This Is How the World Ends
First, a quick history lesson. As Carter and his writing staff sat down to plot out the seventh season in the spring of 1999, they – along with series stars David Duchnovy and Gillian Anderson – desperately hoped it would be the final year. After six seasons and one feature film (Fight the Future, which was released just a year previously), they were all burnt out, and the fact that they had effectively ended the show’s overarching mythology the previous season – which detailed the government’s covering up of and secret participation in an extraterrestrial conspiracy to reclaim the planet in a “viral apocalypse” – meant there would be no chance to coast on all the previously built-up momentum. Whatever new turn the ongoing narrative would take would be an uphill creative battle.
Instead, they opted to tread water. For the first time since the very first season all the way back in 1993, season seven contained almost no mythology episodes whatsoever, and what few were there were strangely absent of the many story threads, recurring characters and, even, thematic motifs that had been so assiduously built up over the preceding six years.
The X-Files was fully intended to end not with a bang, but a whimper, buying the writer-producers enough time to plot out their next moves – and potentially show that planned alien invasion – for the intended slew of films that was expected to follow in the years and, quite possibly, decades to follow.
Fox, however, had other ideas, forcing all and sundry to return for an eighth season – yes, even the famously recalcitrant Duchnovy, who begrudgingly came back for only a handful of episodes. Carter and his staff found themselves having to do the unthinkable: not only coming up with the next chapter of the alien colonists’ ongoing conspiracy right there on the spot, but also with creating a brand-new character by the name of Special Agent John Doggett to replace the largely-absent Fox Mulder.
