First Click: The X-files and the age of wholesome conspiracy theories

We've all grown up a lot in the 13 years since The X-files ended. We've grown up both literally — because that's how time works — but also figuratively, becoming more cynical, world-weary, and jaded as media-saturated millennials rise to become the buying class. With the announcement of a new mini-series re-uniting agents Mulder and Scully, can we actually go back to the kind of credulous conspiracy theories that filled the show's nine-year run?

The '90s seem like a simpler time now, where people could still wear dungarees without it being a whole thing and when people's primary concern was whether the president engaged in some extra-marital activities and what time Friends was on. It was a world where governments could be trusted to not only be harboring aliens, but to be actively succeeding in covering their existence up. Where secret information was held by shadowy agents with sore throats in car parks, not by state-sponsored hackers or NSA contractors.

Humans of 2015, on the other hand, have discovered our governments are indeed conspiring against us. Worse — they're really bad at covering their tracks. We have proof they're tapping our phones, we've learned about secret prisons and blacksites, we know flying robots are sent to kill people who never see them coming. We've seen the invention of the dark web, where drugs and lives are traded for imaginary coins, and we've used communication platforms that have been corrupted by harassment campaigns co-ordinated in secret.

The truth was out there, indeed. We found it, it was horrible, and we wish we could put it back. Maybe The X-files, with earnest Fox Mulder, and sceptical-but-encouraging Dana Scully, is the kind of wholesome conspiracy theorizing we need at the moment. A world where aliens are plotting to spook the crap out of some random farmer for fun, or where an ancient man with a stretchy body wakes up every few generations to eat a few livers, or where a family cuts the limbs off their matriarch and locks her in a suitcase. You know, the kind of heartwarming stories we just don't get nowadays.

We'll see how the new X-files pans out when the six-episode series returns to Fox. In this cynical age, at least Netflix offers us the comforts of the past, with near-bottomless '90s sitcom re-runs at our fingertips. The X-files could be the start — the rise of binge watching could see the return of other cherished shows from simpler times.

— Rich McCormick