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If you look hard enough for coincidences, you can always find them. If you dwell on them long enough, you can shape patterns, develop conspiracies and push full steam ahead into the not-quite-so-distant land of Stark Raving Paranoia. I can think of no more fitting introduction to a discussion of The X-Files: I Want to Believe than to note the following bits of trivia complete with my own inimitable rambling but connected digressions.

The X-Files premiered on September 10, 1993, the end of my first week as an undergraduate at Lewis and Clark College. And no, I can’t claim that I was in on the buzz from the beginning and watched it on the first night. I was out with a friend seeing True Romance on a ginormous screen in SE Portland at a tri-plex theater that has long since been converted into a Slavic Pentecostal Church. And as enjoyable a movie and movie going experience as that was, if I had been less of a terrified putz about going out to concerts on my own during that stretch of my life, I could have been catching Counting Crows opening for The Cranberries on the first trip through town for either band, for the ridiculous price of $3.

The X-Files ended its run in mid-May 2002, around the same time that New York University was holding its commencement exercises for its latest crop of graduating students, which included me bearing a Master of Arts in Cinema Studies that, in the stellar tradition of former grad students everywhere, I have put to shamelessly little use. I briefly considered pursuing a Ph.D., but in being perfectly honest with myself, I had to admit I didn’t know if I had the drive to sustain me for five to seven years. Added to which, if I decided to pursue that end, I was entirely uncertain if I wanted to keep living in New York City for that long a stretch, either. (And, I shouldn’t hesitate to add, the odds of that acceptance would have been markedly slim to boot - on average, only three Ph.D. candidates admitted a year, with generally only one of those coming from the preceding year’s MA ranks at NYU.)

But that is me simply finding continuity within my own life. Consider this as well: The X-Files broadcast its first episode six-and-a-half months after the February 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center, in which six people died, and aired its final episode eight months after the attacks on the morning of September 11th claimed the lives of more than 3,000. I realize that such a comparison is both ghoulish and (seemingly) more than a little trivial and it is my hope that no one finds it overly untoward or distasteful. What I mean to suggest is the difference between the world in which the show sprang to life, and the one it rather lacklusterly bowed out of nine seasons later. I haven’t seen even close to half of all 200+ episodes of the series, but in my bones it feels like the series captured the jittery and jangled vibe of 1990s America as no other show did.

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