THEY WANT TO BELIEVE, BUT IT'S HARD

More than 13 years after it went off the air, "The X-Files" is back for a highly-anticipated new season, with Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny returning as FBI agents-cum-paranormal investigators Dana Scully and Fox Mulder.

​Fox provided reviewers with three of the season's six episodes — here's what they thought:

The Premiere Sucks

A good premiere is important… and "The X-Files" whiffed:

[T]he premiere installment of this new go-around is thin gruel. Stilted and cheesy in equal measure, it will trigger memories of the show at its most ham-fisted.

[AV Club]





The debut episode is so curiously lackluster that even die-hard fans might fear the worst… Between the mandatory furtive meetings in parking garages and murky side streets, Mulder's morose babbling, and O'Malley's Mr. Smith Goes to the Twilight Zone monologuing, the premiere is a veritable Dumpster of sub-Reddit subjects.

[Vulture]

[There's a] nagging sense of reassembling everyone just for the money in Fox's joyless "The X-Files"… [B]ased on the premiere, the harsh truth in here is that it's as if creator Chris Carter and his collaborators have forgotten what people liked about the show.

[Variety]





The premiere's a disaster on almost every level

[HitFix]

The new X-Files hour is fine for what it is, but it lacks the kick of minty-freshness, in favor of the musty tang of mythology. It's a mythology excavated and renovated to do 2016 work its mostly 20th-century original apparatus wasn't designed to sustain.

[Yahoo]





It's hard to watch Mulder and Scully as hollowed-out, depressed characters when they were already rather dejected to begin with. But with any hope the events at the tail end of My Struggle will launch them forward into more interesting territory.

[IGN]





The Next Two Episodes Are Better

[Episodes 2 and 3] are so significantly better that you'd almost be better off just skipping the first one. If the first episode left me disappointed, the next two made me hope that this six-episode experiment works well enough to justify more. They're that good. [The second episode] perfectly blends show mythology (including Mulder and Scully's kid) with a modern plot. [The third episode is] hysterical, smart and so much fun.

[RogerEbert.com]





If the second hour feels like a solid return to form, the third episode is superlative.

[AV Club]

[The second episode] will be fun for fans of the show — an improvement over the premiere, which is fun for no one. Still, nothing could have prepared me for episode 3. Written and directed by the famously gonzo [Darin] Morgan, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" — actual title! — is a wild, playful, brain-twisting, heart-pulling, and above all adventurous episode of television.

[Entertainment Weekly]





[T]he third episode, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster," is where the revival finally starts approaching the high highs of the original show. Darin Morgan's script is weird, twisty, and—as usual—hysterically funny. Everyone's back on their game here.

[io9]





But Not Everyone's Convinced

Most reviewers agree that the first episode is the worst of the bunch, but several still aren't too high on episodes 2 and 3:

What if they got the band back together, but much of its set consisted of out-of-tune covers? That's the sense one regularly gets from the return of "The X-Files…" It's too bad that, with some exceptions, those participating in this intensely hyped reunion are often just going through the motions.

[Variety]





The episodes are all mediocre versions of familiar X-Files templates, starting with the convoluted, exposition-heavy season opener, written and directed by Carter, in which Mulder discovers yet another overarching explanation that puts the show's entire tangled mythology in a new context.

[Las Vegas Weekly]





The new adventures of Mulder and Scully… feel unstuck from time. 2016 may be the worst possible time to attempt a reboot of a series whose point of view was that conspiracy theories are, above all else, fun.

[TIME]





It's a shame that a show that once dealt so well with symbols of cultural anxiety has retreated into trying to figure out how to fit aliens into the modern consciousness.

[The Verge]

If you need a refresher on where the series left off in 2002, IGN has you covered.