When The X-Files blazed back on to TV screens last month to the kind of ratings we fans hadn’t dared predict, it faced one major problem: it wasn’t very good.



No one denied that the frisson between Mulder and Scully was still smouldering away; Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny returned to their roles with such ease it should really be illegal. But series opener My Struggle (yes, they went there) missed the operatic heights it was shooting for in rewriting the show’s mythology. As the weeks have gone by, things have improved dramatically – but clunky Hitler allusions have turned out to be the least of the new X-Files’s problems. Subsequent episodes have been accused of both transphobia and Islamophobia.

A couple of things are worth noting about the first accusation. The episode in question, Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster, is very self-consciously the “funny one”, written by a true X-Files legend, Darin Morgan. And it is an all-time great episode, swerving deftly between pant-soiling funny and behind-the-sofa dark.

Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-monster … a great but controversial episode. Photograph: Channel 5

And yet, the crux of the complaint stems from a cameo by Shangela Laquifa Wadley as transgender Oregon prostitute Annabell, who is seen whacking the monster-of-the-week lizard-person about the face with her handbag. The row erupted after an article on Jezebel by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd proclaimed that the X-Files had fumbled its own “trans-narrative”.

Under most circumstances I might dismiss the idea that Morgan was even attempting a “trans-narrative”. But the trans community is understandably sensitive, having only just started to overcome the dreadful media portrayals it endured for so long. Only this week, veteran LGBTQ campaigner Peter Tatchell was forced surreally on to Newsnight to defend himself against allegations of transphobia.

But there is context: Shangela is a success story of RuPaul’s Drag Race – a show that has come under its own fire for how close drag gags veer to transphobia. Shangela’s creator Darius J Pierce is a drag artist, but his comedy persona is a prostitute just like Annabell. Shepherd’s claim that the character is reductive might hold water, but it’s also true that a significant number of the trans population in that part of Oregon are forced into prostitution. For that to be played for laughs in an episode that also plays serial killing for laughs makes this feel like less of a story. A throwaway gag where Mulder tries to explain gender transition to the were-monster has been taken to signal that he is likening being trans to being a werewolf. You could just as easily claim that the suicide of the closeted Indian in the previous episode likens mind-control-by-demonic-children to gay shame among ethnic communities. Nobody did, because that would have been silly.

Harder to justify is the episode Babylon (shown in the US this week) which tries to frame Islamist terror as its B-story while getting on with another light-hearted romp in which Mulder and Scully team up with their young doppelgangers. Wholeheartedly, I believe that the best way to face up to evil in culture is to laugh at it; to try and make it feel small. Chris Carter does his best here, caricaturing rednecks and Islamophobe nurses, pitching them as demented people who blame “a large and unassimilated Muslim community” for the world’s ills, saying things like “immigrant groups are taking all our jobs” out loud.

It’s pure satire, which would be well and good, had Carter not pushed the terror cell to the background through TV shorthand, playing into the same stereotypes he’s trying to decry. Ismat Sarah Mangla has a point when she writes for the International Business Times; “[It’s] a problem, because the only time we see Muslims on television or film, whether they’re performing the ordinary daily prayers practiced by 1.6 billion Muslims around the world or just behaving in otherwise ‘Muslim-y’ ways; is when they’re about to blow people up. It’s a shame that Carter doesn’t understand that the honest [and] fair depiction of minorities in popular culture matters.”



This is not the same as Shangela and the penis joke.

And there’s an even bigger potential problem. As the only episode without many supernatural goings-on at all (Scully and science save the day), Babylon has big things to say about religion and “the power of suggestion”. Mulder’s placebo-induced mushroom trip has fun with the idea of what faith can make people believe is real, while Lauren Ambrose’s Agent Einstein sagely observes, “People kill people; bombs kill people; words can incite people to kill people as instruments of hate, but are not lethal in and of themselves.”

As an atheist, I would go along with all this. But did they have to do it with Islam? And did they have to do it now? Babylon is as Islamophobic as Homeland has been at its worst, which is to say, not truly “phobic”, just an exercise in noble liberal intentions gone hamfistedly wrong.

The best sci-fi holds a mirror up to the biggest challenges of the contemporary world. The X-Files got it wrong. But that’s not to say it should stop looking.