For about a year, comedian Kumail Nanjiani has been hosting The X-Files Files, a podcast in which he and a guest go through each episode of Fox’s beloved supernatural mystery show and discuss it. By all accounts, then, Kumail is one of the internet’s foremost X-Files fans, so when Fox announced that Community’s Joel McHale and Flight Of The Conchords’ Rhys Darby—two people who are definitely not Kumail—would be part of its X-Files revival, the whole world wondered if Kumail would get the same honor. We don’t know if there were petitions for it or anything, but it seemed like one of those rare internet movements that we could all get behind.
Then, yesterday morning, Kumail tweeted this mysterious message, the meaning of which could only be uncovered by someone in the basement of the FBI’s headquarters with an “I Want To Believe” poster on their wall:
Had Kumail met the two best X-Files cosplayers in the world? Was he involved in a real-life FBI investigation into extraterrestrial activity? Thankfully, a subsequent tweet revealed what was actually going on:
He’s actually going to be on The X-Files, and his episode was written by Darin Morgan—the guy behind “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.” Later tweets also revealed that Kumail got to talk about X-Files memories with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, and Rhys Darby even chimed in about how exciting it all was.
All of this should be a lesson to anyone out there who is a big fan of something: If you’re already pretty famous and you start a podcast about a thing you like, someday you could get involved with making that thing you like when Fox brings it back for a limited revival series. (Not Firefly, though. Don’t even try.)