The X Files, Then And Now: An Observation

(DISCLAIMER: This post has some spoilers for a 21-year-old television show. If this sort of thing bothers you... well, you should probably reconsider your priorities of things to be mad about, but to each their own, so don't say I didn't warn you.)

The other night I watched a few episodes of The X Files. My family used to watch it all the time when it was on the air, so for the sake of nostalgia and good television I decided to revisit it. Mulder and Scully were household names when I was a kid, and the theme music queued a night of bad dreams for me and my overactive imagination, so from the time it aired in 1993 until it ended in 2001, it made itself a fixture in my life. It's still an entertaining show, and I can see why my parents watched it back in the day, but it's very obviously from the '90s.

If Agents Mulder and Scully were conducting their investigations into the X files during the 2010s instead of the 1990s, they probably wouldn't have run into the same roadblocks they'd faced in the first few episodes of the series. For example, toward the end of the very first episode, a bunch of evidence was destroyed when Scully's motel room was burned down. If they were conducting this investigation nowadays all of her field reports, her photos, the x-ray images from the autopsy, and research materials would have probably been saved to a cloud account somewhere. Her report on the case would have been in Dropbox before she ran off to see Mulder. Little snippets of information she'd have jotted in a pad of paper could have been saved in Evernote. Hell, the pictures and x-ray images could have been saved to the camera roll of her iPhone if she'd had one.

That's another thing; if Mulder and Scully had smart phones, there would never be any question to the credibility of their reports. Some creepy contortionist cannibal crawling through the vent in your bathroom? Scully could film that with her phone! UFO sightings over a secret airbase? It'd be on Instagram for the world to see before anyone was the wiser. Delicate information needs to be conveyed? Snapchat destroys the evidence within ten seconds. Need to silently get a hold of someone while hiding from some supernatural entity? Texting. Having a smartphone alone would make solving Mulder and Scully's problems exponentially easier.

You know what else would have helped them? The internet. Since they work for the FBI, they have access to a lot of government databases, one a federal level to a local level, so the amount of time spent looking through physical archives in dramatic dark libraries would be cut way shorter. Google would make a lot of questions they have a lot easier to answer, like searching "UFO sightings near Iowa" or whatever they happen to be working on. The combination of smart phones, the internet, and cloud storage, probably could cut a conveniently timed 45 minute episode of investigation and spooky stuff in half.

Then again, one thing about modern times is government surveillance. The NSA could swoop in and swipe up anyone tweeting "omg just saw sum dude eat & puke out a healthy FBI person. #gross #wat" or someone searching Google for Cthulhu-like nonsense that doesn't seem normal. Any bizarre findings being saved to Scully's Drive account could be theoretically be seized and destroyed by the NSA if they really wanted to. Hiding identities or going undercover would be impossible if anyone found Fox "Spooky" Mulder of Facebook. A lot of cases would probably be pretty obvious if some blogger somewhere decided to talk about how his cousin wrote a bunch of binary code and the government got involved... unless the government saw that blog post and got involved.

Really, the only way to keep that sort of secret stuff secret and out of the hands of the wrong people would be to have it all in physical forms; notebooks, film photos, physically documented information, in-person discussions and first-hand-eyewitness accounts... like they did in the show, I guess. Hmm.

Either way, while there would be some pitfalls for Mulder and Scully working in the 21st century, cases would probably still be way easier than doing so by communicating via land line and car phone, losing evidence to fire and exposing undeveloped film, and not having the worlds knowledge accessible from a device that can fit in a pocket. The 1990s were a simpler time, despite confusing shows like The X Files and Twin Peaks, and it's fun to think about them from a modern perspective.