is Out There

After seven long years of keeping us waiting, X-Files special agents Mulder and Scully are finally going tokiss.

And it's not some weird flashback. And there are no alien virus-carrying bees involved.

"It's a real kiss," a Fox spokesperson grudgingly confirms.

The two frosty stars of the long-running Fox drama, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, will swap spit on the November 28 episode in celebration of the new millennium.

The truth behind the kiss may be out there, but Fox isn't telling. "We're not really releasing anything more," is the official word.

While we don't know any more about the caress, we do know some other details about the episode called "Millennium." The show will bring back Millennium star Lance Henriksen as Frank Black, who helps Mulder and Scully thwart an apocalyptic-minded member of the Millennium Group who can summon the dead. (X-Files creator Chris Carter says he hopes to tie up some of the loose ends from his other show.)

Of course, Fox hyped a kiss between the conspiracy-fighting duo last season, but viewers were disappointed to discover it wasn't the real deal--Mulder traveled back in time and kissed a 1930s Scully lookalike. X-Philes were earlier foiled during the big-screen outing when an overactive bee interrupted a pending smooch.

The fans couldn't be happier about the lip-smacking X-Files episode.

"Wahoo! What a great piece of news to wake up and read," exclaims one cybersurfer on the alt.gossip.celebrities newsgroup

Another fan has a suggestion to spice up the show. "If Chris Carter really wanted to perk things up he'd finally admit that Mulder is gay and that's why he's never hit on Scully," he suggests.

While pairing up the stars of a series is often death for the show (think Moonlighting, or even The Nanny), the general consensus in Hollywood is that the show is on its way out after this season anyway. Duchovny's been grumbling about the show for years and Anderson recently told TV's Access Hollywood she doesn't see another season in her future.

"Normally I'd be worried about it affecting the future of the characters, but this will most likely be the last season anyway so I say go for it," says another Netzien.

The new, perhaps final season of X-Files kicks off November 7 on Fox.

"There's a lot of talk about it right now," Carter told The News. "I try to just keep my eye on the more important creative issues and let some of the business be taken care of by the business people and make good choices based on what they tell me."

Although Carter reiterated that he's open to the idea of an eighth season — the seventh season premieres Nov. 7 on Fox — he suggested he might not be inclined to do it without both of the show's stars, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny.

"Oh, sure, we could come up with 22 stories," he said. "It's just a matter of doing it with David and Gillian on the show.

"This is a very good TV show for generating stories," Carter said. "It's one of those lucky, fortunate things that you come across all too infrequently, because good TV ideas are few and far between. I don't want to see this one end before its time, but I also would never want to force it into being if people didn't want to be here telling stories."

A major problem is contracts: Carter doesn't have one covering an eighth season, and neither does Duchovny. Only Anderson's current contract covers an eighth season.

Carter said he recently discussed the situation at a lunch with Sandy Grushow, president of 20th Century Fox Television. Spokesmen for both Grushow's division and for the Fox network declined comment.

"There are things that need to be worked out by Fox before there can be any real, substantive conversation about that," Carter said.

That would include, Carter acknowledged, working out a resolution to Duchovny's multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Fox. Filed last summer, the suit accuses Fox of funneling rerun rights for "The X-Files" to Fox-owned cable channels and local stations. That depressed the price of the show, Duchovny alleges, thereby lowering his rightful share of the profits.

"That's their business, not mine," Carter quickly pointed out. "We work in a contractual business, and the network and the studio are always dealing with contracts, so this is just another problem for them to solve."

Original Publication Date: 10/21/1999"

Could the Fox TV network be okaying a project as a possible replacement for their possibly soon to depart The X-Files? Writer John Ridley (Three Kings) has signed a deal with the Greenblatt-Janollari Studio to develop potential comedy and drama projects for television. Among the projects he has in the works is a supernatural action pilot for the Fox network. Though the title of the pilot has yet to be revealed, Variety is reporting that the potential series premise is about "a group of people that are in various stages of living and dead who go around dealing with paranormal activity in different parts of the world." Current plans are for the pilot to have a female lead. Beyond that, Ridley himself provides a further idea of what we can expect, saying, "I’m a big fan of the Hong Kong (style of moviemaking), which is visually exciting and fanciful. I want to try to transfer that feel to one-hour television."