From its Fox Network debut on September 10, 1993, to its finale on May 19, 2002, the weekly 60-minute sci-fi drama
The X-Files endeavored to prove that "the truth is out there." The series' title refers to those FBI files dealing with cases of paranormal and other otherwise unexplainable phenomena -- UFO sightings, alien abductions, genetic experimentation, possessions, telekinesis, and the like. Investigating the X-Files are agents Fox Mulder (
David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (
Gillian Anderson). Notorious within FBI circles as a maverick and iconoclast, the Oxford-educated Mulder made it his personal mission in life to prove that there were more things in Heaven and on Earth than were dreamt of in our philosophy. For him, it was
very personal: his own sister had been abducted by extraterrestrials some 20 years earlier. His more skeptical partner, medical doctor Scully, was assigned to curb Mulder's more "fanciful" theories and to seek logical explanations to the phenomena at hand. (Ironically, in real life, actor
David Duchovny doubted the existence of space aliens, while
Gillian Anderson confessed to being a "true believer.") As the series progressed, Scully became more convinced that there were indeed paranormal forces beyond her ken; conversely, Mulder began to concede that Scully
could be right once in a while, and tried to prove that humans, rather than aliens, were responsible for selected phenomena.
Each successive season of
The X-Files ended with a cliffhanger, ranging from the murder of Mulder's information source "Deep Throat" (
Jerry Hardin) to the birth of a mutant child who may or may not have belonged to one of the agents. No matter what happened, the physical evidence proving (or disproving) alien intervention invariably disappeared, and it was abundantly clear that there were those within the government who didn't
want the truth to come out. Among the most obstreperous of Mulder and Scully's antagonists was a ubiquitous, obnoxious stranger (William B. Davis), known variously as "Cancer Man" and "Cigarette Smoking Man," and finally identified as one C.G.B. Spender. Other regulars and semi-regulars over the years have included
Mitch Pileggi as Mulder and Scully's boss, Assistant FBI Director Walter Skinner;
Steven Williams as Mr. X, another enigmatic information source; Nicholas Lea as Agent Alex Krycek;
Mimi Rogers as Agent Diana Fowley; Chris Owens as Agent Jeffrey Spender; and Tom Braidwood as Melvin Frohike, a member of a government "conspiracy watchdog" group known as The Lone Gunman. One of the most popular series ever to emanate from Fox,
The X-Files was also one of the longest-lasting science fiction series of all time, surpassed in longevity only by the endless
Star Trek saga. In 1998, the series spawned a successful theatrical feature, also titled
The X-Files, which tied up several loose plot ends from the series while establishing a whole new set of mysterious complications.
The X-Files was created and execu