My initial knee-jerk excitement upon hearing the opening titles, so designed to tear emotion from me, soon turned to grief. Legend tells that after episode two, we are rewarded for our commitment with chemistry and humour. Tragically I have only seen episode one, and I am thoroughly disappointed. From the offset it felt like a 45-minute exercise in fan service and exposition, a desperate attempt to tell us everything while shoving in as many tropes as possible to foster some sense of nostalgia in its viewer. I can only imagine the conversations in that writers’ room: “How many times can we fit in the name of the show? How many variations on “I want to believe” can we conceive of? What if we say we don’t believe?”

The joy of The X-Files was always wholly dependent on several factors. One, that the nineties was a time of curiosity, exploration, and mystery. A great deal of our…