The X-Files is set to return to Fox early next year, and, appropriately for The X-Files, we still don’t know much about it other than that Joel McHale is going to be in an episode. Luckily, Gillian Anderson—who has thankfully made peace with always being Dana Scully—is happy to talk about the revived series, even if she can’t say anything too specific. In an interview with TVLine, Anderson said that “it feels like it’s been a long time” since she played Scully, and that the character “felt further away” than she expected while working on the last X-Files movie. It sounds like she’s trying to say that it’s a bit strange getting back into Scully’s ill-fitting suits—and it’s hard to blame her, since the show ended 13 years ago.
As for the actual new episodes of The X-Files, TVLine asked Anderson to describe the premiere in three words, and she settled on: “Slow, intense, and functional.” The premiere is “setting groundwork, so it’s got a particular role to play,” she says. Obviously the show has to reestablish who these characters are, and why they’re back together, but we can’t help but hear “mythology episode” when she says something like that. After all these years, that’s still pretty exciting. (The Cigarette-Smoking Man will be there, after all.)
The new X-Files will premiere on Fox on January 24 of next year, at which point we can all start debating the merits of mythology vs. monsters-of-the-week. That’s basically what the internet was made for, right?