‘X-Files’ review: Mulder and Scully are back, but chemistry is gone

The truth is out there, and it may be more sinister and troubling than we thought.

“The X-Files” and FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are back Sunday after a 13-year hiatus from television, for a six-episode miniseries featuring the paranormal investigation duo.

Mulder and Scully are pressed into service after their former boss, FBI assistant director William Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) contacts a reluctant and still skeptical Scully – who’s returned to medicine by performing restorative surgery on children born without ears – to reach Mulder and arrange a meeting between him and Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale), a conservative TV pundit and conspiracy theorist who also believes in alien abductions.

O’Malley introduces Mulder and Scully to Sveta (Annet Mahendru of FX’s “The Americans”), who over the course of her 20-something life has been abducted multiple times by aliens – or so she thinks.

She also quickly becomes central to the story and Mulder’s search for the truth. “Sveta is the key to everything,” Mulder tells Scully.

From the introductions of O’Malley and Sveta, we learn that the conspiracy theories are true, and that Earth’s otherworldly visitors and their technology are real. But the aliens aren’t whom we should fear.

It’s mankind that’s the problem.

“Since 9/11 this country has taken a strange turn,” Skinner tells Mulder.

As a casual but enthusiastic fan of the original Fox series that aired between 1993 and 2002 – I’ve not seen all 202 episodes, much less committed them to memory – the first episode of the new miniseries feels like it picks up from where the series left Mulder and Scully. (Except the unshaven Mulder looks much older in this new run, with jowls and wrinkles, presumably for effect.)

It also mostly stays true to the original.

There’s the return of Skinner, and a brief appearance by the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), in a scene that is both foretelling and startling, as we see him suffering from the effects of too much smoking while taking a drag from a cigarette through his stoma, a hole in his throat.

And there are the terrifying flashbacks by victims as well as a tie in with the crash of an alien spacecraft in northern New Mexico in the 1950s.

But what feels less authentic this time around is the relationship between Mulder and Scully.

It’s true that Mulder and Scully have been apart for the better part of a decade and a half.

But when they meet face-to-face before their introductory meeting with O’Malley, the chemistry the pair had in the original series and in the two feature films seems gone.

Their initial exchange seems forced and unnatural. Even though Scully expresses concern and care for her former partner’s well-being, her body language doesn’t express it.

Still, this first episode appears to promise a compelling story.

The story will go well beyond answering the question of whether little green men are real. It also will reveal that the threat lies not in the truth about the visitors from outer space but in humankind itself.

This story was originally published January 21, 2016 at 2:20 PM with the headline "‘X-Files’ review: Mulder and Scully are back, but chemistry is gone."